In Tech, Is Inclusivity the Same as Diversity?

Why understanding the differences will help tech companies manage both.

The WE.VESTR team traveled to Lisbon to attend Web Summit 2021 last week, and we’re still buzzing from a jam-packed week. Having had a few days to recover and rest — we’re still thinking about a question that was posed at the conference…

…is inclusivity the same as diversity in the tech industry?

Perhaps if we can understand the similarities and the differences — we can then deduce where they take hold in organizations and how we perpetuate both as an industry. But what teams are responsible for ‘delivering’ diversity and inclusivity?

In our experience at WE.VESTR, diversity in tech is a commitment from leadership to build teams from the top down with representation from all genders, identities, races, and backgrounds. Diversity should be a goal of leadership teams because diverse perspectives from teams equate to products and services that appeal to larger markets.

Meanwhile, inclusivity in tech is enabled by strategy and product teams, where a technology product or service enables groups to participate in something when they were previously unable to. We wrote about this last month in a Q&A with Dagmar van Ravenswaay.

For example, WE.VESTR enables financial inclusivity by providing employees and stakeholders to build equity in their companies in a transparent way via the Startup Co-op. We’re also working on a new ESOP feature, where founders can manage their company’s employee options with the rest of their company’s equity, and employees can see the value of their shares in real-time. Simplicity is important for the user experience of these features, as inclusivity is often gaslit by overly complex frameworks. If you want to include more people, prove it by making something that more people can use and be a part of.

Both diversity and inclusivity do, however, co-exist in some departments — specifically marketing and communications. Representation in marketing messaging, as well as non-biased communications, are crucial to the success of both diversity and inclusivity in tech.

But…that’s just our take. What’s yours?