Women in Index: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative

I’m so excited about this. We have the opportunity to be a leader amongst DAOs on this topic and foster an even more collaborative, high-performing, community-led team by prioritizing diversity and inclusion. Not going to be an easy initiative – but so important!

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Proud of women in Index team and fully support this. Index Coop will surely inspire and set an example model in diversity and inclusion for other DAOs to follow suit. As we progress, gain initial traction and scale this program, I would love for D&I to be embedded into the core organizational KPIs as well as WG level KPIs by identifying baseline metrics, SMART goals and tracking progressive KPIs ( representation % in leadership roles, representation % in hiring roles and community members etc. )

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Maybe I am “color blind” to this issue. I value success - regardless of age, skin color, nationality, and gender. Initiatives are always good.

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Love to see this!

As a complement, it could be helpful to survey the existing membership around current levels of belonging and the contributing or detracting factors. That could help inform onboarding and mentorship.

In case helpful, there’s a collection of tools and some templates here: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

Finally, would be amazing to have an historian record the implementation journey for others to learn from.

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It’s great to see this; I’m in support; and great work by all involved! Seeing this effort, I take as a great sign re the Index Coop overall! :owl:

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A lot of this work has been started. It would be a shame to duplicate efforts

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Love this initiative and hope to see this WG funded Q4 so that APAC can collaborate ( yay! timezone friendly community calls) and participate in the mentor program too!

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Yes! TYSM for your advocacy for APAC in this group :slight_smile:

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Thank you, thank you, thank you! for spearheading this @catjam @chasechapman @lee0007 @jujube @rashmiashok11 @Vanita, also @lee0007! I haven’t been able to participate in the working group meetings yet, but hope to in the future. From what little I’ve witnessed on Discord and the Forum, this is a wildly intelligent, compassionate, supportive, and purpose-driven group that is up to something. I want to surround myself with this energy!

A few comments for consideration

  1. The name references women but the goal description includes non-binary people (which I appreciate). Non-binary people may not identify as women, so I wonder if a name change would be more inclusive/important.
  2. How do we address and honor our multiple identities? I may be a woman, a mother and a socially privileged white person in the U.S, which comes with its pros/cons or I may be a gay, single, black, and highly educated person from APAC. Our identities are complex. And I would hate to over-simplify how complicated and interesting each individual in our Coop is. I also want to honor and support minority situations to increase equity. At the risk of watering things down, should this group be more inclusive?

I don’t have a specific solution to offer yet, but I wanted to raise some topics of discussion in hopes that we might crowd-source a variety of perspectives and some unique solutions. I’m interested in this topic/dynamic and eager to learn how the community responds the post.

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Thank you Mary for appreciating the efforts and sharing your comments. We look forward to having you part of the group and share your energy with us.

Point 1: It started as Women In Index, though we always mentioned that this group is for Women and non binary and continued the same, till we got a nod from Joe to make it an active working group and become part of the Leadership 2.0 initiative. The session on Representation and Diversity is scheduled for September 24, 2021.This made us think it’s important we look at changing the name and making it more inclusive/important. The team is working on this and we would request you to also suggest a few names which help fulfill inclusivity.

Point No 2: Is the biggest challenge, as to how we would engage multiple identities to make it inclusive. The team is working on putting up a presentation for community discussion on Representation and Diversity and has participation of a few leaders from Index Coop to help put this together.

We would be happy to get any ideas and inputs from you.

Regards,
Vanita

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Support this so incredibly hard. Thank you @chasechapman for spearheading!! :pray:

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This is awesome! I 100% support this. I recall my own experience when I first started in Index, the confidence gap hit me hard (and the other pain points mentioned above as well), but I was lucky to get guidance along the way by the Women in IC community and our male allies. I definitely see value in this proposed solutions. Hope to see this WG funded :slight_smile:

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I was so excited to see when this initiative started in June, and now to see that this is growing with lot of support is really heart warming. This initiative is very important for the unheard or unseen to contribute abundantly without judgments I believe. Cheers to sisterhood. Its such a nice feeling to see women working for other women, non - binary and all genders. Thanks for this initiative lovely ladies. I so so want to be part of this. Wishing you all huge success!!
In addition to Women in IC calls, I suggest create a task, make the people to be part of and actually be able to contribute based on the topic /task given. This would make them do more research and get involved more than just listening. This would obviously let us learn more about the topic.

