Conscious or Unconscious Biases – Together we can do better. Let’s choose to challenge every day!

Hero Gaming was watching with interest the issues in relation to industry events, publications, and panels over the past week. Even though we were not part of the recently organised events, we speak publicly because diversity and inclusion are central to the Hero culture – and we would like other gaming companies to follow suit in taking active and concrete steps for improvement in order to ensure that diversity is represented and encouraged throughout the industry.

We acknowledge the challenges that media publishers, events, conference and industry expert panel organisers (both physical and digital) who are actively targeting the gambling industry, find themselves in when looking for panellists.  We still have a long  journey ahead of us – as an industry, we need to become more diverse, especially at senior levels. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people from different brackgrounds in our industry who have been immensely successful, but  have unfortunately not had anyone turning the spotlight onto them.

The much-needed change requires all gaming companies to come together to ensure that, we  have a diverse group of people to represent our organisations in these events and conferences. At Hero, we have already offered numerous public speaking training programmes to our employees, but we are committed to increasing our investment to give a wider group of employees the confidence to participate in these events.

In addition, when sponsoring events, we will further seek to ask the right questions regarding diversity before involving our people or brand, and we will introduce contractual provisions which implement penalties by organisers who are not mindful of diversity and inclusion.

We understand that these kinds of mishaps would have not been intentionally coordinated in such a way, but we need to take action to ensure that  more people and organisations get into the habit of ensuring that diversity and inclusion policies are in place and followed.

We need to #choosetochallenge every day, not just once a year on International Women’s Day or the World Day of  Cultural Diversity. The more we collectively raise awareness, the faster we can change. Together we can do better!