🎼 I love electronic music. What I don’t love about it is that, in this field, women are underrepresented. Does it ring a bell with computer science?  You bet it does!😔

Today, I want to highlight two women I admire : The Blessed Madonna and Gabrielle Deydier. They are both huge, in their respective fields as well as in their lives. The first is an acclaimed DJ, the second is an activist, writer, film-director and actress. In addition to being successful, they are both fat. Fatphobia has shaped their outlook and they are both vocal in exposing fatphobic discrimination. 

Logically, they are both supportive of other underrepresented groups. Knowing a discrimination when they see one, they never fail to support the LGBT community as well.

Back in 2014, when I heard “Stay”, a song produced by The Blessed Madonna (she was then called The Black Madonna and changed her name in 2020), I was 😍. She has remained one of my biggest inspirations ever since. Why? She frequently supports LGBT refugees through her work and helps minorities. One thing you should know about The Blessed Madonna is that she is a music geek and only succeeded to be recognized by the electronic community in her late 30s....

ACCESSIBILITY

🎨 Lisa Charlotte Rost wrote a very interesting article about “What to consider when visualizing data for colorblind readers”. I bumped into this article because we are currently working on the new visual identity of The Allyance’s website. Lisa’s article is both descriptive and solution-oriented. Even if she focused on on how to choose colors for visualizations purposes, she makes sure to give many examples and palettes to help the readers. Don’t miss it!

Quote : “Most of the advice here will make your charts easier to read. Not just for people with a color vision deficiency, or the older ones, or the ones that read your chart in low light – for everyone.”

RECRUITMENT

💻 “How hard is it to hire a female senior software engineer in Europe?” Yulia Kuzmane is sharing insightful data on this topic on behalf of Amazing Hiring. Since Morgane Dalbergue, our Sourcing & Recruitment expert, joined The Allyance a month ago, we have decided to use Amazing Hiring in order to help us reach underrepresented engineers. Our clients very often contact us to help them improve the gender diversity among their teams. Of course, we have always done this with our utmost dedication. But now, we can help our clients with even more precision than before! 

Quote : “We took a deep dive into our 600,000,000 candidates’ profiles database collected from 50+ open sources online.”

AGEISM

📸 The tech industry is not the most inclusive for older people. In France, the average age in startup companies is between 27 and 36 years old. If you feel old while reading this, I am sorry! 

Because representation matters, I am happy to share a free “Age-positive image library launched to tackle negative stereotypes of later life” generously shared by The Centre of Ageing Better (UK). Feel free to use it for communication purposes or to get inspired and create inclusive pictures for your organization.

MANAGEMENT

📊 Scaling is one of the hardest challenges startups have to face. Nilan Peiris, VP Growth at Transferwise, took the time to describe how the company went from 60 to 1 000 people! Even if hiring challenges is not the main focus of this article, I enjoyed the points it makes about management and onboarding. Nilan particularly insists on how defining the culture matters. 

Quote : “One of the biggest misconceptions about autonomous teams is that we have autonomous individuals here at TransferWise. We don’t. That would be anarchy.”

THE FRENCH CORNER

🌈 Si vous ne le saviez pas, le mois de juin est le mois des fiertés. Chez The Allyance, la veille de la Marche des Fiertés parisienne, nous organiserons un webinaire gratuit en présence d’Ingrid Therwath. Docteure en sciences politiques et Co-présidente de l’AJL (l’Association des journalistes LGBTI), elle partagera un historique des mots employés pour décrire les personnes LGBTI et répondra à vos questions. Vous pouvez vous inscrire ici.
➕ Bonus : Nous voulons remercier Marcy Ericka Charollois de WeLoveDevs pour avoir partagé notre webinaire dans son article “L’importance de la diversité dans la tech : la visibilité LGBTQIA+.”

Quand : Le vendredi 25 juin à 12 heures, en ligne.

WHAT'S UP?

🔥 Morgane and I are on fire and currently hiring for many positions : Dev Lead, Front-End & Back-End Engineers, Data Engineers, Machine Learning Engineers, Senior Product roles and a Chief Product Officer!

Dear <<First Name>>, if you know someone who might be interested, feel free to share this newsletter because we would be happy to tell them more about it. You can also share the list of our clients.