Bringing Diversity to the Tech Industry - IOTA’s Diversity Initiative
We, at the IOTA Foundation, are constantly working to make our workplace, our technology solutions, and our community more inclusive. Our values and our goals to sustainability and inclusivity unite us, striving in an effort to help create a better world, which includes constantly improving our own organization.
Today, we're happy to share our initiative to bring more diversity to the IOTA Foundation and into the tech industry.
Women in tech
One of the major aspects regarding diversity is equal opportunity and equal pay for women in the labor market. These by far aren’t the only issues that should be addressed --and we certainly should not and will not stop at it -- but they do have a large impact on the overall population. As the IOTA Foundation is active in the technology sector, focusing on driving changes in the tech industry is a natural place for us to start to make a difference.
We understand that women are underrepresented in technology. And according to the Women in Tech Survey 2019, women still only make up just over a quarter of the tech industry. And when we look at the blockchain industry we notice a somewhat similar pattern. According to the LongHash report published in 2018, which analyzed 100 blockchain startups, of 1,062 listed team members, only 14.5 percent were women.
To improve these numbers we need to do our part by taking concrete actions and advocating for diversity. This is crucial to provide equal opportunities and promote added value to projects and working relations. We consider this to be vital.
Diversity at the IOTA Foundation
To understand our perspective on diversity, we would like to give you a little insight into the IOTA Foundation: The Foundation is a decentralized, remote-first organization with individuals in about 30 countries. Our teams are multidisciplinary and we seek that each individual and employee that joins the foundation brings a whole unique set of skills.
Regardless of the distances, languages, culture, ages, and any other differences, the IF is committed to making everyone welcome. As stated in our values, we recognize the value in our employees’ different cultural backgrounds, gender, experiences, and skills and make those differences the core of our competitive advantage. We want to embrace diversity even more in our teams!
The IF has a diverse set of clients and projects in its ecosystem, and our values commit us to building inclusive technology. Therefore our teams’ diversity is the key driver of creativity and innovation, helping to deliver excellent outcomes and results in every action we take.
We want to empower people to express themselves, share opinions, and promote a dynamic of critical thinking and problem-solving. We are committed to creating teams as diverse as our clients to understand firsthand the challenges that our clients and the IF are addressing.
What to expect in 2021
The IF is already a diverse organization in terms of age, location, background and experience; however, in 2021, we are taking one step forward with gender.
This year, we are launching a diversity initiative. We believe in a more inclusive sector and we will therefore start by designing strategies to bring more women into tech. We will continue to allocate resources for professional development to all our employees, free of biases that favor one specific gender. Today merely marks the beginning of our initiative.
We are currently working on making IOTA internally more diverse as well as creating different initiatives and strategic partnerships with some organizations in the industry to organize free developers and manage courses, webinars, and women's spotlights. Stay tuned for more details coming soon.
Let’s all do our part to make this industry more diverse - together!
Join us on Discord (channel #diversity) or our other social channels to hear more about this initiative, or sign up with your email address to get notified once we have more to share.
For more information, visit our website.
