Happy International Women’s Day! The global theme for 2023 is #EmbraceEquity, which is part of an ongoing effort to raise awareness around “Why equal opportunities are no longer enough.” Today is a time to highlight achievements made by women, but also an opportunity to become better informed, and collaborate and brainstorm about the path forward.

“People start from different places, so true inclusion and belonging require equitable action.” — internationalwomensday.com

Consider taking a few minutes today to learn about pervasive challenges affecting women, including in the workplace. Since unconscious bias is a major driver of hurdles holding women back, it is beneficial for people of all gender identities to educate ourselves about the varied experiences of others.

Here are some resources to get help get you started:

• Recognize the difference between equity and equality and see why striving for equality can interfere with inclusion-related efforts.

• Read highlights from the Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org to examine factors that are holding women back from advancement and in many cases making them decide to leave a company. One notable statistic: “For every 100 men who are promoted from entry-level roles to manager positions, only 87 women are promoted, and only 82 women of color are promoted.”

• Watch a five-minute video of the history of the concept of intersectionality, explained by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term. Intersectionality refers to the “double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice.”

• Better understand challenges within the tech sector in the report What (and Who) is Holding Women Back in Tech? One finding from this survey, conducted by Girls Who Code and Logitech, is that 90% of women report experiencing microaggressions at work. The report describes key career drivers and the importance of communities of support.

Womenflare is a Cloudflare employee resource group (ERG) for women and people who advocate for women. We are an employee-led group that is here to empower, represent, and support.

At Cloudflare, we are continuing our tradition of building community and celebrating women’s achievements together throughout March. We are also encouraging discussion on equity vs. equality and how we can champion equity for ourselves and those around us with these internal events in the weeks ahead:

• Celebrating with comedy: We are kicking things off with some fun and jokes from Laugh.Events! Offering “Laughter as a Service (LaaS),” they will deliver stand-up comedy, musical comedy, and other comedic activities for a celebratory “Workplace Variety Hour.”

• Equity and allyship chats: After our celebrations, we are opening forums to discuss equity and what this means for each of us in our unique intersectionalities. We have invited some of our fellow employee resource group leads from Asianflare, Nativeflare, and Proudflare to share with us and dive into how we can be both supported and supportive.

• Equity leadership panel: Our internal leadership panels were always well received in previous years, so we decided not to mess with a good thing. This year, we will be inviting another group of inspirational women leaders in Cloudflare to share their experiences with us and explore the areas where we can promote equity in the workplace.

• And more: We have so much more planned for March! From Book Club and meetups to Cloudflare TV episodes and networking events, we are partnering across teams to ensure there are plenty of opportunities to participate and join in on the fun and discussions.

No matter how you plan to celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, consider how you can do your part to champion an equitable world. Join the #IWD2023 movement — #EmbraceEquity today (and every day)!

Learn more about how we are cultivating community, including through employee resource groups like Womenflare, via our careers page—and check out our open positions.

To read about our progress on the UN Ten Principles and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), download our latest Impact Report.

“I would venture to guess that Anon,who wrote so many poems without signing them,was often a woman.” - Virginia Woolf

Welcome to International Women’s Day 2022! Here at Cloudflare, we are happy to celebrate it with you! Our celebration is not only this blog post, but many events prepared for the month of March: our way of honoring Women’s History Month by showcasing women’s empowerment. We want to celebrate the achievements, ideas, passion and work that women bring to the world. We want to advocate for equality and to achieve gender parity. And we want to highlight the brilliant work that our women colleagues do every day. Welcome!

This is a time of celebration but also one to reflect on the current state. The global gender gap is not expected to close for another 136 years. This gap has also worsened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has negatively impacted the lives of women and girls by deepening pre-existing inequalities. Improving this state is a collective effort—we all need to get involved!

First, let’s introduce ourselves. We are Womenflare—Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Group (ERG) for all who identify as and advocate for women. We’re an employee-led group that is here to empower, represent, and support.

Our purpose is not only to celebrate women’s achievements but also to shed a light on inequalities. That is why for International Women’s Day 2022, we’re joining in focusing on the theme of #BreakTheBias throughout our month of events and activities:

Internally, we are kicking off our celebration on March 8. We will be joined by several women from North Coast hip hop improv comedy group. We hope this fun and freestyle event will encourage participants to think about unconscious biases, breaking them down, and how they can get more involved in empowering the women around them.

Following our kick-off celebrations, we’re hosting open discussions about intersectionality and allyship alongside some of our fellow Employee Resource Groups including Afroflare, Asianflare, Flarability, and Nativeflare. It’s important to us to include other ERGs in these conversations since the goal of empowerment, representation, and support is shared among us and can’t be done alone. And we want to play closer attention to the layers that form a person’s social identity, creating compounding experiences of discrimination. “All inequality is not created equal,” says Kimberlé Crenshaw, the law professor who coined “intersectional feminism” term in 1989. Understanding the way different inequalities play a role in a person’s life means understanding the history, systematic discrimination, and the non-uniformity of it.

Last year, we brought together an internal panel of women leaders at Cloudflare to share their journeys and lessons learned. It was extremely well received, so we decided to build upon its success by inviting another group of internal women leaders to discuss their experiences and insights with us. Some important takeaways from these panel discussions have been the realization that most backgrounds and journeys are vastly different, paths to success are often rocky but rewarding, and perseverance, tenacity, and an open mind, often rule the day. What better way to learn from others and encourage more women to lead!

Allyship is integral to systemic change. An ally is someone who recognizes unearned privileges in their lives and takes responsibility to end patterns of injustice. At Cloudflare, we’re working hard to build more diverse and equitable teams, as well as create and maintain an environment that is inclusive and welcoming. There are many actions you can take as an ally; some include:

• Educating yourself: listen to the experiences of your women colleagues and work with them to understand their perspectives.

• Amplifying women’s opinions and advocating for them: speak up for others and champion them when they need support and encouragement.

• Taking action in the workplace: if you see inequality or discrimination happening, reach out to discuss further and understand what can be done.

• Advocating for diversity: talk with your peers and leaders about the ways you can get involved with improving diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s Empowerment Month in your own creative ways! And all throughout the year, remember to empower women and to recognize them in such a way that their work is no longer anonymous. Join the #IWD2022 movement — #BreakTheBias this month and beyond!

Seven months ago, I joined Cloudflare to work on the Public Policy Team focusing on our democracy projects such as Project Galileo, Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns. Since I joined the team, I have learned a lot about how important cybersecurity protections are for organizations that are the target of sophisticated cyberattacks, while also learning about the complex election security environment in the United States and abroad.

It seems fitting that on International Women’s Day, a day people throughout the world are celebrating the achievements of women, we also celebrate the Centennial Anniversary of the Women’s Suffrage Movement which was the tipping point that gave many women voting rights in the United States.

Since I have been working on Cloudflare’s election security projects, this day means something extra special to me and many of my colleagues who believe that voting is the cornerstone of democracy and that having access to information regarding voting and elections is essential.

Here are five reflections that I want to share on International Women’s Day and the Centennial Anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment which granted women the right to vote in the United States:

The Women’s Suffrage movement burst into view in the United States in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, where participants introduced the notion that women deserved their own political identity and that a righteous government cannot exist without equal rights for all. These organizers passed the torch to the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, founded in 1913, which raised awareness through distributing pamphlets at street meetings, organizing parades, speaking tours, and petitioning Congress to pass legislation on the movement. In 1919, the Senate passed the Nineteenth Amendment and it was officially ratified on August 26, 1920.

With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, it technically granted women the right to vote. However, due to widespread inequality within the ranks of the women’s suffrage movement who primarily focused on white middle-class interests, many African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and American Indian women did not receive the right to vote until later in the century. African American women were not guaranteed the right to vote until the Voting Right Acts of 1965. During the height of the civil rights movement, The Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson to prohibit racial discrimination in voting.

Much has changed since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The Center for American Women and Politics in the United States reports that in every presidential election since 1964, the number of female voters has exceeded the number of male voters.

There has also been a historical increase of women in elected offices around the world. This is evident with the highest number of women ever elected to the U.S. Congress in 2018, Slovakia electing the first female president, the United Kingdom electing 220 female MPs to the House of Commons, women making up 49% of Senate of the Republic of Mexico and female Prime Ministers in Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Foundationally, the right to vote is a nonpartisan issue that benefits the interest of the country, strengthens our democracy, and with more women in office, it promotes diversity of thought and experience.

The way we share information has evolved dramatically from distributing pamphlets in 1913 to millions of people sharing information on the Internet across the world in 2020. State and local governments now use their election websites as the primary source to provide up to date announcements and information on how to register to vote, find designated polling stations, and access election results. Political campaigns use their digital infrastructure to release information about their policies, accept donations, recruit volunteers and give updates on the campaign to increase supporters’ engagement.

