Women in Motion
August 15, 2019
Lack of diversity and inclusion in the technology industry has been an issue for over a decade. Attitudes have changed, but progress is slow. Gender disparity, unequal pay, and homogenous workforces remain challenges.
As we grow our team here at TrueMotion, we want to build an environment that accelerates progress on these fronts. This is why we launched Women in Motion.
Women in Motion is a community formed for women by women at TrueMotion. We focus on opportunities for career advancement, skill development, and cross-company collaboration for women.
Since it began in March, the group has gone from ideation to implementation. We teamed up with Collective – a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy. They helped us make sure that the group we formed could have a meaningful, lasting impact that would be felt throughout the company.
Set goals
We kicked things off by learning more about each other, our backgrounds, our challenges, and our goals – like getting a sponsor in our field and having leadership roles. We discussed what we each wanted to get out of Women in Motion, such as female-focused training and mentorship opportunities. We covered potential topics like salary and promotion negotiation, imposter syndrome, and advocating for ourselves in the workplace. Collective invited a guest speaker, Meggie Palmer – founder of PepTalkHer – to spark an even deeper dialogue. She shared personal experiences about being a woman in the tech industry and gave us tips on how to handle certain uncomfortable situations.
Define a mission
We had a three-hour strategic planning session with Collective’s Founder and CEO, Kellie Wagner. She asked us to write our purpose statements, values, and goals for the group. We shared our work with each other and took fragments of our responses to create a purpose statement, set of values, and defined goals that were unique to us. Here’s the result:
Women in Motion will drive forward an equitable culture at TrueMotion through foundational values of diversity and inclusion. By raising awareness and fostering inclusive behavior, we make TrueMotion an empowering, balanced place to work.
Unifying experiences
While it’s still young, Women in Motion has already made an impact on the women at TrueMotion. We’ve had important conversations that have unified us, like experiences where we struggled to voice our opinions, or were treated as unequal. We have a Slack channel where we welcome new hires, share interesting articles, books, and ideas with each other to help us succeed in and out of the office.
Lasting change
But making lasting change is a long road. To start, we’re doing female-focused training sessions and one group event every quarter. In the future, we’ll host a company-wide training session on diversity and host public workshops at TrueMotion’s HQ. We’ll also be posting about our experience on the #WomenInMotion hashtag on LinkedIn.
We also want to hear from you! Tell us your stories about how you’ve improved diversity and inclusion on your teams.
