With the 'International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination' and 'International Women’s Day‘, two holidays have recently been dedicated to raise awareness of still existing inequalities and to promote openness for more diversity on a societal, political and organizational level. Despite the importance of the ongoing digitalization in these regards, we only have a limited understanding of the relationship between digitalization and diversity. It is therefore worth asking whether digitalization can thereby be considered a ‘diversity-blind’ process and encouraging the generation of theoretical knowledge that can help to explain how digital technologies influence diversity (digital impact on diversity) and how digital technologies are shaped by diversity or the lack thereof (diversity shaping digital technology). Eventually, this understanding might help academics and practitioners alike in their efforts towards inclusive design and application processes that avoid the pitfalls such as machine learning algorithms in recruiting that discriminated against female applicants and facial recognition software that exhibited racial discrimination.

We invite all scholars interested in these topics to submit their papers to our mini-track 'Addressing Diversity in Digitalization‘ at the upcoming HICSS conference (submission deadline: 15 June). The track is not limited to a certain diversity dimension but we welcome contributions that consider demographic (e.g. age, gender, nationality, ethnicity), functional (e.g. education, work experience, religion, income) or deep-level (e.g. diseases, disabilities, traits, values, beliefs) attributes.

For more information visit https://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-55/knowledge-innovation-and-entrepreneurial-systems/#addressing-diversity-in-digitalization-minitrack   

Warm regards

Janina Sundermeier, Hannes Rothe and Yolande Chan