#more than just 'black trans women are the founders of the queer community <3' posts likes and reblogs.

[mypronounsarentmyproblem]

ok real talk small pet peeve of mine again. just little things. white trans ppl things. not gonna credit the artist cause i dont want to draw negative attention to them, this drawing is hella cute & relatable

yeah that drawing is so cute funny and relatable! but also! im kinda sick & tired of seeing "average trans people" always have caucasian features. cause its not the first time im seeing this for SURE.

should i get this mild annoyance at 2 hairstyles in a meme? nope. but im gonna talk abt it anyway. ok bye

[jessicakehoe]

Tarana Burke, Gender-Specific Philanthropy, and More From Day 3 of Women Deliver

By the third and final day of Women Deliver, after hearing countless stories of violence, inequity and injustice, the realization of just how far we have still to go in our fight for equality can start to feel too heavy to bear. At one of the panels, in fact, a speaker used her last few minutes of time to remind people in the audience–“I see a lot of heavy faces”–that we should leave the conference feeling uplifted, not dispirited. There are feminists out there fighting the good fight, she said, and that’s reason enough to feel hopeful.

In the spirit of that, here are highlights from Day 3 of the 2019 Women Deliver conference in Vancouver, where we heard from several women and organizations doing their bit (and then some) in the pursuit of gender equality.

1. Tarana Burke on the power in choosing how and where to share your story Day 3 kicked off with a panel on how collective movements can affect change—whether social, economic or environmental. Indian journalist Barkha Dutt moderated the panel, which included activists Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement; Ailbhe Smyth, co-director of Together for Yes, the abortion rights campaign group that recently legalized abortion in Ireland; Tina Tchen, co-founder of Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund; and Noelene Nabulivou, political adviser at DIVA for Equality, which focuses not just on gender equality but ecological and climate justice.

As Dutt points out early in the panel, “Movements cannot be driven by silence.” They require voices rising up in support to generate the kind of momentum required to change minds, change laws. “It is through collective power that we can achieve individual power,” says panelist Haldis Holst, who has worked extensively in the area of trade union rights. But while raising one’s voice is vital, Tarana Burke steps in to point out that “there is also power in not telling your story” to the world. “I’ve watched the world trade on the labour of survivors,” she says. “They depend on us, they bring us to the forefront, they trot us out to tell these gory stories. And nobody takes into account what that does to us, that we have to live with the aftermath of having our stories displayed to the world and watch people actively not care. So tell your stories in places and ways that you want to… I’m not telling anyone to be silent,” she clarifies. “Getting your story out is important. You can write it in a journal, you can paint it in a picture, you can tell it to a small group, it just doesn’t have to always be this big display. I think it’s an undue burden that we place particularly on women to bring our stories forward. Don’t be intimidated into telling your stories just to move the movement forward.”

Interested in watching the full panel? You can find it here.

2. The status of gender-specific philanthropy Few figures are available on gender-focused philanthropic donations worldwide. To address this gap, the OECD Network of Foundations (netFWD) recently produced a report that looks at philanthropic investments through a gender-specific lens. In a panel dedicated to the issue, Bathylle Missika from OECD shared several interesting stats from their report:

i) Gender-related giving accounts for only 16% of all philanthropic donations ii) Only 6% of those funds address women-specific needs such as preventing violence against women iii) 68% of this funding for gender remains concentrated in just 10 middle-income countries including India, Nigeria and Kenya iv) Funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) accounts for almost half of the world’s gender-related giving v) Foundations whose philanthropic investments are centred exclusively around gender include Fondation Chanel, Goldman Sachs Fund and the Oprah Winfrey LA Fund.

3. Four young feminists on the importance of intersectionality Rega Jha, founder and former editor in chief of Buzzfeed India, hosted a panel in conversation with a diverse group of young feminists—Ugandan trans rights activist Cleo Kambugu, Tunisian activist Aya Chebbi, writer June Eric-Udorie, and Planned Parenthood’s director of engagements Alencia Johnson—all of whom spoke strongly about the need for an inclusive, intersectional approach to equality.

Eric-Udorie, a queer, disabled, black woman who curated a collection of essays titled Can We All Be Feminists? in 2018, shares how to go about becoming a better ally. “This is not a competition. This is not ‘who can win the race the quickest.’ This is really work that is personal and political, and that’s something feminists have been saying for a long time, but I really want to push you to think, all the time, about who isn’t there when you walk into a space, why aren’t they there, how can we get them there? Or if we can’t, how can we go meet them where they are?” Doing the hard work of sitting down and thinking about how to be better, and then reaching out to communities other than your own in support is vital, she says, and something we can all stand to do more of.

You can catch the full panel here.

The post Tarana Burke, Gender-Specific Philanthropy, and More From Day 3 of Women Deliver appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Tarana Burke, Gender-Specific Philanthropy, and More From Day 3 of Women Deliver published first on https://borboletabags.tumblr.com/

[awesomecolorfulcollectorwombat]

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

New Post has been published on https://delphi4arab.com/more-than-150-companies-are-hoping-this-woman-can-fix-their-diversity-problems/

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

For three days in February, 6,000 of people coursed in and out of the Castro Theater, a 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. They came to hear from Laurene Powell Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, and leaders from Amazon and Uber. They came to network. And a pithy marquee on the theater summed up their unifying mission: “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.”

The sixth-annual Lesbians Who Tech + Allies Summit was the largest LGBTQ event in the world. The attendees were roughly 80 percent queer women–but sexuality was just one element of diversity. Of those who spoke on stage, half were women of color, 30 percent were black or Latinx, and 15 percent transgender or gender non-conforming. 

“We are 100 percent about providing value to queer women. We just don’t have this type of community anywhere else in the world,” said Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech. “That we can do this and be visible and also host a damn good tech conference–that inspires people.”

The Summit is not only a place where leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton fly in to speak, but also the physical gathering of just a fraction of the 50,000 members of the parent organization, Lesbians Who Tech, a social enterprise that Pittsford founded in 2013 and which has grown to 42 cities. In 2019, the organization is entering an inflection point, as what was once a conference-media business with a charitable arm aims to become a scalable technology company. “We already work with more than 150 companies looking to retain or recruit diverse talent,” Pittsford said. “Our partners were asking: How do we track hires? How do we actually hold ourselves accountable?” Now, she and LWT are building Include.io, a digital tool that aims to do precisely that.

Before Pittsford dreamed up her organization, she had been analyzing data and building online fundraising tools for a group opposing Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry. She says she was shocked to discover that the people funding the LGBTQ movement were majority white cisgender men, a term that refers to men who identify with the gender with which they were born. “It was a clear wake-up call for me. The people who would benefit from the movement weren’t funding it. Even the women with the money weren’t spending it,” she said.

Simultaneously, she realized that tech events for the queer community in and around San Francisco always seemed to be 90 percent male. “There’s nothing for us,” she said. No cohesive community, no gathering, no movement, no money spending–even for those women who identified as queer in lucrative Silicon Valley jobs. She wondered: could someone or something change that? Could she change that?

Finding a Purpose, and an Audience

Pittsford grew up in a conservative military family in San Diego, and in the early 2000s was living in San Francisco with her brother. As adults, they still struggled with having been taught as kids that all gay people were going to hell. With support from her brother, and working for a pro-LGBTQ human rights organization, Pittsford became more comfortable with her sexuality. Then, one Tuesday morning in 2010 she arrived home to discover that her brother–the only supportive person in her life–had died in his sleep of cardiomyopathy. “My heart was just broken,” she says. “It gave me a sense that I should take risks, give back and do something larger than myself.”

Pittsford’s grief was heavy that year, in which she left her comfortable job doing policy work at Equity California. “I was close to [starting my own venture], but that moment really sped it up for me,” she said. She started working independently, doing data work, and building websites and tools for other businesses.

