Diversity, equality and inclusion: taking a data-driven approach

As your professional body, we want to meet the diverse needs of our community, advocate for better representation and ensure equal opportunities for all.

To help us achieve this goal and better serve all members of our profession, we wish to better understand the profile of our members. This requires a more complete data set of membership diversity than we currently hold. To assist us in a creating this vital baseline, we would appreciate it if you could complete the diversity data fields in your personal member profile.

FAQs

Why is CILIP encouraging members to provide diversity data?

CILIP is actively committed to becoming more inclusive and representative across all of our activities and to championing diversity and representation within the Library, Knowledge and Information sector. Collecting and monitoring the diversity of our members will provide us with data that will be used to:

• inform our equality, diversity and inclusion objectives and identify activities we can undertake to achieve these objectives;
• assess if we are meeting our equality, diversity and inclusion commitments, which includes a target of 20% representation of people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds across all CILIP committees by the end of 2022; and
• inform Equality Impact Assessments to identify equality, diversity and inclusion considerations when designing policies, processes and services

How does CILIP collect this data?

The data is drawn from the information members provide in your member profile on our website. This is a simple, confidential self-completion mechanism that should take no longer than five minutes. First log into the CILIP website, then click on “Manage profile” at the top of the page. This takes you into your profile. Scroll down to “Personal information” to find the diversity questions.

If you prefer not to disclose any data relating to your personal characteristics, please note that there is a 'prefer not to say' category for each data field. This information is useful as we track engagement.

There are also options to self-describe your personal characteristics if you prefer.

Members are encouraged to review their diversity profile annually as additional data categories and options are sometimes added (see below).

How is CILIP improving the way it collects data?

By capturing more complete data we will have a better base to inform our work, assess impact, and complete more detailed analysis across all four nations of the UK.

We have reviewed which of the nine protected characteristics we should gather monitoring data for and the phrasing of the diversity monitoring questions to make them more inclusive. For example, we have recently added a question about transgender identity, and added “non-binary” as a gender category.

How is CILIP keeping member data safe?

All information provided will be treated in confidence and used solely by CILIP for the purposes of diversity monitoring and reporting in line with current data protection legislation. The data is anonymised and aggregated so that individuals cannot be identified in any reporting.

Please see our Privacy Statement for further information about how we use your information.

More information

If you have questions that are not answered here, or more general questions and comments about CILIP’s EDI work, please contact Yvonne Morris, EDI Programmes Manager, at yvonne.morris@cilip.org.uk.