A gender transition, while a personal choice, truly requires a village. Without a community of people supporting or even just recognizing your identity, it’s tough to express yourself freely, let alone do good work. And if our systems and processes do not recognize our people effectively, it also creates a barrier to our work. So for the past several months, Tara Robertson worked with many others to introduce some guidelines and a policy around gender transitioning.
The goal of these is to help managers and coworkers — often keen to do the right thing, but sometimes anxious on getting the specifics wrong — create a welcoming environment so we can all do the work needed to advance our mission.
And, like many of our D&I initiatives, the world is taking notice. Last week, Tara and this work were profiled by leading publication Forbes. The interview provides greater insight into all that’s involved in supporting our staff. And, we really liked this quote from Tara: “It’s not just about the people who are transgender; to make an inclusive workplace, everyone needs to understand how they can be part of that.”
Importantly, our focus on data and objective reasoning can often lead us to think more about Diversity & Inclusion’s “D” (looking at a snapshot view of who is here), and less of its equally important “I” (creating a place where a range of people are free to do their best work).
These policies were rolled out by some accompanying webinars for both managers and individual contributors. Over 30% of us at Mozilla have watched them so far.