In the evenings, she subverted her introversion and began networking, and throwing small happy hours for queer women. In 2014 she decided to host what she dubbed a “Summit” for her burgeoning organization, Lesbians Who Tech. It was to be part networking with like-minded people, part technology conference, and part social-justice rally. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Because lesbians never show up, they never go out.” 

Megan Smith, a vice president at Google who would soon be tapped to be the chief technology officer of the United States by President Barack Obama, walked in the door at 7 a.m. Next, Smith’s then-partner Kara Swisher walked in. Eight hundred people bought tickets–and a few big companies sponsored it. Pittsford was floored: “It was the first time I thought it could be a real thing.”

Over the past six years, the conferences have gained a cult following among queer technologists and executives. LaFawn Davis, the head of inclusion and culture at Twilio, has attended multiple LWT conferences, and adores them so much she jokes they are “lesbian Disneyland.” For her, the long weekends are a chance to immerse herself in a community that is still rare in the tech world. “I get to be surrounded by queer executives! Queer engineers! Imagine!” And over the years she’s also built a network and found job candidates through it.

The Lesbians Who Tech parent organization, though, is an unusual enterprise: it’s part 501(c)(3) and part LLC; a community organization that offers substantial coding scholarships to women, and a mission-driven media business that puts on conferences. 

By 2017, Pittsford realized she needed to solve LWT’s messy structural issue. The organization would need real profits to grow, and to give its now-massive network significant value outside of the conferences. “I came from the nonprofit space, and it’s not the most scalable path,” she said.

Holding Tech Accountable

Aside from ticket sales, the conferences generated revenue through sponsors such as Google, Amazon, and Slack, who also would send speakers and attendees to the events. LWT became a natural recruiting tool for them–but it was totally informal. Once executives at these companies started asking Pittsford how they could improve their diversity hiring and retention and track it, she saw the future of her business before her eyes.

LWT could offer a hiring platform featuring its members, which the organization describes as mid-level and executive LGBTQ women, non-binary, and trans techies–many of whom are also people of color–as well as their allies. The platform could help companies track their ongoing progress in diversity hiring. Pittsford envisioned Include.io, which has 10,000 beta users, as a way to “scale access to direct referrals” from a different pool of talent than the existing employees at large tech companies.

“We are trying to find a way to get referrals to, say, the talented self-taught female programmer in New Orleans who might not know anyone in San Francisco,” Pittsford said. 

“Things like unconscious bias training aren’t working,” she added. “You have to fight it every day–with intention–and this product lets companies do that.”

Include.io has been in beta since June of 2018, and Pittsford says 200 companies have signed up to use it once it’s live later this year. But she has some structural work to do before launch. The company’s Oakland office hasn’t attracted or retained enough tech talent itself to scale Include.io, so she’s setting up a development team in New York, hoping to add three to five more people to the scrappy staff of nine. She says San Francisco is the “Wild West of talent poaching,” where small organizations can’t compete for developers who can command salaries approaching $200,000.

“This has been the hardest year of my professional life,” she said. She’s running a mission-driven organization at the speed of a startup, trying to figure out how fast it can grow and scale without burning out her team–or herself.

Being part of the solution to tech’s diversity problem, however, is what keeps her going every day. Pittsford says she hopes once Include.io is out to the public, it will make executives more comfortable about their own abilities to recruit, hire, and maintain a diverse workforce.

“I still would love to see a CEO say, ‘we are going to be 30 percent black and Latinx by X year,'” she said. “We really feel like something has got to change. Something has got to give.”

[smartwebhostingblog]

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

New Post has been published on http://web-hosting-top12.com/2019/04/05/more-than-150-companies-are-hoping-this-woman-can-fix-their-diversity-problems/

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

For three days in February, 6,000 of people coursed in and out of the Castro Theater, a 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. They came to hear from Laurene Powell Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, and leaders from Amazon and Uber. They came to network. And a pithy marquee on the theater summed up their unifying mission: “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.”

The sixth-annual Lesbians Who Tech + Allies Summit was the largest LGBTQ event in the world. The attendees were roughly 80 percent queer women–but sexuality was just one element of diversity. Of those who spoke on stage, half were women of color, 30 percent were black or Latinx, and 15 percent transgender or gender non-conforming. 

“We are 100 percent about providing value to queer women. We just don’t have this type of community anywhere else in the world,” said Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech. “That we can do this and be visible and also host a damn good tech conference–that inspires people.”

The Summit is not only a place where leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton fly in to speak, but also the physical gathering of just a fraction of the 50,000 members of the parent organization, Lesbians Who Tech, a social enterprise that Pittsford founded in 2013 and which has grown to 42 cities. In 2019, the organization is entering an inflection point, as what was once a conference-media business with a charitable arm aims to become a scalable technology company. “We already work with more than 150 companies looking to retain or recruit diverse talent,” Pittsford said. “Our partners were asking: How do we track hires? How do we actually hold ourselves accountable?” Now, she and LWT are building Include.io, a digital tool that aims to do precisely that.

Before Pittsford dreamed up her organization, she had been analyzing data and building online fundraising tools for a group opposing Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry. She says she was shocked to discover that the people funding the LGBTQ movement were majority white cisgender men, a term that refers to men who identify with the gender with which they were born. “It was a clear wake-up call for me. The people who would benefit from the movement weren’t funding it. Even the women with the money weren’t spending it,” she said.

Simultaneously, she realized that tech events for the queer community in and around San Francisco always seemed to be 90 percent male. “There’s nothing for us,” she said. No cohesive community, no gathering, no movement, no money spending–even for those women who identified as queer in lucrative Silicon Valley jobs. She wondered: could someone or something change that? Could she change that?

Finding a Purpose, and an Audience

Pittsford grew up in a conservative military family in San Diego, and in the early 2000s was living in San Francisco with her brother. As adults, they still struggled with having been taught as kids that all gay people were going to hell. With support from her brother, and working for a pro-LGBTQ human rights organization, Pittsford became more comfortable with her sexuality. Then, one Tuesday morning in 2010 she arrived home to discover that her brother–the only supportive person in her life–had died in his sleep of cardiomyopathy. “My heart was just broken,” she says. “It gave me a sense that I should take risks, give back and do something larger than myself.”

Pittsford’s grief was heavy that year, in which she left her comfortable job doing policy work at Equity California. “I was close to [starting my own venture], but that moment really sped it up for me,” she said. She started working independently, doing data work, and building websites and tools for other businesses.

In the evenings, she subverted her introversion and began networking, and throwing small happy hours for queer women. In 2014 she decided to host what she dubbed a “Summit” for her burgeoning organization, Lesbians Who Tech. It was to be part networking with like-minded people, part technology conference, and part social-justice rally. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Because lesbians never show up, they never go out.” 

Megan Smith, a vice president at Google who would soon be tapped to be the chief technology officer of the United States by President Barack Obama, walked in the door at 7 a.m. Next, Smith’s then-partner Kara Swisher walked in. Eight hundred people bought tickets–and a few big companies sponsored it. Pittsford was floored: “It was the first time I thought it could be a real thing.”

Over the past six years, the conferences have gained a cult following among queer technologists and executives. LaFawn Davis, the head of inclusion and culture at Twilio, has attended multiple LWT conferences, and adores them so much she jokes they are “lesbian Disneyland.” For her, the long weekends are a chance to immerse herself in a community that is still rare in the tech world. “I get to be surrounded by queer executives! Queer engineers! Imagine!” And over the years she’s also built a network and found job candidates through it.

The Lesbians Who Tech parent organization, though, is an unusual enterprise: it’s part 501(c)(3) and part LLC; a community organization that offers substantial coding scholarships to women, and a mission-driven media business that puts on conferences. 

By 2017, Pittsford realized she needed to solve LWT’s messy structural issue. The organization would need real profits to grow, and to give its now-massive network significant value outside of the conferences. “I came from the nonprofit space, and it’s not the most scalable path,” she said.

