164 – How to use LinkedIn to Strengthen Your Commitment to Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 164.

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:23
Hello, I’m Karen Yankovich. And this is Episode 164 of the good girls get rich podcast. And this podcast is brought to you by she’s linked up where we teach simple relationship and heart based LinkedIn marketing to women that gets them on the phone consistently with perfect people building your network full of people who will change your business, your life and your bank account forever. In the she’s linked up family, we create wealthy women. And if you’ve listened before, or if you love what you hear today, we love hearing from you. So make sure that you subscribe to this podcast, leave us a review wherever you’re listening and share this episode on your social media use the hashtag good girls get rich tag me I’m at Karen Yankovich, I’ll be sure to share your post when I see it with my audience. And that’s how we lift each other up. That’s how we all get more visibility. Just go to Karen Yankovich comm slash 164 you can see the blog for this page, you’ll see a link to speak pipe where you can leave us an audio message. You’ll also see any of the links we talked about. And we’re talking about a lot of links in this show here today. And we love hearing from you. So this is this is you know, it’s June of 2021, while I’m recording this and when it’s going to be released, and it’s Pride Month here in the US or maybe in the world. And you know, I am a straight white woman business owner, right? So I am forever a student of diversity, equity and inclusion. And you know, I am always looking to get better at this and always looking to learn about this. And more recently, it has become important to me to not just talk about how we as uplevel media, and she’s think that family can be more of a champion to the diversity, equity inclusion, our friends, our diverse friends, but also the work we do with our clients. Right? We’re helping women primarily, but we help people show up in the world and really shine a light on their greatness. And you know, initially we weren’t doing this, we weren’t really even considering, like, do we include their preferred pronouns, like didn’t even occur to me that we should do that stuff, right? That’s why I’m going to be a forever student, cuz I’m sure there’s things at this moment in time that are still not occurring to me, right. So you know, LinkedIn is starting to step into this arena, which is why I thought it would be important to do this episode, for all of you, you know, as I mentioned, is June 2021. And if you’re if you look at your LinkedIn profile today, with your listen to this, while it’s still june of 2021, they’ve got their logo was rainbow, right. And it’s a little thing, but it shows support, it shows support, and not a lot of other social media platforms are doing this stuff. Some are doing more than others. And it’s, you know, it’s so Okay, so what they have a rainbow logo, but it shows support, and I feel like every little thing that we can do to support our friends that are more of a diverse population, then we should be doing that. Right? We should be doing that. A couple of guys, maybe a year ago now we did a podcast episode, you know, I had two women of color, working at uplevel media, it was Episode 123. So Karen Yankovich, calm slash 123. And we talked a little bit about how we could incorporate better dei practices into uplevel. Media. So you know, we just had like a little bit of a live no holds barred brainstorm about that, because, you know, I’m just learning from everybody I can learn from, but one of the things we talked about was, you know, we don’t we never think to ask, when we do ratings and profiles, we’re never going to ask, you know, do you have preferred pronouns? Right? So we talked about that, like a year ago? Well, you know, since then we’ve started asking questions like that as we’re writing your profiles. So maybe you can relate to this, you know, maybe you’ve seen people doing, you know, doing some of this, you’re not sure how to do it for yourself. And that’s really why I’m doing this episode today to give you a couple of tips to just keep you moving in what I feel like is the right direction, right? So as I was doing this episode, I did a lot of research. And I’m going to share some of the links to some of the research that I did in this, I could have spent another six months doing research. I really wanted to get this episode out in June of 2021. And I tried to keep my research focused on the work that LinkedIn is doing because like I said, I could have gone a million different directions. So I’m impressed with the work that LinkedIn is doing around dei and I wanted to share some of that work with you. So that’s where I got some of the research for a lot of the things I’m going to talk about on this episode. So I’ll share all of that in there. I’m not taking aren’t taking no credit for most of the things that are here. It’s just me kind of compiling this information together for you to make it easier for you to take some of the next steps in using LinkedIn in a way to really showcase your commitment to DNI. So one of the first things I want to talk about our preferred pronouns LinkedIn, I’m gonna say probably in maybe March or April, announced that they’re going to give us the ability to add our preferred pronouns to our profile. Now they rolled it out, I believe it’s rolled out to almost everyone, I didn’t get it, I only got it recently. But if you look at my LinkedIn profile, which will link here in the show notes as well, you’ll see next to mine, it says she in parentheses, she her next to my name. LinkedIn was, to my knowledge, the first social platform to bake that in, this is a baked in section, this is not where you have to like next to your name, put in parentheses, right, so that your name is now changed. This is a section that says, Do you want to share your preferred pronouns? And what are the pronouns you want to share? So LinkedIn, it’s actually in an editable field in their LinkedIn, in your LinkedIn profile? If you don’t see this, you will, it is being rolled out to everyone. Hopefully, I do think most people do have it now. But you know, take a step to do this. Listen, my preferred pronouns are obvious, right? I’m a woman, and my preferred pronouns are she and her, but by virtue of the fact that I’m including them, I’m normalizing this, right. And when I normalize it, I’m normalizing it for people whose preferred