The labor movement has a saying: The leadership should look like the membership. Having a diverse leadership ensures that the full range of member’s issues and perspective are represented in leadership. That helps the union make better decisions overall.
But how can we tell if our leadership is diverse enough? There is one way to measure it. You can do this for any diversity criteria – race, ethnicity, gender, age, LGBTQ+ status, religion – as long as you have the information about it.
To create this measure, we look at one group at a time. We’ll call this the target demographic.
To start, you need to know the diversity of the membership the leaders serve. Let’s take a local union as an example, and let’s look at diversity in gender.
If the target demographic is proportionately represented in leadership, the score will be close to 100. Numbers substantially below 100 mean that the target demographic is underrepresented. Numbers substantially above 100 mean the target demographic is overrepresented.