It's Pride Month! We take a look across the tech scene to see how companies are supporting and celebrating LGBTQ+ employees in the workplace during Pride Month. There are lots of guest speakers, special events, history lessons, dance parties, and more planned!
At Benchling, our Bloom ERG is putting together several events to celebrate Pride Month. One of the activities this year is to highlight a few pieces of LGBT+ history each week. They will also host film screening and discussion on the documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen.
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Motional’s Pride, Resources, Inclusion, and Support at Motional (PRISM) Employee Resource Group (ERG) is planning a robust internal celebration for PRIDE month. They’ll be coordinating educational bulletin boards at local offices with information on history, media, and resources for LGBTQIA+ employees and allies, offering lunches from local LGBTQIA+ owned businesses, and hosting an expert speaker on the history of Pride month and LGBTQIA+ allyship. Motional will also be featuring members of its PRISM ERG on its social channels throughout the month.
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RepTrak was very active during pride month including a DEI Movie Club featuring discussions of the movie Disclosure. Other events included “Pride Social Hour” for LGBTQIA+ Reptrakkers and allies to chat and get to know each other. These events were used as a follow up to our Diversity and Inclusion LGBTQ+ Storytelling Forum from earlier in the year in which we featured employees who shared their stories related to LGBTQ+ identity and experiences.
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We hosted virtual drag bingo with Marti Cummings, a NYC based drag artist, television personality, and political activist (this was an employee-only event)
Care you can be proud of: On 6/3, we hosted a discussion with Andrew Miller (LGBTQ Education Trainer, Denver Health) and Dr. Miriam Langer (Adolescent Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) about reducing the disparities experienced by members of the LGBTQIA+ community, ensuring that all patients are treated with dignity and respect, and de-mystifying the science around gender-affirming care for trans youth.
We are selling Pride water bottles and Pride tie-dye kits to support the Human Rights Campaign.
We are hosting "Contour and Cocktails" with performer and recording artist Brandon Alberto. He will be teaching us drag makeup basics for a fierce eye look and talking to us about his adventures as a queer performer in Kinky Boots throughout the United States and the world (this is an employee only event)
At MassChallenge, we celebrate Pride by sharing the month’s history, what staff can do, and how to get involved at MC. Internally we are hosting a Trans 101 event with Ben Greene, discussion groups, and a chance for folx to share in our Pride @ MC! Teams channel. We also have shared resources on pronouns and ask that staff add them to their email signatures. We also have sent resources on pronouns and why they are important to share, and ask that staff include them in their email signatures and Zoom profiles, during interviews with candidates, and in introductions during team conversations and meetings.
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At ZoomInfo, we love celebrating Pride all year long! We got in the Pride Month spirit early by selling “Stride with Pride” branded T-shirts in May, with proceeds benefiting the Matthew Shepard Foundation. On June 1, we changed the logo on our Okta log-in screens and intranet to our custom Pride logo, and released our employee-sourced Pride Spotify playlist. We’re also hosting several events throughout the month, including a Combined Queer Verbiage presentation and Drag Bingo Night with a costume contest organized by our ZI Pride Employee Resource Group.
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Here at Toast, we are excited to celebrate Pride all month long! We will be hosting engaging virtual events, such as Pride-themed trivia and interactive workshops focused on LGBTQIA+ history. We will also be offering conversations with outside speakers and educational resources for all employees, including a series highlighting influential members of the LGBTQIA+ community throughout the years. Over the course of the month, we will be spotlighting members of Multigrain, our Toast Community for LGBTQIA+ Toasters and their allies, on our social channels.
We are SO excited to kick off Pride Month to recognize the LGBTQIA+ community and elevate voices and experiences of members within! Our mission for the month (and beyond!!) is represented by three pillars: solidarity, intersectionality, and awareness. This Pride Month we will continue to center on and elevate marginalized identities, specifically BIPOC voices, within the LGBTQIA+ community. Some highlights of our month include:
- Throwing a Pride Hackathon
- Planning a Service Project
- Spotlighting LGBTQIA+ Businesses Movies & Artists
- Hosting the 2nd Annual Drag Storytime
- & more
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Vistaprint is proud to announce its new year-round Platinum-level partnership with StartOut, a non-profit dedicated to empowering, supporting and amplifying LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs. This multifunctional partnership was formed to lift up LGBTQ+ startups and small business owners through a strategic offering of mentorship, education, design and marketing assistance, and scholarship programs for StartOut members. Vistaprint has also committed 20 percent of the proceeds from its June 2021 sales of its newly launched line of Pride products, which includes face masks, clothing, mugs, stickers, and marketing items to help small businesses and community members honor and celebrate pride. Vistaprint will host Global Pride Month Events with guests, educators and speakers including Astala Vista, Víctor Gutiérrez, Jay Hulme and Chelsea Clinton for team members to learn, grow and celebrate with PRIDE throughout the month of June.
