{"id":548,"date":"2021-12-06T12:20:21","date_gmt":"2021-12-06T20:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/?p=548"},"modified":"2022-09-06T12:29:15","modified_gmt":"2022-09-06T19:29:15","slug":"mozilla-api-resource-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/mozilla-api-resource-group\/","title":{"rendered":"Mozilla API, a resource group for Asian and Pacific Islander Mozillians and allies"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s <\/i>our mission<\/i><\/a> at Mozilla to build an internet that includes everyone, regardless of demographics and opportunities, and we\u2019re building our team the same way. We believe our growing list of Mozilla Resource Groups (MRGs) \u2014 Afrozillians, Disability@Mozilla, Latin Pride, Mozilla API, Pridezilla, and Women of Mozilla \u2014 are critical to our success.<\/i><\/p>\n

We also believe that the best way to understand these groups is through the people in them. Below, Senior Data Science Manager Julie Hollek explains why Mozilla API is important to her, what the company does to support its goals, and what she hopes for D&I at Mozilla going forward.<\/i><\/p>\n

\n

Why did you join Mozilla API?<\/b><\/p>\n

When I first came to Mozilla, I felt my race in ways I hadn\u2019t in previous jobs. Women in tech are almost always underrepresented; I was more used to that. But about 17 percent of Mozilla employees are Asian or Asian American, which is much lower than your average tech company\u2060. I wanted to be part of changing that\u2060 \u2014 helping make space for people. I\u2019m a Korean adoptee, so I grew up sort of standing on the edge of two cultures. I know what it\u2019s like to be seen as an outsider.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/b>I actually got involved in D&I before the MRG even existed \u2060\u2014 through the Finance and Business Ops (FBO) organization, which the Data Science team is part of. Our CFO at the time, Roxi Wen, is Asian American, and she was very passionate about making sure that everyone in the org felt welcome and that our experiences were acknowledged and represented. She started a council within FBO that was thinking about some of these same issues.<\/p>\n

Then around the beginning of 2021, when the spike in anti-API hate crimes started making more headlines, I think people really saw the need for a Mozilla-wide community. When you\u2019re trying to do your job, and meanwhile people who look like you are getting attacked \u2014 it\u2019s important to have a dedicated space to talk about things like that. So Leslie Gray, our head of D&I, started working with a few of us on what a group might look like. We took a few months to organize and had a big kickoff in May, which in the U.S. is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.<\/p>\n

Tell us about some of the group\u2019s activities so far.<\/b><\/p>\n

Outside of Heritage Month, most of the activity happens in our Slack channel. Those conversations are pretty wide-ranging. We have Photo Fridays, where we share travel memories and food and other life highlights. When Michelle Zauner\u2019s memoir Crying in H Mart <\/i>came out, we talked about that. We\u2019ve also had a Slack bot that shared a new piece of art every day from the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which was cool.<\/p>\n

And then for Heritage Month, we organized several activities<\/a>\u2060 \u2014 there was a cooking class where people learned to make Chicken Adobo; we curated a playlist<\/a> and shared music during All Hands; and we had a couple of conversations that were open to the rest of the team. One was a sort of gathering where we talked about anti-Asian violence. The other was a panel of API Mozillians from across the company and foundation \u2014 all the way up to the C-suite \u2014 sharing their experiences as Asian Americans. I think the discussions have been so powerful. There\u2019s often a tension, especially in East Asian cultures with roots in Confucianism, between speaking up and keeping a sort of stiff upper lip. So it\u2019s good to have a forum where we can say \u2014 and our allies can hear \u2014 the things we\u2019re usually quiet about.<\/p>\n

How has the company shown support for D&I, and Asian and Pacific Islander Mozillians in particular?<\/b><\/p>\n

One thing I\u2019ve noticed is that our leaders are very open about our diversity metrics \u2014 both where we are now, and where we want to be \u2014 and those metrics include API representation right alongside representation of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous Mozillians. We get D&I updates in every company meeting, and we also share our progress publicly<\/a>. I think that accountability is important.<\/p>\n

There are little things, too. I remember not long after I joined, at our All Hands in Berlin, they were handing out little red envelopes with a dollar and a Mandarin orange to celebrate the Lunar New Year. It felt like such a warm welcome, to have something like that acknowledged.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve also done a lot of D&I work directly in the Finance and Business Ops organization, especially around hiring. In our behavioral interview, we have a specific question about how the candidate has contributed to fostering inclusion in their workplaces. That\u2019s what you really want \u2014 not just culture fit, but culture add. We\u2019re looking for people who will help push us in the direction we want to go.<\/p>\n

And on my team, we\u2019ve added a D&I element to our development framework \u2014 so if you want to grow your career here, engagement with D&I is part of how you\u2019re assessed. The framework is based on Mozilla\u2019s community participation guidelines<\/a>, and it covers things like actively seeking opinions from team members with varied experiences, all the way up to contributing to the design, implementation, and measurement of Mozilla\u2019s D&I programs. I\u2019m a big fan of building in processes like that. Yes, you should want to do it anyway, just because it\u2019s right. But it helps when something has teeth. If nothing else, it\u2019s an entry point for talking more actively about D&I; I\u2019ve had members of my team say, \u201cHey, I don\u2019t think I\u2019m there yet. What can I do to improve?\u201d There\u2019s been a lot of positive feedback so far, and we\u2019ve actually scaled the process to the rest of the FBO org at this point. I\u2019d love to see it keep growing.<\/p>\n

What would you like to see going forward \u2014 for the MRG, and for D&I at Mozilla?<\/b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

For the MRG itself, I\u2019d like to host more discussions like the ones we\u2019ve had so far. I think we also have room to grow in terms of engaging with the API community outside of Mozilla. My team, for example, hosted Mozilla\u2019s exhibitor booth at the Student Data Science Symposium<\/a> held by the Atlanta University Center, a consortium of historically Black colleges. I think those relationships are so important \u2014 and it takes time, effort, and consistency to build them right.<\/p>\n

At the company level, I want to see us keep pushing toward the demography of our users. As we think about the products we\u2019re building, we need more people who can speak to a range of experiences. When it comes to our data practices, for instance, how do we build out something like Firefox Suggest<\/a> to serve all users, versus one specific subset? Some of the groups most likely to experience things like algorithmic violence often have little to no voice in tech. To change that, we have to hire.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019d also love to see us think beyond hiring. Diversity is one thing; equity, inclusion, and belonging can be trickier. You have to figure out what they mean to you before you can set clear goals. I\u2019m hopeful, though. We aren\u2019t where we want to be, but even in less than two years since I joined, I\u2019ve seen a lot of changes that are directionally correct. And I think Mozilla is very good at doing hard things, and doing them well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s our mission at Mozilla to build an internet that includes everyone, regardless of demographics and opportunities, and we\u2019re building our team the same way. We believe our growing list … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":554,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[466909,318942,30710],"tags":[466911],"coauthors":[306191],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}