Diversity Statistics in Life Sciences: A Case Study

#SeussIs…

Alex had an idea: he wanted to showcase Seuss’s diversity with a campaign, which he launched in July of 2016 with the hashtag #SeussIs. He conducted a survey in the office to really dig down into the team’s diversity. Even we were surprised when we saw all the different languages spoken and countries lived in tallied up together. Each week we featured a different statistic, regularly featuring pictures of our team members as well.

If you missed the campaign, you can check it out for yourself by looking up the hashtag #SeussIs on our social media channels: LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We got a lot of encouraging positive feedback from clients, vendors, former team members and potential employees. As we discussed in our review of gender quotas, sharing these sorts of stories, where diversity has led to positive environments and profitable differentiation, encourages others to pursue diversity on their own life-science teams. (It’s not tough to do.)

So, in the interest of keeping the discussion going and celebrating diversity in life sciences, we wanted to share our Seuss diversity statistics with you! We’d love to hear: does your team look like ours?

#SeussIs…Multilingual

• Total number of languages spoken: 14

• English, Dutch, Turkish, French, German, Spanish, Telugu, Polish, Hindi, Icelandic, Tamil, Galician, Portuguese and Russian

• Average number of languages spoken per team member: 2.93

#SeussIs…Multinational

• Number of nationalities: 8

• Dutch, American, English, Polish, Turkish, Indian, Canadian and Spanish

• Previous employees from Hungary, Afghanistan, Ireland, Scotland, Romania and Italy

• Number of countries we’ve lived in: 13

• USA, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, India, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, UK, Iceland and Canada

• Avg number of countries lived in per team member: 2.4

• 75% of Seuss employees are expats

• Avg # of countries visited per team member: 18.2

#Seuss Is…Gender Equal

• Led by women

• 40% male/60% female*

*After starting as a group of women, we made a concerted effort to find and hire more excellent men to diversify our team, create balance, bring in fresh ideas and help us attract and relate to still more excellent employees, clients and candidates.

Overall, we are really happy with our campaign – finding out these things about ourselves made us happy, and it made up happy to bring a smile to other people’s faces and give them a nudge to being reveling in their own diversity. Looking at the diversity statistics in life sciences is a good way to start!

Update! Since our campaign ended, we added more awesome people! Seuss Consulting welcomes Business Consultant Eleni Menegatou (from Greece), who adds Greek to our roster of languages. Seuss Recruitment also welcomes Team Manager Susan Braakman to lead our diverse team of recruiters!

Inspired by our campaign? Email: talktous@seussrecruitment.com or call +31 (0) 20 29 00 016 to get support recruiting and building strong, experienced and diverse life-sciences and clinical-research teams.