These last few months have inspired a reckoning not just at Clyde but at companies and in communities around the country.
The triple crises of a global pandemic, systematic racism, and police brutality came to a head in June. George Floyd’s tragic murder came on the back of three months of a deadly virus and ensuing economic hardship that disproportionally affected Black Americans and brought issues of racism to the forefront of our national conversation.
At Clyde, we have always believed that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) should be a part of everything we do. We believe everybody deserves to feel safe, included, and supported at work. We stand in solitary with the Black community in the fight against injustice and we strive to be an actively anti-racist company.
We know that we have a long way to go.
We knew that in June, when we released a statement of support for the Black Lives Matter movement and committed to recognizing how we’d failed to build a diverse team and what we were working to do about it.
Now, several months later, we want to continue that conversation and provide an update on how we think about diversity at Clyde. We want to share where we’re currently at when it comes to having and supporting a diverse team along with what we’re doing to support our DEI goals. We share this not to pat ourselves on the back or pretend like we’ve solved the problem. Rather, just the opposite—we recognize that the path towards having a truly diverse and inclusive workplace is a long one, and we want to be as transparent about where we are along it as we can be. We believe that will help us hold ourselves accountable, help our community see where we stand, and allow us to get the feedback we need to keep evolving.
So here’s where we are.
At Clyde, our core set of values include being thoughtful, listening with empathy, and facilitating collaboration. Those values inspire our DEI vision, which is to intentionally build a team that is as representative as possible of what our country looks like and to make sure that each team member feels supported, included, and enabled to shape the future of Clyde.
We don’t see diversity as a check-the-box goal, but rather as what will make our team, our products, and our service the best they can possibly be.
Here’s what our team current looks like:
We currently have a 30-person team
As a whole, 33% of our team are women and 23% of our team identify as being people of color
13% identify as Hispanic
7% identify as Asian
3% identify as Black
When it comes to management roles, we have an 11-person team
Women make up 45% of that team
People of color make up 18% of that team; all are Asian
When it comes to technical roles, we have an 11-person team
Women make up 18% of that team
People of color make up 27% of that team; all are Hispanic
In the future, we plan to double down on our efforts to make Clyde a truly diverse team. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made so far, especially when it comes to the gender distribution of our team, but we know there’s a lot more we could be doing, particularly regarding racial distribution.
As a small startup with limited resources, we want to prioritize investing in three initiatives: diversifying our candidate pipeline, training our team on unconscious bias and building an anti-racist workplace, and providing generous benefits so our team can show up as their full selves at work and beyond.
We’re planning to almost double in size over the next year, and as we do that hiring, we will do it in a way that creates a team that is more representative of our country as a whole. Over the last year, we’ve been working with PowerToFly, a recruiting platform focused on bringing women and underrepresented minorities into technical roles, to help build a diverse candidate pipeline, and we’ve signed up to continue that work into the future.
We’ve partnered with PowerToFly and their Global Director of Diversity and Inclusion, Dionna Smith, on the training side, too. We set up several training sessions on unconscious bias, allyship, and anti-racism work a few weeks before George Floyd’s murder and had our first session the week after. That first session was a safe space for our team to come together, share how the news was affecting them, and learn how to support each other. We will continue these training sessions on a rolling basis so that each new hire will have a chance to attend them, along with current employees.
Since Clyde’s beginning, we knew that we wanted to create an inclusive environment and build a diverse team, and we knew that our benefits had to reflect those goals. To that end, Clyde offers a flexible time off policy, including unlimited PTO, which we have always encouraged employees to use not just for vacations but also for holidays and cultural traditions that are important to them and might not be public holidays in the U.S. Over the last few months, we’ve made sure our team knows that they can and should use that time to take care of their mental health and to spend time with causes that are important to them, including participating in protests and Election Day. We also offer gender-neutral policies for paternity leave, granting three months of paid time off to each employee and encouraging them to take it (and leading by example on that front—I recently had a son and took all of my paternity leave to spend time with my growing family).
We’ll be back periodically to share updates on how our DEI initiatives are going, how our team is growing, and what we’re learning along the way.
If you’re interested in joining our team, take a look at our open roles here . We’d love to have you on board.
SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER
