In Celebration of International Women’s Day 2018, Bowery Capital is proud to announce our participation in Project #MovingForward. Project #MovingForward is an open-source directory that pools diversity, inclusion, and anti-harassment commitments from VCs. Participating VCs include Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, First Round Capital and over 50 other VC funds across the US. We have all established our commitment to move forward by sharing current progress in the wake of the discrimination and harassment experiences bravely shared in the past year.
At Bowery Capital, we are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and diversity. For us, it means more than just saying this and we thus strive to maintain a public presence where all of our employees, entrepreneurs, limited partners, and service providers understand what this means to us, help us grow, and hopefully follow our lead. To that end there are several things that we have been building and now release to the public for all to understand.
1. The Bowery Manifesto. We have a focused mission, values, and vision that we call The Bowery Manifesto. This document pushes the firm towards an environment where everyone contributes and the best ideas win. While this has been publicly available on our Slideshare account for a long time, we are now starting to talk more and more about it. It seems obvious that everyone should have a guiding document like this and we hope by promoting ours it encourages more and more people to create.
2. Bowery Capital Code Of Conduct. We enforce and publicly promote our Code of Conduct. This is not just another blog post and we memorialize it so anyone that interacts with our firm can see our public posture towards how we build and grow our workplace. This is another way we are supporting the work of project #movingforward.
3. Bowery Capital Annual Gender Study. Moving forward, we are going to release a gender study that keeps us honest. Here is the 2017 study we released last year. In the document, it lays out the key constituents that we interact with the most (founders, team, event speakers). Today 0% of our founders are female, 38% of our team members are female, and 12% of our event speakers are female. We think we are able to really change the ratio around these three areas and will continue to keep ourselves moving in the right direction in support of project #movingforward.
Our Director of Talent, Jessica Bernido, will be the firm contact responsible for reporting harassment or discrimination, as well as the point person for all firm related initiatives as they relate to diversity and inclusion. By providing a formal point-of-contact, we aim to make sure that entrepreneurs, employees and everyone associated with the firm feel comfortable sharing incidences of harassment or discrimination, and believe that we can foster an environment of honesty, transparency and accountability.
If you liked “Announcing Our Involvement In Project #MovingForward” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog.