Holding Tech Accountable

Aside from ticket sales, the conferences generated revenue through sponsors such as Google, Amazon, and Slack, who also would send speakers and attendees to the events. LWT became a natural recruiting tool for them–but it was totally informal. Once executives at these companies started asking Pittsford how they could improve their diversity hiring and retention and track it, she saw the future of her business before her eyes.

LWT could offer a hiring platform featuring its members, which the organization describes as mid-level and executive LGBTQ women, non-binary, and trans techies–many of whom are also people of color–as well as their allies. The platform could help companies track their ongoing progress in diversity hiring. Pittsford envisioned Include.io, which has 10,000 beta users, as a way to “scale access to direct referrals” from a different pool of talent than the existing employees at large tech companies.

“We are trying to find a way to get referrals to, say, the talented self-taught female programmer in New Orleans who might not know anyone in San Francisco,” Pittsford said. 

“Things like unconscious bias training aren’t working,” she added. “You have to fight it every day–with intention–and this product lets companies do that.”

Include.io has been in beta since June of 2018, and Pittsford says 200 companies have signed up to use it once it’s live later this year. But she has some structural work to do before launch. The company’s Oakland office hasn’t attracted or retained enough tech talent itself to scale Include.io, so she’s setting up a development team in New York, hoping to add three to five more people to the scrappy staff of nine. She says San Francisco is the “Wild West of talent poaching,” where small organizations can’t compete for developers who can command salaries approaching $200,000.

“This has been the hardest year of my professional life,” she said. She’s running a mission-driven organization at the speed of a startup, trying to figure out how fast it can grow and scale without burning out her team–or herself.

Being part of the solution to tech’s diversity problem, however, is what keeps her going every day. Pittsford says she hopes once Include.io is out to the public, it will make executives more comfortable about their own abilities to recruit, hire, and maintain a diverse workforce.

“I still would love to see a CEO say, ‘we are going to be 30 percent black and Latinx by X year,'” she said. “We really feel like something has got to change. Something has got to give.”

[lazilysillyprince]

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

New Post has been published on http://web-hosting-top12.com/2019/04/05/more-than-150-companies-are-hoping-this-woman-can-fix-their-diversity-problems/

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

For three days in February, 6,000 of people coursed in and out of the Castro Theater, a 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. They came to hear from Laurene Powell Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, and leaders from Amazon and Uber. They came to network. And a pithy marquee on the theater summed up their unifying mission: “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.”

The sixth-annual Lesbians Who Tech + Allies Summit was the largest LGBTQ event in the world. The attendees were roughly 80 percent queer women–but sexuality was just one element of diversity. Of those who spoke on stage, half were women of color, 30 percent were black or Latinx, and 15 percent transgender or gender non-conforming. 

“We are 100 percent about providing value to queer women. We just don’t have this type of community anywhere else in the world,” said Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech. “That we can do this and be visible and also host a damn good tech conference–that inspires people.”

The Summit is not only a place where leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton fly in to speak, but also the physical gathering of just a fraction of the 50,000 members of the parent organization, Lesbians Who Tech, a social enterprise that Pittsford founded in 2013 and which has grown to 42 cities. In 2019, the organization is entering an inflection point, as what was once a conference-media business with a charitable arm aims to become a scalable technology company. “We already work with more than 150 companies looking to retain or recruit diverse talent,” Pittsford said. “Our partners were asking: How do we track hires? How do we actually hold ourselves accountable?” Now, she and LWT are building Include.io, a digital tool that aims to do precisely that.

Before Pittsford dreamed up her organization, she had been analyzing data and building online fundraising tools for a group opposing Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry. She says she was shocked to discover that the people funding the LGBTQ movement were majority white cisgender men, a term that refers to men who identify with the gender with which they were born. “It was a clear wake-up call for me. The people who would benefit from the movement weren’t funding it. Even the women with the money weren’t spending it,” she said.

Simultaneously, she realized that tech events for the queer community in and around San Francisco always seemed to be 90 percent male. “There’s nothing for us,” she said. No cohesive community, no gathering, no movement, no money spending–even for those women who identified as queer in lucrative Silicon Valley jobs. She wondered: could someone or something change that? Could she change that?

Finding a Purpose, and an Audience

Pittsford grew up in a conservative military family in San Diego, and in the early 2000s was living in San Francisco with her brother. As adults, they still struggled with having been taught as kids that all gay people were going to hell. With support from her brother, and working for a pro-LGBTQ human rights organization, Pittsford became more comfortable with her sexuality. Then, one Tuesday morning in 2010 she arrived home to discover that her brother–the only supportive person in her life–had died in his sleep of cardiomyopathy. “My heart was just broken,” she says. “It gave me a sense that I should take risks, give back and do something larger than myself.”

Pittsford’s grief was heavy that year, in which she left her comfortable job doing policy work at Equity California. “I was close to [starting my own venture], but that moment really sped it up for me,” she said. She started working independently, doing data work, and building websites and tools for other businesses.

In the evenings, she subverted her introversion and began networking, and throwing small happy hours for queer women. In 2014 she decided to host what she dubbed a “Summit” for her burgeoning organization, Lesbians Who Tech. It was to be part networking with like-minded people, part technology conference, and part social-justice rally. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Because lesbians never show up, they never go out.” 

Megan Smith, a vice president at Google who would soon be tapped to be the chief technology officer of the United States by President Barack Obama, walked in the door at 7 a.m. Next, Smith’s then-partner Kara Swisher walked in. Eight hundred people bought tickets–and a few big companies sponsored it. Pittsford was floored: “It was the first time I thought it could be a real thing.”

Over the past six years, the conferences have gained a cult following among queer technologists and executives. LaFawn Davis, the head of inclusion and culture at Twilio, has attended multiple LWT conferences, and adores them so much she jokes they are “lesbian Disneyland.” For her, the long weekends are a chance to immerse herself in a community that is still rare in the tech world. “I get to be surrounded by queer executives! Queer engineers! Imagine!” And over the years she’s also built a network and found job candidates through it.

The Lesbians Who Tech parent organization, though, is an unusual enterprise: it’s part 501(c)(3) and part LLC; a community organization that offers substantial coding scholarships to women, and a mission-driven media business that puts on conferences. 

By 2017, Pittsford realized she needed to solve LWT’s messy structural issue. The organization would need real profits to grow, and to give its now-massive network significant value outside of the conferences. “I came from the nonprofit space, and it’s not the most scalable path,” she said.

Holding Tech Accountable

Aside from ticket sales, the conferences generated revenue through sponsors such as Google, Amazon, and Slack, who also would send speakers and attendees to the events. LWT became a natural recruiting tool for them–but it was totally informal. Once executives at these companies started asking Pittsford how they could improve their diversity hiring and retention and track it, she saw the future of her business before her eyes.

LWT could offer a hiring platform featuring its members, which the organization describes as mid-level and executive LGBTQ women, non-binary, and trans techies–many of whom are also people of color–as well as their allies. The platform could help companies track their ongoing progress in diversity hiring. Pittsford envisioned Include.io, which has 10,000 beta users, as a way to “scale access to direct referrals” from a different pool of talent than the existing employees at large tech companies.

“We are trying to find a way to get referrals to, say, the talented self-taught female programmer in New Orleans who might not know anyone in San Francisco,” Pittsford said. 

“Things like unconscious bias training aren’t working,” she added. “You have to fight it every day–with intention–and this product lets companies do that.”

Include.io has been in beta since June of 2018, and Pittsford says 200 companies have signed up to use it once it’s live later this year. But she has some structural work to do before launch. The company’s Oakland office hasn’t attracted or retained enough tech talent itself to scale Include.io, so she’s setting up a development team in New York, hoping to add three to five more people to the scrappy staff of nine. She says San Francisco is the “Wild West of talent poaching,” where small organizations can’t compete for developers who can command salaries approaching $200,000.