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Nasuni is launching pride month via our Diversity Committee. We have suggested LinkedIn learn course and reading materials. In addition, we will celebrate as a community via a zoom dance party.
Drift kicked off Pride Month by hosting a panel with Gong, Canvas and Go Nimbly about how to better include, support and celebrate LGBTQ+ employees in the workplace. (A recording of the event can be found here!) Internally, our LGBTQ+ ERG, the Rainbots, has created Pride-themed Zoom backgrounds and Slack avatar backgrounds and Pride swag, and they have an event coming up at the end of the month to celebrate Pride. All of these initiatives are in line with the Rainbots goals of increasing visibility and awareness of LGBTQ+ people at Drift (and in tech in general), educating our team and the external community on salient LGBTQ+ topics, and giving back to the local LGBTQ+ community.
At PFF, Pride reminds us that our allyship is cultivated by our #accountability to our LGBTQ+ employees and to the LGBTQ+ community. We both celebrate and commemorate Pride all month long with educational and fun events for our employees. These include a company wide workshop on LGBTQ+ allyship, and a lunch time Pride Trivia game!
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AspenTech recently launched an LBGTQ chapter of our Diversity, Equality & Inclusion initiative and published an internal website with PRIDE Month resources. Throughout the month of June, we are hosting an internal photo challenge and encouraging employees to submit photos of themselves that feature a color of the Pride Flag. Externally, we are changing our AspenTech leaf logo to incorporate the colors of the LGBTQ flag for PRIDE Month and made a monetary donation to Boston Pride.
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At JRNI we have assembled a PRIDE planning committee. The week of Pride we plan on doing the items below:
- Send out informational slides about pride in the 21st century
- Create a google sheet with LGBTQIA+ resources; like tv, film, articles, podcasts and charities
- We have updated our gender identity options in our HR systems to include more than just male and female
- We are rolling out adding pronouns into email signatures and slack names
- We are holding a Pride/LGBTQIA lunch and learn around issues and experiences
- We have updated our Linkedin Banners and instagram profile picture, as well as our zoom backgrounds
Vecna Robotics supports the LGBTQ+ community with a paid membership to NOGLSTP – National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals. Employees are able to become members and take part in the education workshops and programs that empower LGBTQ+ individuals in STEM through advocacy, professional development, networking, and peer support.
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Externally, we designed several Pride specific templates for our customers to use as well as hosting a guest blog on our website with resources for LBGTQIA small businesses.
Internally, we're hosting a Pride-themed chat with IMPACT (I'm Proud at Constant Contact) as we relaunch our affinity groups post-acquisition and transition. We offer year round safe zone training as well as inclusive leadership to help uncover our unconscious biases and lead more inclusively.
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Recorded Future's LGBTQIA+ employee resource group, Out@RF, partnered with our Insikt Group to conduct our second research report about new anti-LGBTQIA+ laws and protections and online radicalization. We've also planned some fun celebrations including a company wide "Ally" pride photo collage, weekly gay history and pop culture quizzes throughout the month, and daily postings about notable figures and advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights.
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Slack Channel postings – Pride Month/Pride History
- 6/7 – Arcadia Cinema Movie – “A Secret Love”
- 6/16 – Weekly Coping with Covid session – “LGBTQA+ Heath”
- 6/22 – Watch Party – “Stonewall Forever”
- 6/24 – Pride Bingo
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To kick off the month, we are hosting a content club on queer representation in the media. This session will discuss how the music, film, and TV industry shapes the perception of LGBTQ+ members in society and how we as an organization can think critically and challenge these representations.
