We unequivocally and without prejudice want to surround ourselves with as many talented people as we can. Software is the future and in order for it to be a good one, it should include individuals with a diverse set of values, skills, knowledge, experiences and histories. As such, we are committed to providing an encouraging, safe and welcoming environment, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ability, ethnicity, or religion.
We believe those traditionally left out of industry-shaping conversations should help design today’s developer ecosystem. We advocate for a diverse group of advisors, founders, employees and contractors through Heavybit’s pipeline efforts, events, leadership circles, speakers bureaus, mentorship pool and hiring practices. Most notably, some of the things we’ve done and will continue to do include:
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Pipeline & Outreach: Heavybit actively encourages women and founders from traditionally marginalized groups to apply to the Heavybit accelerator. We’ve done so by seeking out great candidates via joint events with women in technology groups, producing female founder dinner events, and offering our space to professional organizations that specifically support women and under-represented minorities. If you run a group focused on diverse founders, we’re happy to discuss ways to work together. If you’re a founder, we encourage you to apply to the accelerator.
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Visibility for Diverse Experts: We believe that diverse domain experts should be given the forum to share their insights and we know our member companies and the broader community are better for it. Our conferences feature 50% women and minorities on stage. As preparation for these types of events, we spend hours helping speakers prepare for their presentations and coach them through the process of presentation development. Heavybit also actively reaches out to diverse experts to publish their content and helps them shape the content and further distribute it to our membership.
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Diversity and Inclusion Committee: Heavybit’s Diversity and Inclusion committee has met monthly since 2014 to design new proactive activities and events in furthering our commitment to a participatory culture. Email events@heavybit.com to make suggestions.
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Hiring & Staff: Heavybit has always had an employment equity statement associated with its job listings. Perhaps more importantly, since our inception in 2013, our team has been diverse with at least half of us being female, and/or racialized minorities, and/or queer. That said, we own our privilege and recognize the need to continue iterating on diverse hiring practices and modeling them to our member companies. Some of the ways we’ve done that have been to create unconscious bias resources and events, and to introduce teams to stellar and diverse candidates.
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Anti-Harassment Policy: Heavybit has an anti-harassment policy and process. Click here for more information.