🌈 Rainbow Alliance, a safe group created for our people to talk about all things LGBTQIA+.

💙 Women @ Wolt, making Wolt a better workplace for our women and non-binary team members.

🚀 Close to doubling the share of women team leads in our product development in the past year.

🥳 Welcoming our new diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) lead, who will join us next week.

These are just a few concrete things happening at Wolt when it comes to creating a safe, equal and inclusive workplace. 

To celebrate International Women’s Day, which takes place tomorrow, we wanted to summarize where we are on our DEI journey and on the progress we’ve made in promoting gender equality and DEI overall. Read on to learn more!

Our approach to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

In 2021, we kicked off our DEI efforts by rallying a small bunch of passionate volunteers, aka the ‘DEI crew’! We started by focusing on hiring, training and communications and piloted various initiatives, including our Safe at Work survey and our first Employee Resource Group (ERG), the Rainbow Alliance, was also created as a way for us to support LGBTQIA+ communities. 

In 2022, we worked on making DEI a part of our global strategy at Wolt. We welcomed an executive sponsor to drive DEI matters and discussions in our leadership team. They collaborate with our DEI crew through mentoring and make sure our company strategy and DEI goals are aligned.

We also spent time building our DEI project groups with volunteer team members, goals and actions.

Our DEI  projects currently include:

• Rainbow Alliance: supporting and maintaining a safe community for our people to discuss LGBTQIA+ topics through the Rainbow Alliance Slack community and related activities.
• Women @ Wolt (driven by team Japan): making Wolt a better workplace for women at Wolt. Our Japan team has worked on a collection of amazing initiatives such as career stories and mentorship, launching a guest speaker series, DEI training and building our internal community in Japan. These are initiatives we hope to scale to more Wolt countries going forward.
• Women in Tech: supporting and empowering our women and non-binary employees who work in tech, as well as inspiring more women to get into the tech field through community efforts.
• IAmRemarkable (pilot in Germany): running Google’s #iamremarkable initiative, empowering women and underrepresented groups to celebrate their success.
• DEI training: shaping DEI awareness and behavior within Wolt with training sessions in collaboration with external DEI agencies.
• DEI Communication: having a consistent approach to how we talk about DEI topics. We’ve also worked on an internal DEI information hub where we can be transparent about our initiatives and policies as well as share helpful resources.

This year, we aim to scale our efforts and project streams further.

Supporting women’s professional growth at Wolt

In the past year, we stepped it up a notch in fostering women’s career acceleration at Wolt. We started a mentoring program for our women and non-binary team members, who are either already in product development or who are looking to transition into a tech career. With over 25 mentors and 30 mentees in the first cohort and overwhelmingly positive feedback, it’s now a recurring initiative. 

Our Women at Wolt group also started running internal meetups, focused on bringing women together to learn from one another. The first few meetups focused on career transformation, inspirational career stories and tips for building a career in tech and switching career paths. 

Inspiring more women to get into tech

Outside of our own team, we’ve focused on attracting more women to join our tech teams and encouraging more women to join the tech industry. Last year we partnered with women in tech organizations in Finland including Women in Tech Finland, Mimmit Koodaa (Women Code) and Hive Helsinki.

We’ve organized lots of women in tech community events, along with our “Product Development with Wolt” event series, which is designed to give a sneak peek into various domains of product development for women who are interested in getting into tech. Our events have ranged from hands-on workshops teaching programming language Python to talks about the ins and outs of building loveable products.

We’re still not where we want to be when it comes to gender diversity 

Although globally women make up 41% of our teams, gender balance isn’t where we want it to be in our tech organization. We’ve taken steps in the right direction but we still have a long way to go. However, we’re proud to say that the ratio of women within our team leads in the product development organization has increased from 10% to 17% over the past year and we’re working hard to improve this further. 

Some of the highlights and focus areas for this year include:

• We’re excited to welcome our first-ever DEI Lead next week. They’ll take the lead in building our DEI programs and initiatives within Wolt to help us continue on this journey.
• Taking our DEI recruitment efforts up a gear. By focusing on direct sourcing and by being proactive with our outreach, we aim to attract more talented women to come and work at Wolt. We’re building a new STAR team (Sourcing, Talent-Intel And Research) to help make this happen.
• Dialing up our Women in Tech activities: With key partnerships, new internal and external events and our tech-focused mentoring program, we want to develop our activities so we can have a bigger impact!
• Improving our compensation and benefits practices: We’re aiming for greater transparency and pay equity for our employees.

We know that moving the needle with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives is a long-term commitment and we’re looking forward to putting more focus into this area in 2023. These efforts go hand in hand with our global sustainability strategy to make cities better and positively impact the people and world around us. 

While we’ve focused a lot on empowering our wonderful employees, for this year’s International Women’s day we also wanted to celebrate the women-owned businesses on our platform. So we’ll be shining the spotlight on some of our merchants to tell their stories. Over the next three business days, we’ll share one inspiring merchant story per day here in our blog — stay tuned!  

What else should we be doing? We encourage you to reach out if you have ideas for more actions we can take: bettercities@wolt.com.

Does Wolt sound like the place for you? We’d love to hear from you! Find our open roles on our careers site 💙