How to support women on your team
A few things we can do today to lift & support our female co-workers
Hey you,
I fucked up this week. I’ve had a necessary slap in my face.
As a female founder, I am familiar with the blockers women face in the business world:
implicit gender bias in fundraising (basically when evaluating female founders investors see more risks, when evaluating male founders, more opportunities)
ideas brought forward by women in tech get ignored more often
many more
And yet it happened, on my watch, that one of my female team members actually was experiencing some of these same issues in our team. As per usual, being aware of a problem is not enough, we actually have to work hard every day to solve it. And no matter how busy we are, lifting each other up has to stay on top of our agendas.
While there are measures we can take as a society, they often can feel like “big initiatives” that will take time to implement. So it’s easy to “forget” that there are small actions we can take every day to empower women around us.
Here are a few things that I put on my list to implement for weeks to come. And if I can, you can too!
💪 How to support women at work
my favorite take-away: help them claim their ‘I’ (instead of “we”), offer them your time to talk through their challenges, show emotions openly to help everyone on the team understand that emotions are a normal part of the process (helps reduce anxiety around “showing emotions”)
✅ What leaders must do to keep women in the workforce, according to Ritual founder Katerina Schneider
my favorite take-away: offer schedule flexibility, benefits around WFH & child care and normalize having kids in zoom calls
✊🏾 From Ally to Accomplice: How to Support Black Women at Work
my favorite take-away: openly talk about negotiation practices& salaries and be transparent on wages and salaries as much as you can
👯♂️ Good guys: How men can be allies to women at work
my favorite take-away: offer women more stretch assignments and push for policies that help women in the workplace: flex-time, parental leave, childcare arrangements
🎧 How this coder-gone-CEO is building a diverse tech company (Podcast with Jan Hase)
my favorite take-away: make gender parity and diversity an explicit goal for your business & don’t shy away from discussing so-called “taboos” openly (e.g. time off for period-pain-related symptoms etc.)
#SHAREYOURLEARNINGS
🤷🏻♀️ Do you agree with the ideas above?
💬 Let me know in the comments below!
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I am finding flexibility to be the best way for me to support my team.