pronouns might not be so obvious, right? And then we get to be champions and supportive of people that are not identifying in a way that is as obvious as it as it is to me, right. So hopefully, that makes sense. So even if it’s not all that important to you what you’re called know that by using preferred pronouns as a field on your LinkedIn profile, you’re normalizing it for other people. So hopefully, that makes sense. So absolutely. Take a look. See if you have that option, and add it. The next thing I want you to do is take a look at your visuals on your LinkedIn profile. Now, I told you, I did a lot of research for this episode. So I looked at my visuals. And I’m like, Oh, yeah, this is not great, right. Like I had, I have a section on my LinkedIn profile where I list my podcasts, and I have a couple of episodes shared. And you know, again, I’m a white woman. And all the episodes are shared with white women. Now I’ve interviewed tons of amazing women of color, right? Why didn’t I showcase them? So I do now? Right? So look at your visuals, look at the media that you’re sharing. Just take a look at it from an outsider’s point of view. I of course, didn’t do this intentionally, right. But I now being intentional about making sure that I portray more of a diverse, you know, look when people look at my LinkedIn profile, so they know that I’m going out of my way to make sure that when I share media, I’m sharing media that that showcases my commitment to DNI right now, it wasn’t that because I didn’t do this before. It wasn’t I wasn’t committed to DNI, right? Like I said earlier, there’s gonna be, there’s probably more things that I’m not doing now that I want that when I realized that, I’ll be like, why am I not doing that? Why didn’t I do that? You know, I talked to a few. I got a while back on this podcast about a conference that I spoke at a million years ago. And, and the conference was a women of color connecting conference, and I was doing a LinkedIn training. I, I’m telling you, I learned more from that conference. And the people that were in my workshop, or awfully they learned from me as well. But I learned so much. One of the things, thankfully, my talk was in the afternoon, and I was I was sitting there in the morning, because every time I’m a speaker at an event, I do attend the entire event, I was a speaker there in the morning. And during one of the breaks, I was just kind of mindlessly scrolling through my presentation just to kind of, you know, just to familiarize myself make sure that I’m ready to go and I look at it. And I realized that every single visual in my profile was a white woman or a white guy, I was mortified, I quickly ran out, grabbed my laptop and did some updates to my profile. And now I intentionally make sure that there are people of color and a diverse, you know, I’m showcasing a diverse group of people when I do my presentations, right. I didn’t do it intentionally before, just like I didn’t intentionally share visuals that didn’t have people in color of people of color in them. Now, I am intentionally doing that. That makes sense. Hopefully, I feel like I’m going in circles a little bit with that. But I wanted to share that story to let you know, like this is I feel like this is a lifelong thing for me. And maybe it is for you too. So I as much as I could kick myself for this. The reality is I can’t I have to just know that this is a lifelong journey. And, you know, it’s not about doing something wrong, right? When I didn’t do it, it’s about know when you see it and you look at it differently. shifting it to it’s more in line with your values. And then the third piece of this that I want to talk about and this is really a bigger piece, right? It’s the the words that you’re using in your profile, right? The words that you use in your LinkedIn strategy. We use words like whitelist and blacklist, right they’re words with racial connotations. You know, you take them out, like look at the words and you and when you wrote them, right? You weren’t looking at it with thinking about the racial connotations. I know that but they have potentially racist overtones. So you want to swap them out, right and use something that’s more neutral. You know, I come from the technology world. And in computers, there’s, you know, a master in a sleeve, right? Like, obviously, those are not words you want to use. Now, if you are, if you want to eliminate potentially racist overtones in your profile, intentionally do this, look at the word you’re using, even if they don’t have an entire racist overtone in your mind, they might in other people’s minds, right? So swap them out, be mindful of how the words you’re using might make other people feel, you know, this is another thing you may want to do is convert all your language to more gender neutral language, right use words like they, instead of using, you know, he or she, we tend to default to E, right, we tend to default to men, right? So convert the descriptions in what you’re doing to, you know, when you’re talking about your clients, and listen, if you have clients, like I have clients that are women, if I’m talking about a specific woman, I’m going to use her preferred pronouns, right. But you know, look for gender words, like gender coded words, that might like the example and I’m going to link to all of the places I saw this research, but the example that I saw was like words like aggressive or dominant dissuade women from engaging in the content, right. So if you are looking to, to really have your profile appeal to a larger audience, then you don’t want to use that. So there’s a platform called text.io, that will help you see what the content that you’re using. And then there’s, there’s other free apps, I’m going to link all of those in the show notes that you can see that you can check for gender coded words, okay. And then the other thing when you’re thinking about your copy, think about like a lot of people use LinkedIn to right put to post job offerings, right, maybe you’re hiring a VA, or maybe you’re hiring, you know, an assistant or an executive assistant or a CFO, right. So ideally, what you want to focus on is what your new hire is going to be expected to achieve right in a month or six months or a year, not the qualifications that they have to have. So that you will get a wider representation, and a more diverse representation of applicants for that position. Okay, so hopefully that makes sense. There’s some other apps that we can talk here, about, there’s an app called gender decoder, I’m going