Looking to the future: Introducing EDITED Women

We’ve launched EDITED Women this month, a new employee resource group. And it has been a journey.

Inspired by the creation of EDITED’s first ERG, EDITED Black, we formed a planning committee using our hack days in October. The goal of the hack days was to focus on projects that could improve the working from home experience. It opened the opportunity to conceptualize EDITED Women and simultaneously formed the largest hack day group project at EDITED.

It took 6 months to get to launch. Between mission statements, charters and panel reviews to get through, we also needed to take the time to share our own individual journeys. During our first meeting, we shared experiences of how gender had shaped and affected each one of our careers. It was empowering to hear the strength of these amazing women. While EDITED has a predominantly female representation (67% of our team are women, with 71% in senior management), that one meeting gave us a safe space to have these types of discussions. From that day forward, we decided EDITED Women would first and foremost be a support group and an open forum for anyone to join, and second, a foundation to see real change.

We dedicated 6 months to make an ERG based on our own experiences, that felt constructive and fostered a comfortable space for anyone to join. So, what are we here to do?

EDITED Women strives to Support, Promote, and Hire women in tech at EDITED, and encourage these practices to be shared in the wider tech community. We seek to educate peers and senior management to understand unconscious bias and push for a zero tolerance attitude towards gender discrimination. EDITED Women will be a safe and empathetic environment for all women.

With our mission statement, let’s break that down into 3 objectives:

• Support: We will foster a fair and safe environment at EDITED for women in tech. We will provide a forum for women to discuss related issues. We will encourage the wider company to engage with our community. We will put practices in place that foster a safe, empathetic and constructive chain of communication around issues of gender equality.
• Promote: We will work towards progression and fair promotion of women at EDITED. We will move away from gender-biased words amongst peers and managers, as well as help to educate around language, culture and stereotypes.
• Hire: We will actively work towards increasing women representation at EDITED by attending events, collaborating on the interview processes and encouraging the next generation of women to pursue careers in tech. We want EDITED to innovate and be an example for the promotion of women in tech.

Beyond supporting each other in our daily roles, we want tangible growth for ourselves and new women joiners. ERGs have the potential to inspire and innovate what may feel like an unmovable workplace. They encourage people to speak out by influencing a roadmap, shaping recruitment in their team, elevating a voice they feel isn’t being heard and reversing the direction of a conversation. This makes for a more diverse, inclusive and ultimately, stronger team.

As we commemorate International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating the achievements of women at EDITED and looking to the future.