Earlier this year, Crunchbase publicly committed to an Anti-Racism Action Plan. Crunchbase recognizes that inequalities have existed in our society for centuries, not just at this moment in time, and we want to be at the forefront of this movement to create lasting change. Crunchbase has been implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies for years, and now want to check in with you all about how it’s going in relation to our Action Plan.
Unconscious Bias Training
One of our commitments is to “conduct third-party run anti-bias training on an annual basis.” We’ve done unconscious bias training in the past and are continuing to do them each year. This year, Crunchbase was lucky enough to have LifeLabs Learning share their Behaviours of Inclusion training. Our team learned more about our unconscious biases and how that can impact our daily interactions at work. We learned some techniques to better practice inclusion and actually leverage our differences. Some key learnings include: understanding our own biases and how to work with them, ways to open a conversation to others in group settings, and how to speak up about microaggressions. We also learned how to better communicate by taking the time to pause and truly understand before reacting to one another.
On top of this, our managers are trained to foster inclusion and to be aware of biases that could occur in promotion cycles, hiring decisions, or daily life. We’ve also taken these learnings further and are training all of our interviewers on how to mitigate biases during the interview process. We’re not just training our employees about unconscious biases, but we’re embedding these concepts into all of our practices and in the way we work together.
Equality Day
Crunchbase also committed to “bring in external speakers from underrepresented groups to lead discussions… to help educate Crunchbase employees to better understand different backgrounds/issues.” Crunchbase partnered with FitPros to celebrate Women’s Equality Day. They guided our team on an introspective journey by Jess Pettitt called “Messages I Learned.” Our team was challenged to first determine what thoughts and beliefs we have around gender. From there grow to better determine what sort of social work and promises ought to come next. We are inspired to push forward and work to ensure the equality of all.
We’ve also acted on many of our other commitments like capturing diversity information on companies and venture firms, donating to philanthropies supporting underrepresented groups, and shifting the way we hire top talent. Here’s a snapshot of some of the steps we’ve made. We will continue driving these changes within our company as well as through the platform we’ve created. Thanks for keeping us accountable and pushing more companies to make changes towards an equal world.