“This has been the hardest year of my professional life,” she said. She’s running a mission-driven organization at the speed of a startup, trying to figure out how fast it can grow and scale without burning out her team–or herself.

Being part of the solution to tech’s diversity problem, however, is what keeps her going every day. Pittsford says she hopes once Include.io is out to the public, it will make executives more comfortable about their own abilities to recruit, hire, and maintain a diverse workforce.

“I still would love to see a CEO say, ‘we are going to be 30 percent black and Latinx by X year,'” she said. “We really feel like something has got to change. Something has got to give.”

[hostingnewsfeed]

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

New Post has been published on http://web-hosting-top12.com/2019/04/05/more-than-150-companies-are-hoping-this-woman-can-fix-their-diversity-problems/

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

For three days in February, 6,000 of people coursed in and out of the Castro Theater, a 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. They came to hear from Laurene Powell Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, and leaders from Amazon and Uber. They came to network. And a pithy marquee on the theater summed up their unifying mission: “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.”

The sixth-annual Lesbians Who Tech + Allies Summit was the largest LGBTQ event in the world. The attendees were roughly 80 percent queer women–but sexuality was just one element of diversity. Of those who spoke on stage, half were women of color, 30 percent were black or Latinx, and 15 percent transgender or gender non-conforming. 

“We are 100 percent about providing value to queer women. We just don’t have this type of community anywhere else in the world,” said Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech. “That we can do this and be visible and also host a damn good tech conference–that inspires people.”

The Summit is not only a place where leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton fly in to speak, but also the physical gathering of just a fraction of the 50,000 members of the parent organization, Lesbians Who Tech, a social enterprise that Pittsford founded in 2013 and which has grown to 42 cities. In 2019, the organization is entering an inflection point, as what was once a conference-media business with a charitable arm aims to become a scalable technology company. “We already work with more than 150 companies looking to retain or recruit diverse talent,” Pittsford said. “Our partners were asking: How do we track hires? How do we actually hold ourselves accountable?” Now, she and LWT are building Include.io, a digital tool that aims to do precisely that.

Before Pittsford dreamed up her organization, she had been analyzing data and building online fundraising tools for a group opposing Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry. She says she was shocked to discover that the people funding the LGBTQ movement were majority white cisgender men, a term that refers to men who identify with the gender with which they were born. “It was a clear wake-up call for me. The people who would benefit from the movement weren’t funding it. Even the women with the money weren’t spending it,” she said.

Simultaneously, she realized that tech events for the queer community in and around San Francisco always seemed to be 90 percent male. “There’s nothing for us,” she said. No cohesive community, no gathering, no movement, no money spending–even for those women who identified as queer in lucrative Silicon Valley jobs. She wondered: could someone or something change that? Could she change that?

Finding a Purpose, and an Audience

Pittsford grew up in a conservative military family in San Diego, and in the early 2000s was living in San Francisco with her brother. As adults, they still struggled with having been taught as kids that all gay people were going to hell. With support from her brother, and working for a pro-LGBTQ human rights organization, Pittsford became more comfortable with her sexuality. Then, one Tuesday morning in 2010 she arrived home to discover that her brother–the only supportive person in her life–had died in his sleep of cardiomyopathy. “My heart was just broken,” she says. “It gave me a sense that I should take risks, give back and do something larger than myself.”

Pittsford’s grief was heavy that year, in which she left her comfortable job doing policy work at Equity California. “I was close to [starting my own venture], but that moment really sped it up for me,” she said. She started working independently, doing data work, and building websites and tools for other businesses.

In the evenings, she subverted her introversion and began networking, and throwing small happy hours for queer women. In 2014 she decided to host what she dubbed a “Summit” for her burgeoning organization, Lesbians Who Tech. It was to be part networking with like-minded people, part technology conference, and part social-justice rally. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Because lesbians never show up, they never go out.” 

Megan Smith, a vice president at Google who would soon be tapped to be the chief technology officer of the United States by President Barack Obama, walked in the door at 7 a.m. Next, Smith’s then-partner Kara Swisher walked in. Eight hundred people bought tickets–and a few big companies sponsored it. Pittsford was floored: “It was the first time I thought it could be a real thing.”

Over the past six years, the conferences have gained a cult following among queer technologists and executives. LaFawn Davis, the head of inclusion and culture at Twilio, has attended multiple LWT conferences, and adores them so much she jokes they are “lesbian Disneyland.” For her, the long weekends are a chance to immerse herself in a community that is still rare in the tech world. “I get to be surrounded by queer executives! Queer engineers! Imagine!” And over the years she’s also built a network and found job candidates through it.

The Lesbians Who Tech parent organization, though, is an unusual enterprise: it’s part 501(c)(3) and part LLC; a community organization that offers substantial coding scholarships to women, and a mission-driven media business that puts on conferences. 

By 2017, Pittsford realized she needed to solve LWT’s messy structural issue. The organization would need real profits to grow, and to give its now-massive network significant value outside of the conferences. “I came from the nonprofit space, and it’s not the most scalable path,” she said.

Holding Tech Accountable

Aside from ticket sales, the conferences generated revenue through sponsors such as Google, Amazon, and Slack, who also would send speakers and attendees to the events. LWT became a natural recruiting tool for them–but it was totally informal. Once executives at these companies started asking Pittsford how they could improve their diversity hiring and retention and track it, she saw the future of her business before her eyes.

LWT could offer a hiring platform featuring its members, which the organization describes as mid-level and executive LGBTQ women, non-binary, and trans techies–many of whom are also people of color–as well as their allies. The platform could help companies track their ongoing progress in diversity hiring. Pittsford envisioned Include.io, which has 10,000 beta users, as a way to “scale access to direct referrals” from a different pool of talent than the existing employees at large tech companies.

“We are trying to find a way to get referrals to, say, the talented self-taught female programmer in New Orleans who might not know anyone in San Francisco,” Pittsford said. 

“Things like unconscious bias training aren’t working,” she added. “You have to fight it every day–with intention–and this product lets companies do that.”

Include.io has been in beta since June of 2018, and Pittsford says 200 companies have signed up to use it once it’s live later this year. But she has some structural work to do before launch. The company’s Oakland office hasn’t attracted or retained enough tech talent itself to scale Include.io, so she’s setting up a development team in New York, hoping to add three to five more people to the scrappy staff of nine. She says San Francisco is the “Wild West of talent poaching,” where small organizations can’t compete for developers who can command salaries approaching $200,000.

“This has been the hardest year of my professional life,” she said. She’s running a mission-driven organization at the speed of a startup, trying to figure out how fast it can grow and scale without burning out her team–or herself.

Being part of the solution to tech’s diversity problem, however, is what keeps her going every day. Pittsford says she hopes once Include.io is out to the public, it will make executives more comfortable about their own abilities to recruit, hire, and maintain a diverse workforce.

“I still would love to see a CEO say, ‘we are going to be 30 percent black and Latinx by X year,'” she said. “We really feel like something has got to change. Something has got to give.”

[awesomecolorfulcollectorwombat]

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

New Post has been published on http://web-hosting-top12.com/2019/04/05/more-than-150-companies-are-hoping-this-woman-can-fix-their-diversity-problems/

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

For three days in February, 6,000 of people coursed in and out of the Castro Theater, a 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. They came to hear from Laurene Powell Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, and leaders from Amazon and Uber. They came to network. And a pithy marquee on the theater summed up their unifying mission: “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.”

The sixth-annual Lesbians Who Tech + Allies Summit was the largest LGBTQ event in the world. The attendees were roughly 80 percent queer women–but sexuality was just one element of diversity. Of those who spoke on stage, half were women of color, 30 percent were black or Latinx, and 15 percent transgender or gender non-conforming. 

