It’s no mystery that there aren’t enough women working in the tech and agency worlds. As our CEO Joe Rospars reported last year in a challenge to close the gender gap, the tech industry is 70% male and in the agency world, women make up just 3% of creative directors.
We are proud to report that Blue State is currently 53% women, but that doesn’t mean our work is done. Since making progress is our thing, and it’s Women’s History Month, we wanted to share some of our recent work in the journey towards creating culture where women feel supported, empowered—a place where they can thrive—and also introduce you to a new blog series we are kicking off featuring stories from a few of our inspiring female clients called “Women Creating Change.”
First, our internal update. Last fall we launched BSD Women—an internal group with the mission of creating a thriving workplace for female employees. To kick off the initiative, we sent out a survey to get our colleagues’ take on gender and to seek feedback and recommendations for what we could do to empower women in our organization. We wanted our vision to be formed and guided by the actual voices of BSD female employees.
With a better sense of what the women of BSD wanted to get out of their involvement, we started prioritizing and planning. We heard from respondents that they wanted the committee to organize more workshops and trainings; to bring in guest speakers to talk about negotiation and work-life balance; and provide opportunities to learn more about communication skills, management styles, and financial planning.
So far, we’re off to a good start. Starting in November, we began screening the AIGA Women’s Leadership Initiative’s four-part webcast Advancing Your Leadership Through Negotiation to learn fundamental negotiation strategies and become aware of gender issues that affect our ability to negotiate effectively. Next week we’re kicking off a quarterly financial planning series led by our Finance Director Naomi Yarimi and Digital Analyst Kathy Zhang called Women & Money, which will cover topics like obtaining must-have documents such as wills and living trusts, understanding FICO scores and credit ratings, budgeting and investments.
We also realized that our dialogue needed to expand beyond gender, and that we needed to start talking about diversity and inclusion, too. In response, BSD hosted a series of facilitated conversations in February that were open to all staff in every office. But it wasn’t just talk. Our leadership immediately—and I mean one week later—took the recommendations from the sessions held across the company and put into place real changes that affect hiring and recruiting. And we see this as just the beginning in an ongoing dialogue about and journey towards more diversity and inclusion in our company and culture.
Starting to shape the BSD Women initiative has been exciting, fulfilling, and eye-opening. I hope it has a huge impact in the years ahead for Blue State Digital. Our company has always been a place that tries to create change in the world and increase the common good, and it’s encouraging that we’re committed to figure out how can we do that for each other, within our organization.
Finally, we also hope you’ll join us in celebrating some amazing women in honor of Women’s History Month in our upcoming blog series: “Women Creating Change.” We are kicking off with a Q&A featuring leaders from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and NAACP. We hope you’ll follow along on social using #BSDWomen.