Back to All Stories

Last week kicked off the annual Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco, bringing together over 1,500 lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer and women of color and their allies from across all areas of technology. This year’s summit had a unique focus on space, science, and hardware. At the end of the Friday keynote, Leanne Pittsford, founder of Lesbians Who Tech, shared four ways for queer women to impact the tech community and the world: take risks, experiment, show up, and give back. As a proud sponsor of Lesbians Who Tech, we wanted to share how Salesforce demonstrates these learnings to support queer women in tech.

Take Risks

Around this time last year, Marc Benioff kicked off an initiative to ensure men and women at Salesforce were paid equally. This is in addition to existing efforts around equal advancement, and equal opportunity. Now, Salesforce is one step closer for equality for all and on a clear path to increase diversity and inclusion at all levels of our organization. We are excited to rally around this goal and continue to foster diversity and inclusion for all employees.

Experiment

Outforce is our employee resource group dedicated to fostering diversity and inclusion for people of all genders and all sexual orientations. This year, we are experimenting ways to diversify our employee-elected Outforce leadership team by adding six new representative roles: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Asexual, Queer, and Ally. These visible leaders represent the various identities that exist within our community and provide valuable input for diversity programs.

Show Up

At last year’s summit, Kara Swisher, CEO of Re/code, interviewed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff where he emphasized the importance of prioritizing advancing women into executive leadership roles. Anna Saraceno, the global Lesbian Representative for Outforce, travelled from Indiana to attend the conference: “It was incredibly inspiring and empowering to be at an event with such diverse attendees, all of whom are making impressive contributions to the tech world. From seeing Edie Windsor talk about life as a female lead engineer at IBM in the 50’s and 60’s, to hearing Tiffany Dockery, Product Manager at Amazon, talk about overcoming imposter syndrome when you don’t ‘fit the mold’, I left the summit with a new sense of drive and confidence.”

Give Back

At Dreamforce last September, we held 15 coding workshops in the Dev Zone and at Salesforce.org Expo for 375+ middle and high school students from all over the Bay Area. These classes were hosted by world-class organizations such as ​Black Girls CODE and Girls Who Code. Seventeen years ago, Salesforce set out to create a new kind of company—with a new technology model, a new business model and a new integrated corporate philanthropy model—the 1-1-1 model. The 1-1-1 model contributes 1% of Salesforce’s equity, employee time and product back into the community. To celebrate these 17 amazing years, we're taking the giving to a whole new level with five action-packed days of volunteering during Global Volunteer Week starting on March 7th. Through our 1-1-1 philanthropy model, we pledge 1% of equity, product, and employee time for local communities. Will you take the pledge?

Interested in working at Salesforce? Visit our careers page or learn more about diversity at Salesforce.