Voting is a crucial tenet of our democratic system and regardless of circumstance, individuals should have access to the information necessary to exercise their rights without outside interference. At Cloudflare, our mission is to build a better Internet and part of that is ensuring that users have access to accurate, trusted information, in a safe environment. With many upcoming elections in 2020, it is important that we have confidence in the democratic processes and that starts with ensuring their website infrastructure and internal teams are secure against malicious efforts to take them offline and shake voter’s faith in democracy.

Cloudflare has made election security a priority, investing our time in the Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns as political campaigns and state and local government election websites are the first line of defense in election security. In 2016, it was reported by the Department of Homeland Security that state and local government election infrastructure in all 50 states were targeted during the Presidential election. Fast forward to 2020, we are protecting more than 170 state and local government election websites and providing services to 18 of the 32 U.S. Presidential campaigns.

Therefore, it seems fitting that we celebrate the Centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment and International Women’s Day, highlighting the achievement of women throughout history and the importance of voter confidence in the democratic institutions that many fought to participate and have their voices heard.

Working at Cloudflare has allowed me to learn how important access to information is to Internet users, and voters across the world, and I am proud to work for a company that supports strengthening democracy.

If you are interested in learning more about our election project, please visit cloudflare.com/athenian/ & cloudflare.com/campaigns/usa/.

Competing for security talent in the tech industry - where every company is investing heavily on security - isn't easy. But, in 18 months, we have grown our team 400% from under 10 people to almost 50 (and still hiring). We are proud that 40% of our team are women and 25% are from an under-represented minority. We believe from experience, and the research shows, that more diverse teams drive better business results and can be a better place to work.

In honor of International Women’s Day this Sunday, we wanted to share some of our lessons learned on how to build a diverse team and inclusive culture on a modern security team.

• Our effort to build a diverse team starts from the moment we draft a job posting. We try to choose language that will resonate with a broad set of candidates, and question proposed “prerequisites” for a role such as college degrees or a minimum or maximum set of experience. For example, we choose language that invites people looking to grow, and avoid militaristic terms often seen in security job descriptions.

• We are open to considering multiple locations where a role can be based. Cloudflare has 13 offices around the world. We have been flexible in which office our team members can join.

• We don’t rely on one hiring source. We strive for multiple hiring sources. We appreciate employee referrals and do company-wide presentations frequently to keep our team’s open positions top of mind across our 1200-person company. We love candidates who apply through Cloudflare's online careers site because they read a Cloudflare blog post and find it interesting, or are a happy Cloudflare customer in some way. We help fuel this source of candidates by writing blog posts on a wide range of topics like here and here. We also believe in proactively reaching out to potential candidates (see more in the next point). Having three strong channels in which we are meeting candidates makes hiring a bit easier.

• Proactively reaching out to passive candidates can be hard for some hiring managers. We work hard to make everyone on our team better at this. We partnered with our recruiting team to train our security team on how to use LinkedIn and Eightfold to find potential people to reach out to, and we encourage our leaders to go to meetups and the networking components of conferences and to ask respected industry peers for referrals. Our hiring managers then reach out directly with a personalized message. Our response rate is over 10% when we take the time to personalize the messaging to fit the particular possible candidate.

• We think long-term about team-building and know that it might take six months to a year to close promising passive candidates. We build a relationship by sharing updates on the company as well as new problems we are trying to solve, and over time we have seen these candidates come to appreciate the company and work and then join our team.

• We do proactive engagement at a number of conferences and events such as the Grace Hopper conference, AfroTech, and the International Association of Minority Cybersecurity Professionals events. We also look to build relationships and hire through organizations dedicated to placing minority candidates such as Path Forward.

• We leverage our internship program to broaden our candidate pool and change perception about viable backgrounds for roles. It is easier to convince people to consider candidates from less “pedigreed” schools or with skills developed outside traditional educational paths through direct exposure to those who’ve taken different routes but share the same passion for security. We’ve found some amazing interns who’ve proven themselves on short intern stints with us, and already progressed into full-time roles.

• We make sure we put together the right interview panel for the candidate: that means not only evaluating the candidate thoroughly but also giving the candidate the opportunity to look across the table at someone they feel comfortable asking “can someone like us succeed here?” You are not just using the interview process to evaluate the candidate, you are showing the candidate who you are as a team.

• We hold ourselves accountable by reviewing metrics on hiring and retention. Our company leadership team gathers once a week to review data on how the entire company is doing, including looking at how we are doing at building a diverse workforce and what we can do to improve. And we don’t just look at diversity in general, we look at diversity across management, and for those in management, we also consider things like span of control.

