Since this is our first post on our blog in Spanish (this article is a translation of Ser el Cambio), we wanted to start off with a bang by featuring one of our most challenging projects we’re facing as a company. Though our offices might not be new, our engineering team is constantly growing, and one of our primary resolutions this year is that our team continue to grow from life experiences, different cultures, and, above all, achieve a balance in terms of gender representation.

Our goal is clear… More women in engineering! However, when we sat down to try and figure out how we would achieve this goal, we found that it was a whole lot more than just looking for women to submit their resumes. We discovered that the industry offers little-to-no support for women, leaving them little room to grow and practically no voice when it comes time to make important decisions.

Faced with all of this, we realized that we didn’t want to be a business that just simply tried to put more women to work. In order to tackle this issue more head-on, we developed a working group that we chose to call #ada-lovelace in honor of the great scientist and role model who served as the face for the representation of women in computer science. The idea of this group is to dream up and create a working environment in which all women feel safe, represented, and fully integrated into our business.

The group is made up of men and women who understand that women’s presence and opinions are necessary and important within our company and, above all, within every level of the field of engineering. During most of 2017 and the first part of 2018, this group has taken on the following tasks:

• Create a space where current and future mothers within our company can feed their babies in total privacy without the fear of being observed.
• Promote and sponsor groups dedicated to educating women in science and technology, such as Django Girls and Agile Woman.
• Create confidential working groups within the company where concerns over day-to-day work and workplace issues can be shared in a respectful environment.
• Ensure that interview panels have women on them for positions of all levels and roles. The idea behind this is that the hiring process shouldn’t be segregated by gender, rather, than all interviews should be focused on job-relevant abilities.
• Creation of the first “seedlings of engineers” within our company, which will be a school for up and coming professionals that may or may not already have professional experience. Within this group, we will strive for a certain percentage representation of women in order to promote their entry into the workforce.

As part of this projects, we held interviews with women that are part of our engineering team in order to find out what had made them consider Eventbrite as a possible workplace (Interview in Spanish):

We are fully aware that this is an on-going effort, and we must continue to make progress in order to solve this problem, which not only affects us as a company, but the industry, and society as a whole.. It’s a challenge in and of itself to identify the problems that cause the gender gap to form within the realm of education and training, which then extend to the workplace and the positions that women one day might find themselves in.

You might ask yourselves, Can they pull this off? We’re on the way. Like all big changes, we need time to generate results and see the overarching benefits of this work; however, we’ve begun with the first step in the right direction.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

– Margaret Mead

—

Wrote in Spanish by Natalia Cortese

Translated into English and published by Melisa Piccinetti

Reviewed translation by Sebastian Torres