We also wrote a blog on this: check out here. https://robinpowered.com/blog/robin-recognizes-pride-month
At Quickbase, supporting LGBTQ+ employees means allowing our employees to come to work as their full, authentic selves. Being aware of the kinds of identities people bring with them to work, and being respectful of those identities, means that many employees feel safe and valued for the work that they do. We recently formalized our LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group here at Quickbase, and have begun to brainstorm how to provide educational, social, and professional development opportunities to our LGBTQ+ employees. We are very excited to kick it all off with Pride month in June! To start, we’re hosting a company-wide virtual Pride 5k and raising donations for the Transgender Law Center, the largest national trans-led organization advocating for a world in which all people are free to define themselves and their futures.
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Here at Virgin Pulse, we celebrate the diversity of our employees all year long. In June we’re especially excited to uplift the LGBTQIA+ community within Virgin Pulse. This month we’re hosting a challenge on our platform about how to be a strong LGBTQIA+ ally. We’re also sending out weekly emails highlighting different aspects of the LGBTQIA+ community (terminology, history, representation, intersectionality, etc.) and spotlighting Virgin Pulse employees and their stories. We’re hosting two internal panels this month as well – Pride Through the Generations, speaking to LGBTQIA+ history and pride in the workplace and Parenting with Pride, which focuses on having children as an LGBTQIA+ parent and raising open-minded and inclusive children. We’re also hosting trivia parties, a Show Your Pride day and sharing custom Pride-themed Zoom backgrounds!
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Reggora supports the LGBTQ+ community during Pride Month
Normally, the month of June is a time for Pride celebrations around the world. But as we know for the past two years the COVID-19 pandemic has upended a lot of live events and prevented people from gathering as a united group. To show our support, we put together ideas for Pride Month 2021 that all our employees could get involved in.
Book Club: Our June book club book was Here For It Or How To Save Your Soul In America by R. Eric Thomas.
Celebrate (Boston) Pride, virtually: Streaming Pride Lights together virtually
The virtual park lighting ceremony is meant to commemorate departed friends, family and coworkers and to increase awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which is still affecting the community today. A signature event of Boston Pride Week, Pride Lights will feature remarks from Mayor Kim Janey, Chief of Health & Human Services Marty Martinez, and a poem reading from Philip Robinson. Virtual performances provided by the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, with others to be announced.
We also encouraged our employees to be an ally during Pride month by: boosting the voices of LGBTQ+ people around you and in your social circles, retweeting and reposting with attribution, and making space for people to share their stories And asking our Reggora employees to post recommendations for LGBTQ+ voices to be amplified; Adding your pronouns. We know that adding pronouns to Slack, Linkedin, or Zoom is also a quick and easy way for allies of the LGBTQ+ community to have a powerful and positive impact. Using pronouns shows others that you are not going to assume their gender. It also helps educate people about gender inclusivity in the workplace. Public pronouns create an inclusive environment for everyone to own their identity, allowing them to bring their “whole self'' to work and be respected for it; providing a curated list of LGBTQ+-owned businesses to support
The number of LGBTQ-owned enterprises is growing, and their impact is accelerating. The most simple and obvious way to show your support is to shop at LGBTQ+-owned stores, which builds empowerment and gives that business a stronger voice. Another way is to share the LGBTQ+ businesses you know about on social media and spread the word about supporting them. As well as asking our employees to get involved and post in the comments your own favorite LGBTQ+ owned brands so everyone can check them out!
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We were so excited to celebrate Pride Month we kicked it off a few weeks early with a Virtual Bingo night with JuJubee from Ru Pauls Drag Race. We are holding several events throughout the month of June as well. We will have a Virtual Panel on Intersectionality in the LGBTQ+ community, Cogicians are meeting up for a watch party at Cogito office of the the new FX Pride series, and our Pride+ resource group will be running a virtual Talent Show at the end of the month. In addition to these fun events we have been sharing daily fun and educational Pride Month facts and resources via Slack.
Nexthink is on a mission to delight people at work. Not just some people, but ALL people. We’re proud to be celebrating Pride Month! Nexthinkers around the world are showing their support for the LGBTQIA+ community with custom Nexthink Proud virtual Zoom backgrounds and will be learning more about how to advocate for a transgender inclusive workplace through our Diversity Dialogue “Saying Goodbye to My Son & Hello to My Daughter”, featuring guest speaker Irene Brank.