• We also get great support from our co-founders and other executives directly in our hiring process. They are always willing to spend extra time introducing people to the company, our mission, and our values. One of them will always be the last person to meet the candidate on their final interview. You can’t beat a welcoming message from the top.

The work doesn’t stop with getting a great set of people with complementary skills to come work at Cloudflare. To us, diversity is a means to the end of developing a highly productive team, not an end in itself. And, it turns out that hiring a diverse team is not a moment to celebrate success, it is a moment where leadership responsibility increases. A diverse team - made up of people from various backgrounds who don’t automatically feel at ease with one another - is not a guarantee of success. To cultivate a truly productive team requires a culture of openness to differences and a willingness for people to share their unique perspectives with people who are different.

We obsess over making sure all these great people who decided to join will also decide to stay for the long-term. We identified a number of ways we could build a community that welcomes people from different backgrounds and celebrates open debate.

• We’ve moved on from the media-favored image of security professionals as “hackers” and instead focus on innovation and empathy as our core values. We believe our role is more akin to a scientist designing a cure for a disease, a teacher helping a student solve a hard problem, or a nurse responding to a person in need of treatment. While we still need the skill to be able to break things and consider the attacker mindset we are responsible for combating, we will not succeed if we cannot stand in the shoes of our customers and empathize with their plight when we roll out painful security requirements.

• We talk regularly about how team members must have a stronger than usual commitment to developing the “psychological safety” necessary for everyone to believe their opinions are welcome and valued and will contribute to the greater good.

• We counter the risk that security work can become very reactive by promoting a spirit of innovation. That has led to us already open sourcing multiple solutions, contributing to development of Cloudflare products, and presenting at security conferences. We are strategic about what solutions we should build ourselves and what we should buy from other vendors, always staying current on what’s new.

• Our team decided to pick a logo, and we ended up choosing an orange-to-pink hued phoenix because they represent resilience and optimism: A phoenix never dies; instead, she always rises from the ashes and becomes more majestic each time around. This embodies the security mindset -- we help Cloudflare bounce back from attacks and security incidents, reemerging stronger and more secure than ever. It's easy to feel like you never "win" against constantly evolving adversaries. Knowing that we are the phoenix, destined to bounce back from whatever setbacks we face, helps us stay optimistic no matter what we face. And of course, the image of a phoenix also fits well with the core Cloudflare name and brand. Not your typical security imagery, but something that we are proud to wear on our t-shirts because it represents our team.

• We encourage every member of our organization to work on something that is outside their sub-team’s subject area so they interact with the broader team and also have a sense of personal career development.

• We take our work very seriously and know when to say “Let’s get down to business” like Mulan in the Disney movie (which we’ve heard team members sing), but don’t take ourselves too seriously. We keep it light around the office.

• We change our seating arrangements regularly to encourage expanding relationship circles.

• We ask team members across the organization to lead meetings and give presentations to the whole group.

• We promote from within. Five team members have been promoted into first-time manager roles.

• We have open-ended manager round-tables to discuss vulnerable topics relating to growing a diverse team.

• We support our team members playing active roles in company Employee Resource Groups such as here and speaking up on topics outside our core areas of expertise.

• We take time for team-building activities. Some of our best practices are to keep the events during business hours and limit those that include alcohol.

• We celebrate success. In the security world, external recognition is more often given for failure than success. Most companies don’t celebrate the prevention of harm, they celebrate new products and new business. If you are not careful, a security team can feel isolated from the rest of the company because its work is not directly tied to generating revenue and even worse can be perceived as blocking progress.

One of our favorite meetings was an informal risk review session we had with our engineers during which we white-boarded what we all thought were our biggest risk areas. It was great in the moment because it was such a collaborative session where everyone felt comfortable speaking up about their fears. No two people saw things the same way, but all were open to hearing other perspectives and many of us in the moment changed how we thought about priorities. And what made it an all-time experience was how even though we may have left the meeting a bit discouraged about all we needed to do, within a week every team member had stepped forward and volunteered to work on one of the hardest challenges. Looking back a bit over a year later, we have made strong progress in reducing all the risks identified in that meeting, and we did it together as a team.

Security is hard work, and the work is never done. But bringing together a diverse team with a positive culture has helped our team get a lot of hard and stressful work done well. There is a lot more we can do to keep things moving in the right direction for our team members and company and we welcome additional suggestions for improvements in our approaches.