Must-Read: 5 Books About DEAI Written By Women

More than half (62%) of employees believe that Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion (DEAI) are essential to their organization’s success. And their assumption is correct – companies who have diverse talent and are inclusive are 35% more likely to outperform competitors. With this in mind, leaders across industries are wondering how to incorporate tenets of DEAI both internally and in their consumer-facing products and services.

Luckily, there are a plethora of resources out there, and, between you and me, I believe the best resources have been created by women. The following five DEAI books in particular are must reads for anyone looking to aid their personal development or advance change within their organization.

1. Say More About That ...And Other Ways to Speak Up, Push Back, and Advocate for Yourself and Others by Amber Cabral

In Say More About That, TedEd Speaker and Walmart’s former Senior Manager of Culture, Strategy, and Inclusion, Amber Cabral examines how the current social climate has made speaking out against microaggressions, discrimination, and stereotyping so daunting. To combat both conscious and unconscious bias, Cabral offers tips and tools for communicating assertively and effectively.

Whether you are an underrepresented person or an ally, this guide makes seemingly difficult conversations simpler through language tactics, story sharing, and discussion of inclusion fundamentals. Beyond these actionable tools, Cabral offers in-depth explanations of what concepts like allyship, equity, identity, privilege, and other terms truly mean, within a larger historical context. 

2. Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally by Emily Ladau

About 15% of the people worldwide are disabled. Still many of these individuals face ableist bias everyday, perpetrated by media and culture. In this short and digestible book, advocate, speaker, podcast-host, and writer Emily Ladau outlines a multitude of ways to be an ally for the disabled population, from how to practice good disability etiquette while avoiding ableism rhetoric, to how to plan events and spaces for accessibility.

Using personal experiences to tell a greater story, Demystifying Disability does a tremendous job of bridging the understanding gap between the disabled and the able bodied.

3. Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google's Product Inclusion Team By Annie Jean-Baptiste

Building an inclusive product takes intentionality from marketers, researchers, product managers, and other brand builders. Using strategies, processes, and research from Google’s massively successful Product Inclusion Team, Annie Jean-Baptiste, the tech giant’s Director of Product Inclusion and Equity, provides a framework for designing inclusive products– ones that are not just made for but also with women, people of color, and other underrepresented people in mind.

The knowledge shared in Building for Everyone applies to any industry, as it shares actionable information for reaching a diverse group of consumers in order to bolster long-term usability and overall profitability.

4. The Wake Up: Closing the Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Change by Michelle MiJung Kim

Queer immigrant Korean American woman writer, speaker, activist, and entrepreneur, Michelle MiJung Kim does an excellent job of unpacking the more nuanced aspects of DEI initiatives – specifically, how individuals are upholding white supremacy and oppression unknowingly in interpersonal interactions.

Many anti-racism books rely on toolkits and checklists for improving both behavioral practices and organizational systems. The Wake Up Call opts for an approach that applies both research and personal stories to support the central theme: “the only constant is context.” She argues that it is context that is often ignored when we compare diverse experiences or speak on hot-button issues.

5. Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work by Ruchika Tulshyan

In Inclusion on Purpose, Ruchika Tulshyan hones in on the working experience of women of color, giving specific examples of how they experience bias at the intersection of race and gender. On the topic of prevalent issues like imposter syndrome or burnout, Tulshyan shifts the responsibility away from individuals and asks us to examine how our culture perpetuates such anxieties.

As an inclusion strategy practice founder and a keynote speaker who has addressed audiences at NASA, Pixar, Microsoft, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. Congress and more, Ruchika Tulshyan is no stranger to calling on people with privilege and power to make changes on the institutional level, which she continues to do here, communicating the meaning and importance of creating psychological safety for employees.