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Great initiative, more diversity early on really is beneficial overall. I think articles or posts about women and non-binary persons talking about their experience as contributors would be interesting to learn about [if there are and I’m just being ignorant please let me know :slight_smile: ]

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I understand that what you want to accomplish with a separate category for women is something good. I really do. The way I see it though is that if we want equality we shouldn’t divide the people into men and women. Creating a category for women is like admitting that they are different than men, isn’t it?! We are all the same. I’d really like to hear your thoughts on that @chasechapman @catjam I’m interested in finding the truth through conversation and I have no intention to quarrel.

Hi ROSO, welcome to the IC forums and glad to see you have found this thread from last year!

This is an interesting point but I believe you might be missing the reasoning behind the creation of the WNBIC initiative.

Research has shown that diversity in the workplace affects a company’s profitability, problem solving capabilities, and job satisfaction.

If we break down the numbers in Index Coop (I am unsure of the stats within the entire ecosystem so will not comment on that), we can see that out of 86 core contributors, only 12 are women (calculated in percentage terms that is 14%).

The thoughts behind the intentional push of creating an environment where we are sourcing women and marginalised folks are due to the fact the current landscape is incredibly imbalanced. In fact, we see this when we look inwards at our own organisation. When a man joins Index Coop, he is immediately surrounded by other men. There is a higher probability of having shared life experiences, thus creating a welcoming/comforting environment. As a woman/marginalised person walking into Index, you are not greeted by the same experience. Some may stay and push through the uncomfortable tension, but some may leave.

We hope that by creating and signalling a safe space within Index and the crypto space as a whole, we can uplift women & marginalised folks to start contributing on a regular basis. To reiterate, the point is not to exclude anyone from any working group. Rather, the point is to create a space where everyone can be included. We hope that one day we can disband the WNBIC pod, because the real ‘win’ we can have is an environment where no more intentional diversity push is necessary :).

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I wish I could write as well as you do, honestly!! Thanks for taking the time to answer so thoroughly. What you do seems to work. I’d be shocked if there were more than 10% women in the entire crypto space and as you said in Index it’s 14%. I recognise the good intention behind this. I am with you and I believe that there should be something like that for nationalities as well. But can you imagine a category for black people?:crazy_face: I believe that we should think more about the phrasing. The language divides. It is built that way in order to explain the reality through differences.

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You misunderstood me. The fact that I want to think about the best way to accomplish a goal, challenging the way we already do this, only suggests that I also believe in it. Please don’t be offended. I’d love more than anything to see a world in which you don’t need to have a separate category for everyone we consider “different”.
Diversity should be the norm, not something we strive for.
My point with the first comment was to discuss on what the best way to reach that goal is.
I’m only interested in the truth. If the truth is that what I say is of no use then I am fine with that.
But people created racism in the first place by dividing people into categories. black-white, russians-Americans, Christians-jews, men-women, gay - straight, fat- thin, smart-idiot… I hope you see what I’m saying. My one and only purpose of saying what I say is to see the reality of oneness. Anyway, I didn’t mean to offend anyone. I am sorry. In Greek I’d explain it better :stuck_out_tongue: love all <3

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@ROSO Hey I do not believe you offended anyone :slight_smile: I was also a doubter of this working group at a certain point of time, since I did not find the female contributors I worked with were any different from men. However, in reflection, I do feel crypto as a whole, and Index Coop included, is still a “boys club”, where people call each other sers without asking their gender. And a lot of the memes are clearly visualised through guys’ lens. Not perceivable to me, but there certainly are women who find it intimidating to break into this community. The WnNB WG provides them with A CHOICE to seek help and advice (if they so choose to) ,being the minority in this space. This working group is created and managed by female contributor. Although as a guy I am not able to fully understand the barriers women face to join and thrive in this community, I think this WG is created for a reason, one should be respected.

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I would love to participate in the mentorship program. Ready to listen, learn, and build.