Startup Diversity

Every week at Emmerge, an engineer, artist and all around great guy named Ian runs a retrospective, where we discuss the good, the bad and the meh of the past week. Topics range from the serious: “deleting vs. commenting out old code” or “I’m worried about balancing polish vs new feature development” to the ridiculous: “peanut butter pretzels are causing a public health crisis” or “freedom fighter Tom Brady exonerated by the criminal justice system.” But this week the first two items on the bad column were: “Still have less than 50% female representation in the company” and “We are also suspiciously all white-looking.”

When we create the discussion topics in our retrospective, it’s not obvious who posts which topics, so I assumed one of our engineers named Nicole had posted it. (Partially because of her gender, but mostly because she’s one of our most outspoken believers in doing the right thing on both the product and culture side) But this discusssion wasn’t sparked by Nicole or Ian, who’s also a very progressive voice in our company. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that it was an engineer named Mark.

He’s a guy who identifies as white, despite his mixed heritage, and I’ve worked with him for about 6 years through 4 companies. He knows the people at this company really, really well and he was reminding us that we can do better. He was also reminding us that diversity isn’t just about the people who are shut out. Diversity effects everyone and a lack of diversity impacts the whole team. Not just the activists or the true believers, but everyone who comes to work at Emmerge.

As a founder, this isn’t easy. I’m proud of our team and I’m proud of our company and frankly I’m proud of the fact that we have two women out of our first 11 employees: a senior engineer and our lead designer. Right now we’re all taking solace in the fact that two of our last four hires have been women, which means things are heading in the right direction as we grow. Over time, I’m sure we’ll be able to get to a much more even balance.

Most of our team met at a startup called Context Optional where our 13th hire was a woman. I’m proud to say Mariam is now a COO and founder at Doughbies. At Emmerge, our lead designer Ashlee was our 8th hire. That’s not enough, but it’s definitely progress. We’ve also been lucky enough to have some powerful women supporting us along the way. Anne Glover of Amadeus Capital was the first VC to back us and Marcy Simon has been the most amazing angel and advisor anyone could ask for.

I consider myself a committed feminist and I was an angel investor in Glassbreakers when they were focused solely on women in tech. Today they’re taking a much broader view of diversity, and my team is taking me along for the same ride. In the past year, I dedicated a lot of effort to bringing women onto our team and we also brought in a good mixture of different backgrounds in terms of national origin, sexuality and religion. But we’re still whiter than we want to be, and it was interesting to see that conversations about race and gender are intrinsically linked in our employees minds.

But our retrospective isn’t just about sparking a conversation, it’s about what we’re doing for the future. Fortunately, we have important infrastructure in place to help our diversity efforts in the long run:

• Standard, rather than negotiated salaries. The women who work at Emmerge are tied for the highest salary at Emmerge and have great equity. We didn’t make them fight for it or even ask for it. They’re simply worth it. I believe this is a gender issue, a class issue, and an ethics issue and I intend to discuss it at length in a future post.
• A commitment to diversity in our recruitment process. We’re making a product for the modern workplace and we want our company to reflect the people we’re building for. We discussed a list of tactics for recruiting a more diverse workforce, and the future of Emmerge will certainly be more diverse than the present.
• Maintaining a welcoming workplace. Beyond our recruitment efforts, we’re keeping an eye on our company culture and our office environment to ensure a warm and welcoming workplace for all types of people. We have a lot of employees with families so we created flexible work from home policies for parents. We’ve also got a democratic and inclusive product management process, step free access, standing or sitting desks, many people over the age of 30, and lots of people with dyed hair.

Emmerge is just a year old this week (with 11 people already!?) and we don’t have the resources of larger companies. We don’t have recruiters or HR who can help us with these issues. But it matters to our business, so we’re all pitching in and making diversity a permanent part of our agenda. We’re scheduling ongoing discussions about how we can improve our recruitment and culture to make sure we’re getting the best talent, from all walks of life, for the years ahead.