Across every sector of society, organizations are striving to foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA).
These efforts work best when they are tied to an organization’s unique goals, culture, history, and context. We offer a host of services grounded in this type of custom approach to DEIA, including:
DEIA Pulse Checks
Pulse checks anonymously track employee perceptions of fair treatment, self-efficacy around interactions with employees who differ from them, and fear of retaliation for speaking up. We designed a “Belonging Survey” focused on sexual orientation, gender identity, age, and disability status for a nonprofit organization with over 1.5 million members.
Implicit Bias Training
Despite the best intentions, research illustrates how stereotypes influence behavior and judgment outside conscious awareness. Our implicit bias workshops help evaluators and interviewers identify and mitigate these forces before they lead to unfair outcomes.
Barrier Analyses
For each phase of the talent management cycle—including sourcing, recruitment, hiring, onboarding, development, and promotion—we highlight where opportunity bias and barriers to DEIA may exist and how to ameliorate them. We helped a city government improve its entry-level firefighter selection process by recommending concrete ways to promote DEIA, including surveying applicants who dropped out of the process, making testing more accessible, and developing clearer interview scoring guidelines.
We can provide third-party, objective evaluations of a wide array of DEIA-focused initiatives. We are evaluating an effort to increase math achievement by helping school leaders understand how systemic racism, bias, and deficit thinking inhibit learning and growth among high-need middle school students. This work will pinpoint the extent to which these interventions enhance students’ math identity, sense of belonging, and mathematics achievement.
Promoting Assessment Fairness
- Pioneering assessment development and scoring methods that minimize subgroup differences
- Conducting adverse impact and subgroup difference analyses
- Optimizing diversity and validity through sophisticated psychometric modeling
- Facilitating bias and sensitivity reviews of assessment content
- Designing clear, standardized accommodation policies
- Building 508-compliance into our solutions
- Ensuring women, people of color, and the historically underserved are well-represented among subject matter expert (SME) panels
Our staff put our mission into action by leading and serving on DEIA-focused boards and committees, contributing our voice to national efforts to promote justice and fairness.
For over 70 years, our innovative custom solutions have mirrored our clients’ own uniqueness. As a mission-driven organization dedicated to living our values through every client engagement, our work promotes DEIA from the classroom to the boardroom and within diverse public and private sector organizations, educational institutions, and the military.
