AUBREY BLANCHE, THEN GLOBAL HEAD OF DIVERSITY + BELONGING AT ATLASSIAN, JOINED US FOR THE GIRLEDWORLD WOW SUMMIT at RMIT IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, IN JUNE 2018.
MANY AMAZING ATLASSIAN WOMEN HAVE FEATURED IN OUR GLOBAL CAREER ROLE MODELS CAMPAIGNS AND DESIGN THINKING INDUSTRY CHALLENGES.
Our Cofounder Madeleine Grummet also spent May 2018 in San Francisco with her incredible leadership Mentee Mary Raleigh, member of the San Francisco Atlassian Playbook team, and participated in Atlassian’s ShipIt to see what awesome work looks like inside awesome teams!
As a female-founded and funded startup, and passionate STEM and diversity advocates, we are doing what we can in our sphere of influence to drive greater awareness and actionable process around diversity and inclusion to ignite conversation, table the metrics and push for progress.
But diversity is indeed a very wicked problem.
Entrenched cognitive biases, fixed cultures, diversity fatigue and too much talk and too little action mean we’ve actually still got a long way to go before D&I and gender is no longer on the agenda.
Run the numbers today on the number of women currently in STEM startups, ASX or Fortune500 CEO leadership roles or government senior level positions. Not good.
This is despite the fact that we keep talking, reading and town-halling about team diversity as a critical driver of innovation and problem-solving, but unless we can cultivate it, hire for it, celebrate it, elevate it or action it, our best attempts at fixing the issue will always be constrained.
Atlassian’s State of Diversity Report 2018 revealed why the D&I dial isn’t actually moving despite the conversations about cultural shift and commitment to D&I in the US and Silicon Valley right now.
This is, of course, an endemic problem.
To effect any real change we need to sweep company, startup and society-wide, top to bottom, bring more chairs to the cap table, break down mindless bureaucracy, shift fixed mindsets, share our stories, build D&I skills, action inclusivity programs, push against status quo, employ empathy, and put people, values, balance and belonging before the BS of empty D&I PR rhetoric.
We also need to commit to active end-to-end processes and systems that mandate diversity as an accountable, transparent line item, and usher in a new world of work practice where we hire for diversity of not just faces but races, places and think spaces (mind sets).
What are you doing today to action diversity and shift the dial?