That’s the reason I originally left ESOMAR– this is an important topic. I went to work for another organization, the European Network Against Racism (ENAR). It’s the Pan-European voice for communities, which are racialized. That means you need to speak up for Black communities, Jewish communities, Muslim communities, Roma, and Muslim people. So, really, a broad range of people, who are what we call racialized. Basically, society ascribes to them certain characteristics to the detriment of those communities. The reason I came back to those roots wasn’t because of that. It’s about the work that we were doing at ESOMAR around DE&I. We were getting more interest from the membership, to start exploring and looking at how we could support some of the Black Lives Matter momentum within the understanding of what we as a global industry could do in this space.
Together with the council, we organized a whole series of community circles, for open discussions within the industry to talk about the challenges that we as an industry face, but also we have been pleased to help move the discussions forward. We had discussions on things like how we do inclusive research, how to properly execute the questions you ask, how you ensure a nationally representative sample, and stuff like that. But we also then look at things around how we make our companies think. Things like recruitment strategies, and retention strategies, to ensure that the organization has a safe space for people, but then we also explored things like how we as market researchers explore and collect all kinds of information about the state of our societies. What role can we play to raise awareness around where society is on DE&I topics and to make the information available for advocates representing these groups to be much more present?
So I think about how research can be a useful ally in the cause of anti-racism. We have to deal with the fact that countries are at very different stages of computation. And you also have models of how to do diversity inclusion. So as a global community, we’re trying to balance out different best practices and to collate and share as much as we can, not just from the usual suspects of the U.S., and the UK, but also the rest of the world as well.
