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It has been 20 months, almost to the day, since I started to press for more inclusive language around gender/sexuality in the mandatory online anti-sexual harassment & anti-racism trainings at my university. I had no idea it would end like this. 1/n
It took months to get U admins to understand the issue, agree it was a problem, and decide it merited action. But there was a problem: the entire training program is outsourced to a contractor, EverFi, who administers the same trainings to a huge number of universities. 2/n
The U admins who cared lacked any power to make change themselves, or to cancel our contract with the provider. So we seemed stuck with 46,000 students at UM being exposed to anti-trans and other rhetoric every year. 3/n
Fortunately, the contractor has ties to the university and was willing to listen to feedback to maintain their relationships. After 12 months of pushing, I finally got a meeting with U admin, contractor staff, and myself to explain the need for change. 4/n
I prepare a whole presentation. Why the current setup is directly harmful to LGB & especially trans and enby students; why it perpetuates harmful stereotypes among cishet ones; why it produces low quality data for analysts... 5/n
The contractors partly grasped the problems, but resisted change: data continuity is important; new language is untested; many of their clients are conservative; they don't know how to do this well; would I be willing to do unpaid expert consulting labor for them? 6/n
All of those are legit concerns. Teaching and researching gender and sexuality well are not trivial tasks! So we got a promise to disable the problematic content for our students while they worked on something better. The promise was broken (likely oversight not malice) 7/n
Today, 8 months later, 20 months after I first raised concerns, they held a stakeholder meeting to update us and the people from MIT who separately raised overlapping concerns. Good news! 8/n
Starting in June, all of their higher ed products will use a much improved set of questions around gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity. The change may be small, but it affects students at 1,300 colleges and universities! Literally millions of people. 9/10
It was particularly encouraging to hear their head of research explain why the previous approaches were problematic & needed change, and to hear members of their team thank us for raising concerns & pushing for action. No face-saving bluster, just commitment to doing well. 10/10
Key to note that they we able to do this through hiring a nonbinary person onto their team as a design expert, funding multiple research assistants to work on it and publish about it, and by engaging other outside experts. That's material investment, and it's critical. 11/10
Is this thread me bragging? Maybe a little; golly I am excited to see our collective efforts pay off! But mostly I want to share because this kind of work is often so discouraging and fruitless. We need stories of positive change, even small, to keep ourselves going. 12/10