to link all of these in the Resources tab in the show notes. So check all of that stuff out, that can help you with all of this. But at the end of the day, what you want to have is a keyword strategy. Like we are always talking about keyword strategies here on LinkedIn. But you want it to be an inclusive keyword strategy. So once you’re creating like one of the things we do when we write LinkedIn profiles, is we identify what all of your keywords are. We then now Now we didn’t before, but now we take a look at it and say, is this keyword strategy inclusive? Right? And you know, sometimes it changes in some many times it doesn’t change. But now it’s now we’ve looked at it where before we didn’t, right, does that make sense? There’s a term that I learned as I was doing the research for this episode. And the term is called woke washing. And I literally had to listen to that a few times. So like, what is it woke washing. And woke washing is when a corporation or an institution or an individual says or does something that signals their advocacy for a marginalized cause, but then continues to cause harm to that vulnerable community, right? Here’s the deal. When you know better, you’ve got to do better, we need to improve our processes, we need to reflect on what we do internally, we need to reflect on our customers touch points. And then and then take action on it. Because if you’re not taking action on it, if you’re just saying like, Yes, I support Black Lives Matter, but you’re not taking action to look at something simple, like your LinkedIn profile to see if you are really being inclusive and how you describe yourself and the work you do and the commitment you have, then your work, work washing, right, then you’re doing exactly what you’re you might even not know you’re doing it. But I’m here to tell you that you are doing it, I’m doing it, I’m probably always going to be doing it right. But I’m always going to be trying to get better at this. So just take the time to do this. Right. Let me just recap this a second. And then we’ll talk about how to take the time to do this. You there’s LinkedIn has a section that allows you to put your preferred pronouns and by all means do that, by all means do that, use that if you got that feature, do that, because it just shows your your commitment to normalizing. Use the use of preferred pronouns, right? Take a look at your visuals. Make sure when you people look visually at your profile, your LinkedIn profile, that the media you’re sharing, and the the images that you’re sharing, you know, represents the diverse world that you that you live in, and that you put out to the world and the people that you work with, right? Make sure that you’re doing that and change when you need to change it. It’s not wrong if you didn’t do it this way. But now’s the time to change it. And then take a look at your words, take literally look at your words on your profile. Make sure you’re not using words like whitelisting make sure you’re using, you know, more general neutral language and, and again, you know, if you’re looking for a diverse group of people, you know, that are that are responding maybe to your content, maybe you’re putting content out there, or maybe you’re putting you know, a job application out there. Do it in a way that you’re you’re going to be attracting the most diverse population. And that happens and the case that I saw in this article that I’m in link to you is, you know, taking out the checklist of skills and writing more results based things. So hopefully that helps. So how do you get started? How do you get started, be the person who is always, always always making small changes like these to your LinkedIn profile, so that you’re walking the walk, not just talking the talk. This is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. It’s a long term commitment. But if you truly have a commitment to DNI, then taking a look at it from a LinkedIn profile perspective, is just one small step that can help you move towards bigger commitments in this LinkedIn is the place to tell your story. It’s the story of you it’s the story of your personal brand, right? If you’re like me, maybe you just move through the day and forget to go back and reflect on things like that presentation that I did, right until I until like, I thankfully realized that it right you’ve got a lot of stuff already out there. Take the time Take the time. Take this episode as your reminder to go and do this. And LinkedIn is just one small places lots of other places you can do this, but your LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn strategy is one small place that you can take action today right to show your commitment right put a stake in the ground declare your values let your values guide you to learning you know to really showing up for the way you want to be seen and for the people you want to show up for you know as she’s linked up in our she’s linked up family we create wealthy women you heard me say that we are committed to supporting women of all races, all identities, right? And we talk about women honestly we take men to we don’t care what your body parts are who your you know how you identify, but we do feel that women are feeling underrepresented on LinkedIn and we are here to make you feel more comfortable right it all starts with our on demand masterclass, you can check that out and the link is below but you can go to that at water that money tree comm you know that I think LinkedIn could be your money tree. I hope that this was helpful to you. I hope that you understand that. There’s just a few small things you can do to take. I think I think a big action towards your commitment to DNI I do this podcast to support you I’ve got this free training course that helps you that the word of that money tree.com to help you get started with your profile. It’s really the first step to your LinkedIn success. Let’s lift each other up if this was helpful to you, if you think that there’s people in your audience that don’t know some of these tiny little things we talked about on this podcast say that could make a big impact than share this podcast helped me help you take a quick screenshot of this episode on your phone share that on social also. I will share it with my audience. I want you to get more visibility. I want to help you do that. I am here to support you. I want this to be simple for you. Let’s create this simple business empire together. And I will see you back here again next week for another episode of the good girls get rich podcast