ThoughtCo's Diversity Pledge Table of Contents Expand Our Commitment Diversify Our Contributors Eliminate Bias Expand Our Library Progress Updates Dear Readers, ThoughtCo strives to provide all readers with resources for lifelong learning, but the power of education is limited by the understanding, perspective, and experience of those who teach, write, and research. Over the years, ThoughtCo has published thousands of articles on topics ranging from art to zoology. While we have sought out qualified writers from diverse backgrounds for some topics, broad swaths of content have not benefited from multiple perspectives. The result is scholarship that is neither as representative nor as rigorous as our audience deserves. It is past time for this to change. Today, we commit to the following: Diversify Our Contributors We commit to hiring writers, editors, and scholars with diverse backgrounds, including those with a deep understanding of the Black American experience. Specifically, we are seeking BIPOC writers and editors with a background in one or more of these areas: Race RelationsCivil RightsAmerican History and CultureEconomyGovernmentSociology Eliminate Bias By September 30, 2020, we will assess the top 500 articles across our History, Social Science, Government, and Issues content. We will work closely with subject-matter experts to identify misconceptions, missing opportunities, and relevant information, and we will remediate our content and illustrations for issues of representation, implicit, and explicit bias. Expand Our Library By September 30, we will assess our existing content and identify topic areas where we can facilitate respectful conversations around race, including: education, literature, history, and classroom resources. We will write new content and add to existing articles in these topic areas; we commit to including expert and primary sources from diverse perspectives and communities. We know we won’t do this perfectly, and we thank you for holding us accountable. If you are interested in assisting us, we invite you to apply for a role. Or, simply email us to let us know about an issue you’ve identified. Sincerely, The ThoughtCo Team December 2020 Progress Update Over the last six months, the ThoughtCo team has been devoted to fulfilling the promises made in our diversity pledge. Today, we offer an update on our progress: Since June, we have hired a team of six writers, editors, and scholars from diverse backgrounds to review, edit, and update our content. These new contributors specialize in fields such as history, social justice, and education, and offer a deep understanding of and empathy with the needs and challenges of under-served communities and under-represented populations. In June, we began the process of rigorously reviewing our top 500 articles for bias. Based on our findings and in close collaboration with subject-matter experts, we launched a series of anti-bias projects, organized by topic area, with the goal of eliminating bias from our content. So far, we have assessed and remediated a total 2,005 articles for issues of representation, implicit, and explicit bias. The first project focused on removing dehumanizing language and adding vital historical context to articles about slavery. Drawing on the community-sourced work of Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman and other senior slavery scholars, we updated 1,592 articles to accurately represent the experiences and humanity of enslaved people. In subsequent projects, we eliminated biased language, corrected misinformation, and added essential context to 413 articles about Black inventors, authors, politicians, and historical figures; the experiences and histories of Indigenous peoples; and gender, sex, and sexuality. December 2021 Progress Update Since our last update, the ThoughtCo team has continued to strive to fulfill the promises we made in our diversity pledge. Here is an update on our progress: We continued to rigorously review our library for issues of representation and implicit and explicit bias. Since the December update, we have launched four new anti-bias projects and assessed and remediated an additional 566 articles, including: Updating articles about migration and immigration to ensure the content is accurate, sensitive, and does not reproduce biases or prejudice Adding depth and context to timelines related to Black History Correcting articles that used the terms Black and African American inaccurately or interchangeably Fact-checking and eliminating bias from articles about voting and elections We also established a high-priority bias review process to ensure that reader feedback about bias in our content is addressed promptly and thoroughly. Thanks to readers like you, we were able to rapidly remediate issues in 28 articles about history, politics, and sociology. There is much more work to be done, and we are committed to being fully transparent about our progress. We will continue to share updates right here on our pledge about our progress and learnings. Finally, we would like to acknowledge every reader who has taken the time to contact us with feedback, thoughts, and questions about our content. We are grateful for your insight and thank you for continuing to hold us accountable to our goals.