I recently took a class at work about using “precise language”. One of my takeaways was to be deliberate about what I mean by each word when I talk about people, particularly their demographics like race or gender. For example, what does it mean to say someone is “diverse”? Often that’s a term used to “other” people and reinforces they they are not the default (which often in the tech industry and world means white male).

When my book club talked about the desire to pick a “diverse author”, I wanted to figure out what we actually mean by that. I.e. what characteristsics do we over-represent with the authors we’ve picked?

The following graph shows each author of a book we’ve read, along with their age, gender, and race (according to quick Google searches for each).

(there are many other characteristics of authors or their books we could consider as part of a desire for “diversity”)

With the exception of the string of 7 white men to start with, we’ve been almost perfectly split male/female authors. But we’re overwhelmingly white and, surprisingly, gen X. Therefore, I believe my desire for a “diveristy” in our authors could be representative of a lack of non-white and younger authors.

Jess Kid is our first millennial and picked before I wrote this, so we took a step in that direction without acknowledging that was a direction we wanted to go. Perhaps this study will help inform us for the next book we pick.