“We are 100 percent about providing value to queer women. We just don’t have this type of community anywhere else in the world,” said Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech. “That we can do this and be visible and also host a damn good tech conference–that inspires people.”

The Summit is not only a place where leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton fly in to speak, but also the physical gathering of just a fraction of the 50,000 members of the parent organization, Lesbians Who Tech, a social enterprise that Pittsford founded in 2013 and which has grown to 42 cities. In 2019, the organization is entering an inflection point, as what was once a conference-media business with a charitable arm aims to become a scalable technology company. “We already work with more than 150 companies looking to retain or recruit diverse talent,” Pittsford said. “Our partners were asking: How do we track hires? How do we actually hold ourselves accountable?” Now, she and LWT are building Include.io, a digital tool that aims to do precisely that.

Before Pittsford dreamed up her organization, she had been analyzing data and building online fundraising tools for a group opposing Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry. She says she was shocked to discover that the people funding the LGBTQ movement were majority white cisgender men, a term that refers to men who identify with the gender with which they were born. “It was a clear wake-up call for me. The people who would benefit from the movement weren’t funding it. Even the women with the money weren’t spending it,” she said.

Simultaneously, she realized that tech events for the queer community in and around San Francisco always seemed to be 90 percent male. “There’s nothing for us,” she said. No cohesive community, no gathering, no movement, no money spending–even for those women who identified as queer in lucrative Silicon Valley jobs. She wondered: could someone or something change that? Could she change that?

Finding a Purpose, and an Audience

Pittsford grew up in a conservative military family in San Diego, and in the early 2000s was living in San Francisco with her brother. As adults, they still struggled with having been taught as kids that all gay people were going to hell. With support from her brother, and working for a pro-LGBTQ human rights organization, Pittsford became more comfortable with her sexuality. Then, one Tuesday morning in 2010 she arrived home to discover that her brother–the only supportive person in her life–had died in his sleep of cardiomyopathy. “My heart was just broken,” she says. “It gave me a sense that I should take risks, give back and do something larger than myself.”

Pittsford’s grief was heavy that year, in which she left her comfortable job doing policy work at Equity California. “I was close to [starting my own venture], but that moment really sped it up for me,” she said. She started working independently, doing data work, and building websites and tools for other businesses.

In the evenings, she subverted her introversion and began networking, and throwing small happy hours for queer women. In 2014 she decided to host what she dubbed a “Summit” for her burgeoning organization, Lesbians Who Tech. It was to be part networking with like-minded people, part technology conference, and part social-justice rally. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Because lesbians never show up, they never go out.” 

Megan Smith, a vice president at Google who would soon be tapped to be the chief technology officer of the United States by President Barack Obama, walked in the door at 7 a.m. Next, Smith’s then-partner Kara Swisher walked in. Eight hundred people bought tickets–and a few big companies sponsored it. Pittsford was floored: “It was the first time I thought it could be a real thing.”

Over the past six years, the conferences have gained a cult following among queer technologists and executives. LaFawn Davis, the head of inclusion and culture at Twilio, has attended multiple LWT conferences, and adores them so much she jokes they are “lesbian Disneyland.” For her, the long weekends are a chance to immerse herself in a community that is still rare in the tech world. “I get to be surrounded by queer executives! Queer engineers! Imagine!” And over the years she’s also built a network and found job candidates through it.

The Lesbians Who Tech parent organization, though, is an unusual enterprise: it’s part 501(c)(3) and part LLC; a community organization that offers substantial coding scholarships to women, and a mission-driven media business that puts on conferences. 

By 2017, Pittsford realized she needed to solve LWT’s messy structural issue. The organization would need real profits to grow, and to give its now-massive network significant value outside of the conferences. “I came from the nonprofit space, and it’s not the most scalable path,” she said.

Holding Tech Accountable

Aside from ticket sales, the conferences generated revenue through sponsors such as Google, Amazon, and Slack, who also would send speakers and attendees to the events. LWT became a natural recruiting tool for them–but it was totally informal. Once executives at these companies started asking Pittsford how they could improve their diversity hiring and retention and track it, she saw the future of her business before her eyes.

LWT could offer a hiring platform featuring its members, which the organization describes as mid-level and executive LGBTQ women, non-binary, and trans techies–many of whom are also people of color–as well as their allies. The platform could help companies track their ongoing progress in diversity hiring. Pittsford envisioned Include.io, which has 10,000 beta users, as a way to “scale access to direct referrals” from a different pool of talent than the existing employees at large tech companies.

“We are trying to find a way to get referrals to, say, the talented self-taught female programmer in New Orleans who might not know anyone in San Francisco,” Pittsford said. 

“Things like unconscious bias training aren’t working,” she added. “You have to fight it every day–with intention–and this product lets companies do that.”

Include.io has been in beta since June of 2018, and Pittsford says 200 companies have signed up to use it once it’s live later this year. But she has some structural work to do before launch. The company’s Oakland office hasn’t attracted or retained enough tech talent itself to scale Include.io, so she’s setting up a development team in New York, hoping to add three to five more people to the scrappy staff of nine. She says San Francisco is the “Wild West of talent poaching,” where small organizations can’t compete for developers who can command salaries approaching $200,000.

“This has been the hardest year of my professional life,” she said. She’s running a mission-driven organization at the speed of a startup, trying to figure out how fast it can grow and scale without burning out her team–or herself.

Being part of the solution to tech’s diversity problem, however, is what keeps her going every day. Pittsford says she hopes once Include.io is out to the public, it will make executives more comfortable about their own abilities to recruit, hire, and maintain a diverse workforce.

“I still would love to see a CEO say, ‘we are going to be 30 percent black and Latinx by X year,'” she said. “We really feel like something has got to change. Something has got to give.”

[smartwebhostingblog]

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

New Post has been published on http://unchainedmusic.com/more-than-150-companies-are-hoping-this-woman-can-fix-their-diversity-problems/

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

For three days in February, 6,000 of people coursed in and out of the Castro Theater, a 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. They came to hear from Laurene Powell Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, and leaders from Amazon and Uber. They came to network. And a pithy marquee on the theater summed up their unifying mission: “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.”

The sixth-annual Lesbians Who Tech + Allies Summit was the largest LGBTQ event in the world. The attendees were roughly 80 percent queer women–but sexuality was just one element of diversity. Of those who spoke on stage, half were women of color, 30 percent were black or Latinx, and 15 percent transgender or gender non-conforming. 

“We are 100 percent about providing value to queer women. We just don’t have this type of community anywhere else in the world,” said Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech. “That we can do this and be visible and also host a damn good tech conference–that inspires people.”

The Summit is not only a place where leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton fly in to speak, but also the physical gathering of just a fraction of the 50,000 members of the parent organization, Lesbians Who Tech, a social enterprise that Pittsford founded in 2013 and which has grown to 42 cities. In 2019, the organization is entering an inflection point, as what was once a conference-media business with a charitable arm aims to become a scalable technology company. “We already work with more than 150 companies looking to retain or recruit diverse talent,” Pittsford said. “Our partners were asking: How do we track hires? How do we actually hold ourselves accountable?” Now, she and LWT are building Include.io, a digital tool that aims to do precisely that.

Before Pittsford dreamed up her organization, she had been analyzing data and building online fundraising tools for a group opposing Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry. She says she was shocked to discover that the people funding the LGBTQ movement were majority white cisgender men, a term that refers to men who identify with the gender with which they were born. “It was a clear wake-up call for me. The people who would benefit from the movement weren’t funding it. Even the women with the money weren’t spending it,” she said.

Simultaneously, she realized that tech events for the queer community in and around San Francisco always seemed to be 90 percent male. “There’s nothing for us,” she said. No cohesive community, no gathering, no movement, no money spending–even for those women who identified as queer in lucrative Silicon Valley jobs. She wondered: could someone or something change that? Could she change that?

