How diverse is the Wild Animal Initiative team?

June 28, 2022

This spring, we anonymously surveyed our staff and board to evaluate the distribution of people who are generally underrepresented in the sciences. We needed to evaluate our team’s diversity to earn Candid’s platinum seal of transparency designation, which was the primary determinant of the survey’s timing. But we had considered a survey like this for some time, with the hope that the results could help inform some of our internal efforts to be a just and equitable organization.

All 17 of our staff and board members completed the survey, which asked questions about their race, gender, sexuality, age, and disability status. We chose to focus on race, gender, and sexuality for this analysis blog post because the questions about those identities were open-ended and received the greatest range of responses.

Wild Animal Initiative seeks to have a staff and board whose identities in these categories are comparable to the overall population of the United States. While recognizing it’s not the perfect benchmark, we chose the United States population for comparison because most of our staff and board are currently located in the United States. The small sample size of our current staff and board makes it difficult to assess how we compare now in a way that is statistically significant. But as we grow, we can look at survey data each year and track whether we are getting closer to the composition of the benchmark population.

Race

“How do you racially identify?”
Open response

• White: 10 respondents

• Two or more racial identities: 3 respondents

• Asian: 1 respondent

• Black: 1 respondent

• Latino: 1 respondent

• None: 1 respondent

Gender

“What is your gender?”
Multiple choice

• Woman: 7 respondents

• Man: 6 respondents

• Non-binary: 4 respondents

• Other: 0 respondents

• Declined to answer: 0 respondents

“Do you identify as the same gender you were assigned at birth?”

• Yes: 14 respondents

• No: 1 respondent

• Sometimes: 1 respondent

• Declined to answer: 1 respondent

Sexuality

“What is your romantic and/or sexual orientation?”
Open response

• Heterosexual or straight: 7 respondents

• Bisexual: 4 respondents

• Queer: 2 respondents

• Heteroflexible or mostly heterosexual: 2 respondents

• Gay: 1 respondent

• Asexual: 1 respondent

How we will use the survey data

This year’s survey is the first step in our plan to continuously assess whether Wild Animal Initiative is an inclusive and equitable place to work. We plan to repeat the survey annually.

The survey asked respondents to identify their role in the organization: individual contributor, people manager, director, or board member. We can use those responses to track over time whether people with different life experiences feel like they belong and thrive equally. For example, if too few people from underrepresented backgrounds are in leadership roles, or if the organization becomes more homogenous over time, that could indicate inequity.

We also plan to use this data to measure whether we successfully recruit people from different backgrounds. We want our staff to represent plurality in perspectives and ways of thinking so we can make the best possible decisions about improving wild animals’ welfare.

Improving the survey

Because this was the first version of this diversity assessment, we also asked respondents for feedback and suggestions for improvement.

• Five people expressed overall satisfaction with the questions.

• No one gave negative feedback.

• Several respondents suggested that we ask about additional identities. For instance: nationality, first language, immigration status, and parental status.

• A few respondents suggested different ways to phrase some of the questions or answers.

• A few respondents suggested changes to the privacy/anonymity settings on the survey. No names or contact information were collected in the survey, but the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee could view individual sets of responses.

Before next year’s assessment, we intend to:

• Learn how other organizations in the sciences measure and evaluate diversity.

• Consider which additional categories we should include in the survey, based on underrepresentation in the sciences.

• Consider how and when to measure inclusion and belonging, whether in the same survey or separately.

If you have ideas about how to measure and improve representation in our organization, or if you have suggested reading you'd like to share, please contact our Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee at jedi@wildanimalinitiative.org.