“Your antropomorphometrics, pigmentation levels and cumulative number of heartbeats or their correlates are irrelevant.”

By Jeroen Elassaiss-Schaap

“Your antropomorphometrics, pigmentation levels and cumulative number of heartbeats or their correlates are irrelevant.”: that is how we end our job announcements. Today we wanted to explain this in more detail.

Equal opportunity statements

In the last years, PD-value has put out numerous job advertisements with great success. We realized over time we needed to make them more professional. One of the improvements was a statement about equal opportunities. My first reaction was: why? Anyone who knows me or interacts with us can see that we have a wide diversity of employees. On second thought, and nudged by discussions with Basak Tektemur-Altay , it became clear that it is important to let the outside world explicitly know that this is what we as an organization stand behind.

The next question was: how to formulate the statement? There are many examples out there. It unfortunately all becomes so explicit and dry. Those statements on the other hand are also difficult to justify for a small company: the next hire can push our team from the balance. And you than are almost force to spend some attention to that aspect, making the whole statement complicated, bringing too much attention to something that to my opinion ideally should have been a non-topic, completely self-evident.

Philosophy underlying our statement

One night in the period we were considering the statement, I realized how I would like to tackle it. Stressing that it is a non-issue is the most important of the whole statement. We therefore negate the issue, stating that any of aspects that lead to the diversity issues are not relevant, by ending in “...are irrelevant”.

As a group of modelers-consultants, we are pretty nerdy, with a keen interest in data, science, biology, medicine etcetera. The statement in a negation fashion lends itself to a pretty nerdy orientation to the differences. This serves two purposes. It becomes nicely funny and light-hearted, taking out the seriousness associated with these topics. The other purpose is that you need to be a bit like the rest of the team to understand. One needs to read twice and think about it before it becomes clear what is portrayed.

The terms

Writing it out spoils the fun a bit. But nevertheless, let’s do it. Going into the terms individually, we first encounter ‘antropomorphometrics’. I needed to look it up to ensure its correct spelling. It means the measurements (metrics) associated with the form (morpho-) of the human body (antropo-). We associate it with two concepts at the same time. The shape of the body is different between male and female home sapiens specimens (it is also true for many other species, coincidentally) – implying in the context of the full statement that we do not care about those differences. But we also do not discriminate against people with different body forms, as could be associated with obesity, amputations, disease-associated malformations and the like. And all that is captured in this one term! Very glad that I figured that one out. Saves a lot of advertisement space as well.

The second term is ‘pigmentation levels’. That is easier, but perhaps a more loaded concept because of the different regions people originate from are associated with different genetic make-up of the color of the skin. The color is determined by melanocytes expressing different amounts of pigmentation granules. I actually made a point of inserting melanocytes in the dal-e prompt of the image used in this post. Again, we do not care about these differences, one more crossed of our list.

It is followed by cumulative number of heartbeats. Of course this can only relate to age: the older your are the more times your heart has beaten, there is no way around it. Perhaps one can decrease it by doing a lot meditation. Cool. Also something that is not driving us to hire you or not.

Finally we top it of by adding ‘or their correlates’. This one is nerdy as well, because we do in our daily work deal with frequently. There is also a deeper purpose, as it provides a blanket cover for overly literal interpretation of the earlier terms, or the chance that someone might feel not included in the series – all kinds of backgrounds and conditions that may differ between human can be swept in using this statement.

Conclusion

Our equality statement is really short, a bit fun in multiple ways, but also dense in its meaning. We are serious about it, too: we really do not care about those differences. As a matter of fact, the more differences the better. We only care about your talent and experience that you bring when joining.