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IbelongHE is our Employee Resource Group at HealthEdge. For June’s meeting, one of our employees will be making a presentation on the history of Pride - from Stonewall to legislative changes and changes in healthcare regulations for the LGBTQIA community over the years. Since our customers are insurance companies, we wanted to highlight this area. The second half of our meeting, we will have a guest speaker from Harvard speak to us about the definition and importance of allyship.
The conversation will continue all month long on our dedicated IbelongHE Slack channel, where employees can share book, movie, article recommendations and talk about their experiences. We’ll share information once a week on learning opportunities such as pronoun usage, bias training, and virtual Pride events our teams may like to enjoy.
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At Namely, one of our ERGs, PrideIN, is hosting several activities.
“Topic Tuesdays”
Throughout the month, PrideIN will be having “Topic Tuesdays” via Slack. Every Tuesday, the ERG will be discussing current events that are near and dear to the LGBTQIA+ community.
Virtual Movie Night
This year, we’ll be showing Rafiki—a 2018 Kenyan drama film directed by Wanuri Kahiu. Rafiki is a story of romance that grows between two young women, Kena and Ziki, amidst family and political pressures around LGBTQIA+ rights in Kenya.
Virtual Fitness Classes
To get employees up and moving, Namely is conducting two virtual fitness classes to celebrate Pride Month. The first class is a total body sweat floor class for all levels called “Sweat with Pride”. “Sweat with Pride” will benefit Lost N Found Youth Inc.—an Atlanta, Georgia-based nonprofit that exists to end homelessness for LGBTQIA+ and all sexual minority youth. LNFY strives to provide stability and safety to young adults through a 24/7 hotline, daily drop-In center, transitional and emergency housing, street outreach, and partnerships with other providers in the area.
Zumba
Namely will also be hosting a virtual Zumba class, held by PrideIN and one of the ERG’s allies, HACER—the Hispanic Alliance for Career Employee Resources.
To celebrate Pride month, 3Play Media has invited two local drag artists, Just JP and Jayden Jamison to perform, and then do an q&a to share more about their experiences in drag culture with us!
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LogMeIn is celebrating PRIDE month with several events and activities including: a session with a licensed professional counselor to answer questions around how to support children and family members who might be questioning, exploring, or struggling with their gender identity; a LGBTQIA+ trivia night; a sharing session of our favorite drag queens; and a discussion of the film The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. In addition to this, LogMeIn has made a donation to The Trevor Project, and our PRIDE@LogMeIn Employee Resource Group has curated a library of resources for our LGBTQIA+ employees and allies.
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In recognition of Pride, we’re focusing on both celebrating our LGBTQ+ employees and helping our associates learn more about the history and importance of Pride month. This has included a program where associates can submit entries on “what Pride means to you” and photos of them celebrating Pride – this month, and always. Entries will be included as part of a compilation write-up and video and featured on our internal employee Hub. We’re also sharing educational resources on “Why we celebrate Pride in the United States,” “Pride flag history and meaning” and “Pride events near you.” Huge thank you to our WERQPLACE resource group!
Ordergroove is celebrating Pride Month with a book club on James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room. Ordergroove's Diversity Council is teaming up with our LGBTQIA+ affinity group, OG Pride, to co-host the discussion on themes of sexuality and masculinity.
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To celebrate Pride Month this year, we organized a global committee and planned a few different initiatives around the globe to demonstrate our commitment and support to not only our own LGBTQ+ moose and allies, but to our communities as well!
1. We provided our moose with a template that automatically adds a Pride flag and the message “Rapid7 is an equal opportunity employer” to their email signatures all year long!
2. We launched an #Insight-Pride slack channel for bi-weekly donut intros to other LGBTQ+ moose and allies so we can meet one another, chat, and enjoy an Insight Coffee together
3. We've planned Pride Picnics; these are lunches in our global offices for our LGBTQ+ moose and allies to enjoy a meal together on Rapid7
4. We organized a book club for our global moose reading and discussing The Stonewall Reader over Zoom
5. We are sponsoring and hosting a booth at the annual Austin Pride Parade & Festival
6. We're featuring our LGBTQ+ and ally moose in spotlights on our social