Please describe your proposed solution.
Catalyst Women is a space for learning, collaboration, and creation rooted in behaviors and intentions that support women as builders within Cardano.
We have launched this project in January 2022 with the aim is to give women the confidence to take action and participate to their full potential within Catalyst, where they might otherwise have remained as an observer.
Why is this necessary?
When the subtle but powerful differences between males and females are celebrated and optimized in collaboration ecosystems thrive, empathy soars, personal development grows. Communication, confidence, leadership, and teamwork are maximized to their full potential.
People naturally draw confidence and cues about how they should behave from the culture of their environment. How they perceive themselves within the environment, how comfortable they feel to contribute, and how their ideas and inputs are received impact their desire to take action.
In any given environment, the minority group is on the backfoot when it comes to the culture of the space being aligned with their way of being. Unless however, the people in this environment are highly self-aware and have the ability to overcome inbuilt biases and overpowering behaviors. Or, the individual has a high degree of confidence and a strong ability to communicate to the dominant group.
Less than 5% of Cardano are women.
When there are significantly fewer women in an environment, the unbalanced nature of that environment has shown to favor the male majority way of operating, and to miss beneficial approaches that are not considered. For many women, this means they are less likely to voice their opinions and ideas and less likely to be heard.
So we created this inclusive space in the name of women, as an environment to allow everyone to be heard, to nurture new ideas, build trusted relationships, and provide pathways into Catalyst.
Carado Women is a testing and development ground for ideas and initiatives that, over time, will bring more balance to environments within Catalyst. We seek collaboration with everyone so that the people building within Cardano are able to contribute to their full potential, and are representative of the people of the world.
With the growing interest and the trusted community that we have created, another idea emerged - the weekly Women In Blockchain(WiB) meetings every Thursday.
Weekly Women in Blockchain Meetings
The Women of Blockchain is a group founded by members of Cardano Catalyst Women to help build awareness of Cardano and to help build an inclusive blockchain industry.
We believe that stronger collaboration comes from forging real connections, which is why Women of Blockchain currently provides weekly networking and collaborative space to women across chains.
Supporting an Inclusive Pipeline for Blockchain
Supportive professional groups are essential to building the pipeline of diversity in technology, including blockchain.
Project Catalyst’s inclusive environment is already helping Cardano lead the way for the blockchain industry to help meet UN SDG goals. And we want to help accelerate bringing the UN SDG goal of gender equality to fruition.
But why is an inclusive blockchain important? We can look to other examples to understand.
A World Economic Forum blog post cited the following examples of why inclusion in essential to technology:
- Early speech recognition software struggled to recognise women’s voices.
- Having been designed by and tested on men, when airbags were first introduced they disproportionately injured women and children.
- Apple released a health app that could keep track of a wide-ranging set of health metrics but initially failed to account for menstruation.
Supporting materials:
<https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/women-in-business-why-we-all-need-a-support-group/>
<https://www.ellevatenetwork.com/articles/9336-a-fresh-look-at-a-long-standing-problem-using-blockchain-to-achieve-gender-equity>
<https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/the-tech-industry-needs-more-women-heres-how-to-make-it-happen-d1eec473-48cc-4801-bd40-dfba040b0e4a/>
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
Types of activities that we are already doing since the beginning of the year 2022:
- After Town Hall meetings - speaker focused or featuring Catalyst community members - personal stories and projects. Every Wednesday at 5pm UTC.
- Weekly Women in Blockchain - general discussions for cross-chain collaboration and a safe space to ask the “unasked” questions. Every Thursday ay 6pm UTC.
- Social media management
- Cross-chain speaker sourcing
- PR activities
Alignment with Challenge KPIs:
- A group of people who has proved their consistent actions and willingness to make contributions to the ecosystem.
- Opening the doors to other communities can increase the number of Catalyst members and broaden their perspectives and knowhow.
- Learning from other open source communities
- Increasing the brand awareness and bringing in curious developers from outside of the Cardano community.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
Risk of not delivering: Speakers might postpone events because of busy schedule which could create a delay and mess in our agenda. In order to make sure that we always have a speaker, we should have secured a couple of speakers ahead.
Risk of not adopting: With the rise of the Cardano Catalyst community, the ATH rooms become more and there are many interesting events happening at the same time. In order to make sure we always have an audience, we should rely on effective communication and high quality content.
Risk of not reaching the desired outcome: There is a possibility that we might not be able to have different cross-chain speakers every month so in this case, we are featuring Cardano Catalyst community members in order to showcase the personal stories of the people building our community.