Wolt invites more women to join the tech industry
At Wolt, 47% of our entire team are women, and we’re very proud to have so many amazing women work hard to build Wolt across all areas of our business.
One of them is Marianne Vikkula, who is the VP of New Markets at Wolt. She joined in 2018 as a launcher to take Wolt to new countries. Under her leadership, Wolt has expanded from 6 countries in Northern Europe to 23 countries around the world. She has also run Wolt’s launch and business in Japan, and today she is building our own retail business with Wolt Market.
A challenge for us is that only 17% of the people who work in our product development – meaning our engineers, data scientists and analysts, product leads and product designers – identify as women. Getting more women to build technology, apps and software is a big challenge not only for us, but for technology companies at large. In fact, out of the people who work in the tech industry only about 25–30% are women*. We want to encourage more women to join the tech industry, because we’ve seen what a difference it makes.
Why does this matter?
It’s simple: more diverse and inclusive teams build better products. We can understand the needs of different kinds of people better when we have different kinds of people on our team. Research** also shows that inclusive teams perform up to 30% better. This is the result of several key advantages diverse and inclusive teams can give an organization, for example better access to top talent, an increased sense of belonging, increased employee engagement and better decision-making.
Sissi Ye is the Director of Product, Retail at Wolt. Her team is building technology to enable merchants of all sizes to join Wolt’s platform, and have their products delivered to customers of the digital era. Sissi joined Wolt in 2019 and she has played a critical role in Wolt’s expansion from the delivery of restaurant food to the delivery of everything. Sissi leads a team of 30+ people.
What is Wolt doing to challenge the status quo?
In addition to wanting to encourage more women to apply to jobs at Wolt, we of course want to make Wolt a welcoming place to work for everyone. More, concretely, here are some actions we’ll be taking this year:
- We’ll offer training for our leadership, team leads and recruitment teams on diversity, equity & inclusion, starting with understanding unconscious bias, how to provide a safe environment and how to use inclusive language.
- We’ve formed a project team for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to help look at our gaps and take actions. We have also recently hired a dedicated People Partner and an Employer Brand Lead for our product teams, with the focus to add diversity and inclusion into our tech teams.
- We’ve started building safe communities internally for underrepresented groups and anyone who wants to learn and share.
- We’re kicking off partnerships with Women in Tech and Mimmit koodaa (women code) to encourage more women to join the tech industry and to start coding.
- We’re doing more to publicly address the situation, for example by sharing the growth stories of some of the women who work at Wolt. We’re also encouraging more of our women to speak at events and to be active in the women in tech community.
- We’re creating a Wolt-wide guidance for writing gender neutral job ads.
- We’re conducting regular analyses to identify any gender gaps in compensation levels.
- We’re starting a mentorship program to encourage more women at Wolt to take on roles in leadership and support their growth.
What else should we be doing? We encourage you to reach out to us if you have ideas for more actions we can take: responsibility@wolt.com.
Some facts about women at Wolt
- 47% of the entire Wolt team identify as women. We are lucky to have incredibly talented women across all the Wolt teams, ranging from leadership to country and operations managers, people in marketing, brand and legal, as well as in product, support and HR. (40% of our team identify as men, 12.8% didn’t answer and 0.2% identify as other as of February 2022.)
- 24% of our leadership team are women, and we hope to see more women as leaders. The women in our current leadership are responsible for the expansion of Wolt’s business, building our new retail vertical, leading our legal side as well as our comms & PR globally.
- 32% of our General Managers and Regional General Managers are women. They run the show in Estonia, Germany, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Norway.
- 45% of our country operations teams are women, in charge of our marketing, courier operations and partnerships across our 23 countries.
If you want to learn more about career opportunities at Wolt, and join the team to build amazing experiences for our customers and partners, please check our open jobs.
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