Companies
Modern Tribe shares actions for inclusion on International Women’s Day
(Source: Modern Tribe blog)
March 9, 2018 — Santa Cruz, CA
Modern Tribe is focused on creating a welcoming environment for all people who value a diverse set of experiences and strive to live well and do good work.
Happy International Women’s Day! This year, the International Women’s Day campaign theme is #PressForProgress. This theme requires collective, progressive action to achieving gender equality. Gender inequality is pervasive in many business sectors, with the technology industry having one of the lower percentages of women working in the field. As a group of technology professionals, we hope to be part of the movement to accelerate gender equality.
To increase our focus on gender equality at Modern Tribe, as well as create an inclusive environment for people from all demographics, we’ve embraced some larger actions that are worth sharing on this day. While this post is focused primarily on gender equality in light of International Women’s Day, Modern Tribe is focused on creating a welcoming environment for all people who value a diverse set of experiences and strive to live well and do good work. Many of the action items discussed below are not limited to gender equality but have been taken with this broader goal in mind.
For starters, Modern Tribe formed an inclusion group. This is a group of team members at various levels in the company who meet weekly to work on defining and executing inclusion initiatives. Being a member of this group is voluntary, open to all, and considered billable work. This group was formed last summer and has been meeting regularly since then to work toward specific improvements.
We’d like to highlight the initiatives that align with the International Women’s Day 2018 campaign theme and actions.
Action 1: Maintain a gender parity mindset, which states ‘I will question any lack of women’s participation.’
Modern Tribe skews heavily male. Though we have women working in many disciplines, including Design, Project Management, Strategy and QA, we have struggled to recruit female developers. One of our first actions was taking a look at our recruiting process. Are there ways to modify our job postings to garner a more diverse set of applicants? Could we change steps in our recruiting process to reduce unconscious bias? We started by identifying some small initiatives that could have immediate impact. We’ve changed out many of the photos on our website to more current photos that show the increased diversity of our team. We also ran our job postings through Textio, a service that checked job posting language for unconscious bias, and revised posts to use more gender-neutral language. As a result of these changes, we have increased the number of female applicants to engineering roles by 60%.
Continue reading article here: https://tri.be/blog/international-womens-day/
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Tagged Modern Tri.be
