disrupting the Disruption

I have no idea what a "Phlebotomist" is. None. So I thought it'd be fun to start this article off with that, and of course look it up later. 

As medical diagnosis have their own mind-numbing classification system of numbers—ICD9—so do occupations. Meet the US Federal SOC system, where Pathologists, Proctologists, and Veterinarians have a neat and ordered presence within the greater-whole of American employment occupations. Umpires are mentioned, too. Social Media Marketing specialists or Data Scientists? Nope. 

Grinding, lapping, polishing, and buffing machine tool setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic have their own code, and are clearly distinguished from 7920 51-4021 Extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic. 

Shown in the image above, are Detroit factory workers hard at work grinding, lapping, polishing, and buffing engine blocks, in Diego Rivera's epic Detroit Industry mural. Rivera painted the mural between 1932 and 1933, when dozens of classifications for machine operators of all varieties, mapped well to the occupational landscape in our country.

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Shown above, is LinkedIn’s EEO-1 filing from 2013. It’s what the data from their recent diversity numbers release was pulled from.

The numbers are current, to probably sometime in December of last year. They’re 6mos off. The design of the form is typical for government compliance filings—how they taxonomize race, is especially puzzling to me. Moreso, the segmentation of job types is mostly irrelevant to most industry sectors—as with Muzak, it's a "jack of all, master of none". 

We can do better than this. We NEED to do better, than this. Real-time reporting and benchmarking ourselves by numbers, is how our own industry sector rolls—Tech. We’re not going to change without data to measure our methods, because otherwise we're just shooting solutions into the dark. Likewise, speaking specifically to the Tech sector: if we can't even go for a jog or get on a scale w/o an app to track that we did it and how we did... I think today's Diversity efforts can be best likened to that gym membership everyone buys January 2nd of each year. 

As HumanAxis' first project, EqualTogether is ready to be that tool. Being real, there will never be any "there's an app for that" solution to solve for social woes as complex as workplace inequality. EqualTogether is not seeking to in and of itself, fix the inequality woes. Instead, we're seeking to put a measurement-platform in place as a first-step, through which all subsequent solutions can be measured from.

The latter, being most critical. EqualTogether’s program is multi-faceted, but the public-facing real-time reporting of HR data is a sweet-spot we’re excited about. If you’d like to contribute as an investor or technology partner, please—contact us!