Envato Gender Diversity Report 2015

Last year Envato released its gender diversity figures.

At the time we were the first Australian start-up to do so – partly to ensure we hold ourselves publicly accountable to continuing to raise the diversity bar, and partly to motivate our peers in the industry to do the same.

This isn’t a new conversation. Sadly. But we’re going to keep driving it until it’s an outdated one.

In 2014 we had women filling 7% of our engineering roles (we only measured engineering).

After doing more research and talking to people in every corner of the industry, we chose to modify the way we measured these figure this year, to include the full spectrum of technology roles, including product developers.

In 2015 we have 17.3% of women filling technology roles this year (including an increase within engineering). We’re very glad this number has notably increased, but there’s obviously a long way to go.

We haven’t moved the needle on leadership yet – we have 28% of women filling our leadership roles.

In the year since we released our figures (which weren’t awesome), we’ve put a number of initiatives into place to make Envato more inclusive, less homogenous and a better place to work overall. Also, have a look at our progress for 2017.

Here’s a little of what we’ve done:

“If we’re going to build anything of value, we need to understand the desires and motivations of those we hope to serve with our efforts,” explains our Envato Market’s Program Director Adrian Fittolani.

“Having greater diversity in our teams gives us the best chance of seeing the needs of our user community met. It’s smart design and smart business.

“The diversity initiatives of the last year or so have definitely impacted on the way we recruit. Attention is now paid to the type of ad we run for example, to be sure that it does not favour the job seeking traits of a particular gender.”

“We build products we want people everywhere to use, love, and have become a part of their lives in some way,” adds Jordan McNamara, who works on the Envato Catalyst team.

“We need teams that reflect the reality of those people from all walks of life.

“When I started at Envato in 2009, there were 10 men and two women in the Melbourne office. Now we have women thriving at every level of the business. I’m proud to have strong female leaders and colleagues.

“Diversity is about giving everyone a fair go, regardless of gender or gender identity, race, sexual orientation, religion or disability.”

“Envato is creative and collaborative,” says Learning and Development Lead and Out Envato leader, Cliff Ings.

“If we only had middle-aged white guys here, there’s no way we’d have the agility in our work or come up with many of the out of the box features we’ve released!”

Here’s a handful of resources and reading we’ve found inspiring and valuable along the way:

This article was originally written by Vanessa Paech.