On Wednesday, September 2nd we hosted our event “One Year of the <wit> project.” We had the pleasure to host Tami Reiss as our main speaker. Tami is the brilliant mind behind Just Not Sorry - “The Gmail Plug-in that helps you send more confident emails by warning you when you use words which undermine your message.” Just Not Sorry has been covered in NYTimes, Glamour, Vogue, NPR, Fast Company - and many more news outlets. She is a product strategy leader with 15+ years of experience helping startups, established enterprise companies, and community profit organizations define their product strategy and set up product organizations for scale.

Here are her “Top 10 Tami Takeaways”:

1. If you are a woman, find a male mentor

Let them understand why what's happening to you is different than what they experience. If you are a woman and you're looking for a mentor, yes, find a female mentor, But also find a male mentor because only then will they start understanding the challenges that women encounter when it comes to workplace negotiations and dynamics.

2. Provide opportunity for what I'm going to call synergies.

I love what the wit project is doing. They see that nonprofits need to up their technology. They see women need to have the experience and to build a portfolio in technology. So that’s what I mean by this - figure out where the pieces fit together.

3. Wherever you are working, insist on objectivity in your hiring practices…

Insist on scorecards, insist on there being people, checking off numbers as to how people are ranked, not in a matter of what they look like, but do they have the skills needed.

4. And encourage transparency about your hiring practices too!

Encourage transparency from your leadership about what they're doing to encourage diversity.

5. Create a fair family leave policy

To me this is one of the most important things any company can do. That is for both parents — independent of whether or not those parents are the same gender or different genders, independent of whether that child was born naturally, through surrogate, through adoption or anything else. When men start sharing the work at home and they start recognizing what that is about and they bond with their children, they are more likely to understand what it is like for their female counterparts, for their female employees and why that is difficult.

6. Challenge the status quo.

And encourage your leadership to do the same.

7. Find hacks that help.

There are things you can do quite easily to elevate women and people of color. There is a Slack plug-in that when anyone types “you guys” it'll say, “did you mean y'all?” You can set this up around five minutes. Use little hacks like this to help other people become more aware of their language.

8. Everybody should walk into the room with the confidence of a mediocre white man.

Enough said!

9. Communicate with confidence, but still, be yourself.

10. Build tools that help.

Find tools that help you learn and discover. These can be something so simple as an App that is meant for women to learn about investing. Women do not take enough equity in the companies they work for, and it causes a lack of wealth down the line, and you should be investing in yourself and you should be investing in the market.

10 TAKEAWAYS FROM OUR EVENT WITH TAMI REISS