Finding a Purpose, and an Audience

Pittsford grew up in a conservative military family in San Diego, and in the early 2000s was living in San Francisco with her brother. As adults, they still struggled with having been taught as kids that all gay people were going to hell. With support from her brother, and working for a pro-LGBTQ human rights organization, Pittsford became more comfortable with her sexuality. Then, one Tuesday morning in 2010 she arrived home to discover that her brother–the only supportive person in her life–had died in his sleep of cardiomyopathy. “My heart was just broken,” she says. “It gave me a sense that I should take risks, give back and do something larger than myself.”

Pittsford’s grief was heavy that year, in which she left her comfortable job doing policy work at Equity California. “I was close to [starting my own venture], but that moment really sped it up for me,” she said. She started working independently, doing data work, and building websites and tools for other businesses.

In the evenings, she subverted her introversion and began networking, and throwing small happy hours for queer women. In 2014 she decided to host what she dubbed a “Summit” for her burgeoning organization, Lesbians Who Tech. It was to be part networking with like-minded people, part technology conference, and part social-justice rally. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Because lesbians never show up, they never go out.” 

Megan Smith, a vice president at Google who would soon be tapped to be the chief technology officer of the United States by President Barack Obama, walked in the door at 7 a.m. Next, Smith’s then-partner Kara Swisher walked in. Eight hundred people bought tickets–and a few big companies sponsored it. Pittsford was floored: “It was the first time I thought it could be a real thing.”

Over the past six years, the conferences have gained a cult following among queer technologists and executives. LaFawn Davis, the head of inclusion and culture at Twilio, has attended multiple LWT conferences, and adores them so much she jokes they are “lesbian Disneyland.” For her, the long weekends are a chance to immerse herself in a community that is still rare in the tech world. “I get to be surrounded by queer executives! Queer engineers! Imagine!” And over the years she’s also built a network and found job candidates through it.

The Lesbians Who Tech parent organization, though, is an unusual enterprise: it’s part 501(c)(3) and part LLC; a community organization that offers substantial coding scholarships to women, and a mission-driven media business that puts on conferences. 

By 2017, Pittsford realized she needed to solve LWT’s messy structural issue. The organization would need real profits to grow, and to give its now-massive network significant value outside of the conferences. “I came from the nonprofit space, and it’s not the most scalable path,” she said.

Holding Tech Accountable

Aside from ticket sales, the conferences generated revenue through sponsors such as Google, Amazon, and Slack, who also would send speakers and attendees to the events. LWT became a natural recruiting tool for them–but it was totally informal. Once executives at these companies started asking Pittsford how they could improve their diversity hiring and retention and track it, she saw the future of her business before her eyes.

LWT could offer a hiring platform featuring its members, which the organization describes as mid-level and executive LGBTQ women, non-binary, and trans techies–many of whom are also people of color–as well as their allies. The platform could help companies track their ongoing progress in diversity hiring. Pittsford envisioned Include.io, which has 10,000 beta users, as a way to “scale access to direct referrals” from a different pool of talent than the existing employees at large tech companies.

“We are trying to find a way to get referrals to, say, the talented self-taught female programmer in New Orleans who might not know anyone in San Francisco,” Pittsford said. 

“Things like unconscious bias training aren’t working,” she added. “You have to fight it every day–with intention–and this product lets companies do that.”

Include.io has been in beta since June of 2018, and Pittsford says 200 companies have signed up to use it once it’s live later this year. But she has some structural work to do before launch. The company’s Oakland office hasn’t attracted or retained enough tech talent itself to scale Include.io, so she’s setting up a development team in New York, hoping to add three to five more people to the scrappy staff of nine. She says San Francisco is the “Wild West of talent poaching,” where small organizations can’t compete for developers who can command salaries approaching $200,000.

“This has been the hardest year of my professional life,” she said. She’s running a mission-driven organization at the speed of a startup, trying to figure out how fast it can grow and scale without burning out her team–or herself.

Being part of the solution to tech’s diversity problem, however, is what keeps her going every day. Pittsford says she hopes once Include.io is out to the public, it will make executives more comfortable about their own abilities to recruit, hire, and maintain a diverse workforce.

“I still would love to see a CEO say, ‘we are going to be 30 percent black and Latinx by X year,'” she said. “We really feel like something has got to change. Something has got to give.”

[awesomecolorfulcollectorwombat]

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

New Post has been published on http://unchainedmusic.com/more-than-150-companies-are-hoping-this-woman-can-fix-their-diversity-problems/

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

For three days in February, 6,000 of people coursed in and out of the Castro Theater, a 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. They came to hear from Laurene Powell Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, and leaders from Amazon and Uber. They came to network. And a pithy marquee on the theater summed up their unifying mission: “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.”

The sixth-annual Lesbians Who Tech + Allies Summit was the largest LGBTQ event in the world. The attendees were roughly 80 percent queer women–but sexuality was just one element of diversity. Of those who spoke on stage, half were women of color, 30 percent were black or Latinx, and 15 percent transgender or gender non-conforming. 

“We are 100 percent about providing value to queer women. We just don’t have this type of community anywhere else in the world,” said Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech. “That we can do this and be visible and also host a damn good tech conference–that inspires people.”

The Summit is not only a place where leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton fly in to speak, but also the physical gathering of just a fraction of the 50,000 members of the parent organization, Lesbians Who Tech, a social enterprise that Pittsford founded in 2013 and which has grown to 42 cities. In 2019, the organization is entering an inflection point, as what was once a conference-media business with a charitable arm aims to become a scalable technology company. “We already work with more than 150 companies looking to retain or recruit diverse talent,” Pittsford said. “Our partners were asking: How do we track hires? How do we actually hold ourselves accountable?” Now, she and LWT are building Include.io, a digital tool that aims to do precisely that.

Before Pittsford dreamed up her organization, she had been analyzing data and building online fundraising tools for a group opposing Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry. She says she was shocked to discover that the people funding the LGBTQ movement were majority white cisgender men, a term that refers to men who identify with the gender with which they were born. “It was a clear wake-up call for me. The people who would benefit from the movement weren’t funding it. Even the women with the money weren’t spending it,” she said.

Simultaneously, she realized that tech events for the queer community in and around San Francisco always seemed to be 90 percent male. “There’s nothing for us,” she said. No cohesive community, no gathering, no movement, no money spending–even for those women who identified as queer in lucrative Silicon Valley jobs. She wondered: could someone or something change that? Could she change that?

Finding a Purpose, and an Audience

Pittsford grew up in a conservative military family in San Diego, and in the early 2000s was living in San Francisco with her brother. As adults, they still struggled with having been taught as kids that all gay people were going to hell. With support from her brother, and working for a pro-LGBTQ human rights organization, Pittsford became more comfortable with her sexuality. Then, one Tuesday morning in 2010 she arrived home to discover that her brother–the only supportive person in her life–had died in his sleep of cardiomyopathy. “My heart was just broken,” she says. “It gave me a sense that I should take risks, give back and do something larger than myself.”

Pittsford’s grief was heavy that year, in which she left her comfortable job doing policy work at Equity California. “I was close to [starting my own venture], but that moment really sped it up for me,” she said. She started working independently, doing data work, and building websites and tools for other businesses.

In the evenings, she subverted her introversion and began networking, and throwing small happy hours for queer women. In 2014 she decided to host what she dubbed a “Summit” for her burgeoning organization, Lesbians Who Tech. It was to be part networking with like-minded people, part technology conference, and part social-justice rally. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Because lesbians never show up, they never go out.” 

Megan Smith, a vice president at Google who would soon be tapped to be the chief technology officer of the United States by President Barack Obama, walked in the door at 7 a.m. Next, Smith’s then-partner Kara Swisher walked in. Eight hundred people bought tickets–and a few big companies sponsored it. Pittsford was floored: “It was the first time I thought it could be a real thing.”

