Step 3: Keep Your Best People

Role models, mentors, sponsors (both male/female and internal/external) have unspoken codes and culture, as well as policies and procedures; and, they all play an important role in retaining awesome talent. Make sure that your executive leadership and teams are educated, engaged, and committed to instituting and reinforcing policies and behaviors that support a variety of perspectives and promote equitable advancement.

Establish Mentoring Relationships

"Mentoring-in-a-Box: Technical Women at Work" will help you start and sustain a purposeful and rewarding mentoring relationship. Informed by research from academic and business literature and by conversations with mentoring experts in the field, this "Box" resource offers activities and tools to support a mentoring pair, presented in an easy-to-use format. // (ncwit.org/imentor)

Review Your Performance Review (Yes, redundancy helps.)

"Supervising-in-a-Box: Performance Review/Talent Management" provides supervisors with resources for reducing biases in performance evaluation and talent management systems. This "Box" resource includes tip sheets, resources for identifying and reducing biases, templates, evaluation tools, key takeaways, and background information on unconscious biases. // (ncwit.org/supervising)

Deal Directly With Overt Sexism

Sexism has measurably harmful effects, but sexist behavior can be minimized. Instructors and supervisors can practice zero tolerance and facilitate positive peer interactions, and they can provide highly visible leadership, policies, and procedures that go beyond legalities to explicitly denounce sexism. This case study identifies available surveys and issues that should be considered when assessing the prevalence of sexist behavior in an organization. // (ncwit.org/overtsexism)

Entrepreneurial Startup Toolkit: Step 1 | Step 2 | Step 3 | Step 4