Showing Our Work

There continue to be a lot of conversations inside and outside of the tech industry about how companies can authentically show up for racial justice and advance equity and accessibility within their companies and across the broader community. While PDXWIT has been sharply focusing on this internally for many years, we historically didn't share much about this process to avoid it coming off as performative. We wanted to be it, without feeling the need to say it.

We have come to learn that an organization like ours — one that exists to see a more diverse, inclusive and accessible tech industry — needs to be a model. So, it’s time for us to show our work.

PDXWIT Staff and Leadership Team

April 2022

Staff
67% BIPOC

Showing-Our-Work-assets_2021-update_PieChart-2020-board.png

Board
75% BIPOC

July 2018

Staff

Board

Legend: Blue = Asian; Green = Black; Black = Latinx; Red = White;

Meet Our Staff

Meet Our Board

PDXWIT’s team has intersectionality of identities, including gender-non-conforming individuals and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Volunteers are a huge part of our team and provide key support to PDXWIT. We have not historically collected demographic information on our volunteer team but have begun doing so and will plan to report out on that information as we have the data.

Event Changes

Implementation of land acknowledgement at events and associated actions to support decolonization of the tech industry.
Introduction of child care at monthly happy hours (pre-pandemic)
Inclusion of ASL interpretation and closed captioning during events
Enacted a policy prohibiting panels that do not have diverse representation.
Incorporation of speaking stipends for all event speakers.

Confronting Implicit Bias and incorporating community feedback

Overhauled the Scholarship selection process to include anti-bias training for all reviewers.
Changed the questions we are asking in the State of the Community Survey to capture the experiences of everyone in the PDXWIT survey, not just certain groups.

Recruitment/Team Structure/Operations

Overhaul to our hiring, recruitment and onboarding process for employees and board members
Increased diversity of the board and creation of an equitable recruitment process
Change from a traditional hierarchical majority leadership structure of the board to a shared leadership model.
PDXWIT prioritizes local BIPOC owned businesses when seeking vendors.