Over the past six years, the conferences have gained a cult following among queer technologists and executives. LaFawn Davis, the head of inclusion and culture at Twilio, has attended multiple LWT conferences, and adores them so much she jokes they are “lesbian Disneyland.” For her, the long weekends are a chance to immerse herself in a community that is still rare in the tech world. “I get to be surrounded by queer executives! Queer engineers! Imagine!” And over the years she’s also built a network and found job candidates through it.

The Lesbians Who Tech parent organization, though, is an unusual enterprise: it’s part 501(c)(3) and part LLC; a community organization that offers substantial coding scholarships to women, and a mission-driven media business that puts on conferences. 

By 2017, Pittsford realized she needed to solve LWT’s messy structural issue. The organization would need real profits to grow, and to give its now-massive network significant value outside of the conferences. “I came from the nonprofit space, and it’s not the most scalable path,” she said.

Holding Tech Accountable

Aside from ticket sales, the conferences generated revenue through sponsors such as Google, Amazon, and Slack, who also would send speakers and attendees to the events. LWT became a natural recruiting tool for them–but it was totally informal. Once executives at these companies started asking Pittsford how they could improve their diversity hiring and retention and track it, she saw the future of her business before her eyes.

LWT could offer a hiring platform featuring its members, which the organization describes as mid-level and executive LGBTQ women, non-binary, and trans techies–many of whom are also people of color–as well as their allies. The platform could help companies track their ongoing progress in diversity hiring. Pittsford envisioned Include.io, which has 10,000 beta users, as a way to “scale access to direct referrals” from a different pool of talent than the existing employees at large tech companies.

“We are trying to find a way to get referrals to, say, the talented self-taught female programmer in New Orleans who might not know anyone in San Francisco,” Pittsford said. 

“Things like unconscious bias training aren’t working,” she added. “You have to fight it every day–with intention–and this product lets companies do that.”

Include.io has been in beta since June of 2018, and Pittsford says 200 companies have signed up to use it once it’s live later this year. But she has some structural work to do before launch. The company’s Oakland office hasn’t attracted or retained enough tech talent itself to scale Include.io, so she’s setting up a development team in New York, hoping to add three to five more people to the scrappy staff of nine. She says San Francisco is the “Wild West of talent poaching,” where small organizations can’t compete for developers who can command salaries approaching $200,000.

“This has been the hardest year of my professional life,” she said. She’s running a mission-driven organization at the speed of a startup, trying to figure out how fast it can grow and scale without burning out her team–or herself.

Being part of the solution to tech’s diversity problem, however, is what keeps her going every day. Pittsford says she hopes once Include.io is out to the public, it will make executives more comfortable about their own abilities to recruit, hire, and maintain a diverse workforce.

“I still would love to see a CEO say, ‘we are going to be 30 percent black and Latinx by X year,'” she said. “We really feel like something has got to change. Something has got to give.”

[lazilysillyprince]

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

New Post has been published on http://unchainedmusic.com/more-than-150-companies-are-hoping-this-woman-can-fix-their-diversity-problems/

More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

For three days in February, 6,000 of people coursed in and out of the Castro Theater, a 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. They came to hear from Laurene Powell Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, and leaders from Amazon and Uber. They came to network. And a pithy marquee on the theater summed up their unifying mission: “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.”

The sixth-annual Lesbians Who Tech + Allies Summit was the largest LGBTQ event in the world. The attendees were roughly 80 percent queer women–but sexuality was just one element of diversity. Of those who spoke on stage, half were women of color, 30 percent were black or Latinx, and 15 percent transgender or gender non-conforming. 

“We are 100 percent about providing value to queer women. We just don’t have this type of community anywhere else in the world,” said Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech. “That we can do this and be visible and also host a damn good tech conference–that inspires people.”

The Summit is not only a place where leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton fly in to speak, but also the physical gathering of just a fraction of the 50,000 members of the parent organization, Lesbians Who Tech, a social enterprise that Pittsford founded in 2013 and which has grown to 42 cities. In 2019, the organization is entering an inflection point, as what was once a conference-media business with a charitable arm aims to become a scalable technology company. “We already work with more than 150 companies looking to retain or recruit diverse talent,” Pittsford said. “Our partners were asking: How do we track hires? How do we actually hold ourselves accountable?” Now, she and LWT are building Include.io, a digital tool that aims to do precisely that.

Before Pittsford dreamed up her organization, she had been analyzing data and building online fundraising tools for a group opposing Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry. She says she was shocked to discover that the people funding the LGBTQ movement were majority white cisgender men, a term that refers to men who identify with the gender with which they were born. “It was a clear wake-up call for me. The people who would benefit from the movement weren’t funding it. Even the women with the money weren’t spending it,” she said.

Simultaneously, she realized that tech events for the queer community in and around San Francisco always seemed to be 90 percent male. “There’s nothing for us,” she said. No cohesive community, no gathering, no movement, no money spending–even for those women who identified as queer in lucrative Silicon Valley jobs. She wondered: could someone or something change that? Could she change that?

Finding a Purpose, and an Audience

Pittsford grew up in a conservative military family in San Diego, and in the early 2000s was living in San Francisco with her brother. As adults, they still struggled with having been taught as kids that all gay people were going to hell. With support from her brother, and working for a pro-LGBTQ human rights organization, Pittsford became more comfortable with her sexuality. Then, one Tuesday morning in 2010 she arrived home to discover that her brother–the only supportive person in her life–had died in his sleep of cardiomyopathy. “My heart was just broken,” she says. “It gave me a sense that I should take risks, give back and do something larger than myself.”

Pittsford’s grief was heavy that year, in which she left her comfortable job doing policy work at Equity California. “I was close to [starting my own venture], but that moment really sped it up for me,” she said. She started working independently, doing data work, and building websites and tools for other businesses.

In the evenings, she subverted her introversion and began networking, and throwing small happy hours for queer women. In 2014 she decided to host what she dubbed a “Summit” for her burgeoning organization, Lesbians Who Tech. It was to be part networking with like-minded people, part technology conference, and part social-justice rally. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Because lesbians never show up, they never go out.” 

Megan Smith, a vice president at Google who would soon be tapped to be the chief technology officer of the United States by President Barack Obama, walked in the door at 7 a.m. Next, Smith’s then-partner Kara Swisher walked in. Eight hundred people bought tickets–and a few big companies sponsored it. Pittsford was floored: “It was the first time I thought it could be a real thing.”

Over the past six years, the conferences have gained a cult following among queer technologists and executives. LaFawn Davis, the head of inclusion and culture at Twilio, has attended multiple LWT conferences, and adores them so much she jokes they are “lesbian Disneyland.” For her, the long weekends are a chance to immerse herself in a community that is still rare in the tech world. “I get to be surrounded by queer executives! Queer engineers! Imagine!” And over the years she’s also built a network and found job candidates through it.

The Lesbians Who Tech parent organization, though, is an unusual enterprise: it’s part 501(c)(3) and part LLC; a community organization that offers substantial coding scholarships to women, and a mission-driven media business that puts on conferences. 

By 2017, Pittsford realized she needed to solve LWT’s messy structural issue. The organization would need real profits to grow, and to give its now-massive network significant value outside of the conferences. “I came from the nonprofit space, and it’s not the most scalable path,” she said.

Holding Tech Accountable

Aside from ticket sales, the conferences generated revenue through sponsors such as Google, Amazon, and Slack, who also would send speakers and attendees to the events. LWT became a natural recruiting tool for them–but it was totally informal. Once executives at these companies started asking Pittsford how they could improve their diversity hiring and retention and track it, she saw the future of her business before her eyes.

LWT could offer a hiring platform featuring its members, which the organization describes as mid-level and executive LGBTQ women, non-binary, and trans techies–many of whom are also people of color–as well as their allies. The platform could help companies track their ongoing progress in diversity hiring. Pittsford envisioned Include.io, which has 10,000 beta users, as a way to “scale access to direct referrals” from a different pool of talent than the existing employees at large tech companies.

