At this week’s annual State of the Nation event, IAB Canada announced its commitment to encouraging the industry to revise vocabulary to eliminate systemically inappropriate references and to use terms that more closely reflect functional meaning. In recent years we have witnessed the power of words and their impact on society. As we reflect on our industry, it is clear that some of our terminology may contribute to unconscious bias and that we, as a community, can do better.
In 2018, IAB Canada launched AutoCorrectHER, a Chrome extension designed to drive awareness of pervasive language that undermines gender equality. This year, we are committed to reviewing our lexicon and making important changes to terminology that may contribute to subtle or explicit racial bias or any kind of diminishment of humanity.
Moving forward, all of our communication will include revised vocabulary that we hope will inspire broad adoption.
We invite our community to contribute any suggestions beyond the following immediate list below:
- Citizens
- People
- Core lists/databases
- Primary lists/databases
- Prioritize
- Exceptions
- Filtered
- Acceptable
- Blocking
- Suppression lists
- Inclusion lists
We have a lot of work to do.