“We are trying to find a way to get referrals to, say, the talented self-taught female programmer in New Orleans who might not know anyone in San Francisco,” Pittsford said. 

“Things like unconscious bias training aren’t working,” she added. “You have to fight it every day–with intention–and this product lets companies do that.”

Include.io has been in beta since June of 2018, and Pittsford says 200 companies have signed up to use it once it’s live later this year. But she has some structural work to do before launch. The company’s Oakland office hasn’t attracted or retained enough tech talent itself to scale Include.io, so she’s setting up a development team in New York, hoping to add three to five more people to the scrappy staff of nine. She says San Francisco is the “Wild West of talent poaching,” where small organizations can’t compete for developers who can command salaries approaching $200,000.

“This has been the hardest year of my professional life,” she said. She’s running a mission-driven organization at the speed of a startup, trying to figure out how fast it can grow and scale without burning out her team–or herself.

Being part of the solution to tech’s diversity problem, however, is what keeps her going every day. Pittsford says she hopes once Include.io is out to the public, it will make executives more comfortable about their own abilities to recruit, hire, and maintain a diverse workforce.

“I still would love to see a CEO say, ‘we are going to be 30 percent black and Latinx by X year,'” she said. “We really feel like something has got to change. Something has got to give.”

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More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

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More Than 150 Companies Are Hoping This Woman Can Fix Their Diversity Problems

For three days in February, 6,000 of people coursed in and out of the Castro Theater, a 1920s movie palace in San Francisco. They came to hear from Laurene Powell Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, and leaders from Amazon and Uber. They came to network. And a pithy marquee on the theater summed up their unifying mission: “Queer. Inclusive. Badass.”

The sixth-annual Lesbians Who Tech + Allies Summit was the largest LGBTQ event in the world. The attendees were roughly 80 percent queer women–but sexuality was just one element of diversity. Of those who spoke on stage, half were women of color, 30 percent were black or Latinx, and 15 percent transgender or gender non-conforming. 

“We are 100 percent about providing value to queer women. We just don’t have this type of community anywhere else in the world,” said Leanne Pittsford, the founder of Lesbians Who Tech. “That we can do this and be visible and also host a damn good tech conference–that inspires people.”

The Summit is not only a place where leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton fly in to speak, but also the physical gathering of just a fraction of the 50,000 members of the parent organization, Lesbians Who Tech, a social enterprise that Pittsford founded in 2013 and which has grown to 42 cities. In 2019, the organization is entering an inflection point, as what was once a conference-media business with a charitable arm aims to become a scalable technology company. “We already work with more than 150 companies looking to retain or recruit diverse talent,” Pittsford said. “Our partners were asking: How do we track hires? How do we actually hold ourselves accountable?” Now, she and LWT are building Include.io, a digital tool that aims to do precisely that.

Before Pittsford dreamed up her organization, she had been analyzing data and building online fundraising tools for a group opposing Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that would have eliminated rights of same-sex couples to marry. She says she was shocked to discover that the people funding the LGBTQ movement were majority white cisgender men, a term that refers to men who identify with the gender with which they were born. “It was a clear wake-up call for me. The people who would benefit from the movement weren’t funding it. Even the women with the money weren’t spending it,” she said.

Simultaneously, she realized that tech events for the queer community in and around San Francisco always seemed to be 90 percent male. “There’s nothing for us,” she said. No cohesive community, no gathering, no movement, no money spending–even for those women who identified as queer in lucrative Silicon Valley jobs. She wondered: could someone or something change that? Could she change that?

Finding a Purpose, and an Audience

Pittsford grew up in a conservative military family in San Diego, and in the early 2000s was living in San Francisco with her brother. As adults, they still struggled with having been taught as kids that all gay people were going to hell. With support from her brother, and working for a pro-LGBTQ human rights organization, Pittsford became more comfortable with her sexuality. Then, one Tuesday morning in 2010 she arrived home to discover that her brother–the only supportive person in her life–had died in his sleep of cardiomyopathy. “My heart was just broken,” she says. “It gave me a sense that I should take risks, give back and do something larger than myself.”

Pittsford’s grief was heavy that year, in which she left her comfortable job doing policy work at Equity California. “I was close to [starting my own venture], but that moment really sped it up for me,” she said. She started working independently, doing data work, and building websites and tools for other businesses.

In the evenings, she subverted her introversion and began networking, and throwing small happy hours for queer women. In 2014 she decided to host what she dubbed a “Summit” for her burgeoning organization, Lesbians Who Tech. It was to be part networking with like-minded people, part technology conference, and part social-justice rally. “I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Because lesbians never show up, they never go out.” 

Megan Smith, a vice president at Google who would soon be tapped to be the chief technology officer of the United States by President Barack Obama, walked in the door at 7 a.m. Next, Smith’s then-partner Kara Swisher walked in. Eight hundred people bought tickets–and a few big companies sponsored it. Pittsford was floored: “It was the first time I thought it could be a real thing.”

Over the past six years, the conferences have gained a cult following among queer technologists and executives. LaFawn Davis, the head of inclusion and culture at Twilio, has attended multiple LWT conferences, and adores them so much she jokes they are “lesbian Disneyland.” For her, the long weekends are a chance to immerse herself in a community that is still rare in the tech world. “I get to be surrounded by queer executives! Queer engineers! Imagine!” And over the years she’s also built a network and found job candidates through it.

The Lesbians Who Tech parent organization, though, is an unusual enterprise: it’s part 501(c)(3) and part LLC; a community organization that offers substantial coding scholarships to women, and a mission-driven media business that puts on conferences. 

By 2017, Pittsford realized she needed to solve LWT’s messy structural issue. The organization would need real profits to grow, and to give its now-massive network significant value outside of the conferences. “I came from the nonprofit space, and it’s not the most scalable path,” she said.

Holding Tech Accountable

Aside from ticket sales, the conferences generated revenue through sponsors such as Google, Amazon, and Slack, who also would send speakers and attendees to the events. LWT became a natural recruiting tool for them–but it was totally informal. Once executives at these companies started asking Pittsford how they could improve their diversity hiring and retention and track it, she saw the future of her business before her eyes.

LWT could offer a hiring platform featuring its members, which the organization describes as mid-level and executive LGBTQ women, non-binary, and trans techies–many of whom are also people of color–as well as their allies. The platform could help companies track their ongoing progress in diversity hiring. Pittsford envisioned Include.io, which has 10,000 beta users, as a way to “scale access to direct referrals” from a different pool of talent than the existing employees at large tech companies.

“We are trying to find a way to get referrals to, say, the talented self-taught female programmer in New Orleans who might not know anyone in San Francisco,” Pittsford said. 

“Things like unconscious bias training aren’t working,” she added. “You have to fight it every day–with intention–and this product lets companies do that.”

Include.io has been in beta since June of 2018, and Pittsford says 200 companies have signed up to use it once it’s live later this year. But she has some structural work to do before launch. The company’s Oakland office hasn’t attracted or retained enough tech talent itself to scale Include.io, so she’s setting up a development team in New York, hoping to add three to five more people to the scrappy staff of nine. She says San Francisco is the “Wild West of talent poaching,” where small organizations can’t compete for developers who can command salaries approaching $200,000.

“This has been the hardest year of my professional life,” she said. She’s running a mission-driven organization at the speed of a startup, trying to figure out how fast it can grow and scale without burning out her team–or herself.

Being part of the solution to tech’s diversity problem, however, is what keeps her going every day. Pittsford says she hopes once Include.io is out to the public, it will make executives more comfortable about their own abilities to recruit, hire, and maintain a diverse workforce.

“I still would love to see a CEO say, ‘we are going to be 30 percent black and Latinx by X year,'” she said. “We really feel like something has got to change. Something has got to give.”