Building Bridges: Women and Diversity in the Agile Community

On 7 March 2021, Agile Bridges hosted an event in honor of International Women’s Day. Agile Bridges is a Scrum Alliance® and Scrum.org collaborative community initiative, inspired by women and powered by women for women.

We talked to the organizers of this initiative, Daphne Harris, Director of the Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) Program for Scrum.org, and Anu Smalley, a Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST®) for Scrum Alliance, about what inspired them to start this initiative.

Scrum Alliance: What inspired you, Daphne and Anu, to come together towards this shared goal? 

Daphne Harris: For me, it began with the MeToo movement. I started thinking about what I could do to amplify women’s voices from my position in the agile and Scrum community. As I was looking at the statistics for Scrum.org, I felt that having only 11% of our PST community as women was disproportionate and I saw a need to change that.

Anu Smalley: And at Scrum Alliance, out of 273 trainers (CSTs), only 31 are women – so also around 11% for our organization. And for people of color, the numbers are even lower.

Daphne: Right. So clearly those percentages don’t reflect the population of the world. In December 2020, I attended an Agile New England event and heard Anu speak on gender parity. Her talk really resonated with me, so I reached out to her to see if we could collaborate. We started talking about ways we could help build bridges to and for women in the agile community.

Anu: Yes. Daphne reached out to me and we decided that we could do something together. Even if we do represent two different certifying organizations, we are completely united in wanting to address gender parity. And our organizations are 100% behind our efforts. I have a mentoring circle that I started in 2019 for CST candidates. The group is primarily women and people of color although we do have others in the group.  

Daphne: And while I’ve been supporting women trainer candidates one on one for some time, I was intrigued by Anu’s mentoring circle and thought maybe we could build on that by doing something together.

^{Agile Bridges logo by Alalia Lundy}

What are you hoping to achieve? Any planned next steps?

Daphne: For me, I imagine seeding a future generation of female agilists. Just as the wind carries seeds to a new land and suddenly new trees grow there, I want our efforts to carry seeds to people who might have never thought about agile before. And from there, with a little nurturing (seeding, bridging, and watering), we can watch the number of women involved in our industry grow and grow.

The Agile Bridges community is a way for us to bring together a small group of very talented women and support their growth. Then from there, each of them can grow the next group of women. And it will spread organically. Putting on this event was intended to do just that. Part of the ask in the event was how participants can spread those seeds.

Anu: I visualize a bridge made up of women’s hands, each supporting and bringing along the person next to them. To support this vision, we reached out to a woman trainer, who is an amazing visual illustrator - Alaia Lundy who created the image/logo for our initiative - which is all about bridging, seeding, and sharing. 

I got to where I am because I had so much support. But I know that not everyone is as lucky, so I’m always looking for ways to pay it forward.

We need to stop worrying about the glass ceiling and focus on the broken rung

My ask of all the women in the group is to pay it forward.  We need to stop worrying about the glass ceiling and focus on the broken rung: the first step that women need to take to grow into leaders. If women do not step onto the ladder in the first place, there is no way they can attempt to break the glass ceiling.

Daphne: Exactly. Well said. We want to build bridges in our community so that we can grow and nurture all these amazing talents. We want to give women the support they need to move from where they are to where they want to be, hence the bridge.

Our first step was to get together with a handful of women who we’ve been encouraging. Within minutes, we had decided to host a small event on March 7th, inviting more women from both communities to connect with each other. That gave us five weeks to plan. The women in the group designed the event and took on panelist and facilitator roles. The event was a lot of fun! We facilitated conversations about courage as we #ChooseToChallenge (the International Women's Day 2021 theme) and discussed ways to work together to achieve our dreams.

Anu: Yes, this event was absolutely amazing. We saw so many amazing women stand up and be courageous about what their future will look like and what they are willing to #ChoosetoChallenge. Beyond that, we want to deepen the support and opportunities for women in the groups – and expand our reach. The two of us can only mentor so many women, but if each of the women in the group also mentors a few other women, we can grow exponentially. 

Can you tell us about the panelists, where are they from and what are their backgrounds? 

Anu: We each had women we were supporting in their journey to PST or CST, including some women of color. We asked for volunteers from those small groups for our initial pilot. Our hope is that these panelists will continue the growth in their own communities, and we can expand through our efforts to pay it forward. 

Daphne: Yes, and in selecting this pilot group, we specifically sought different women at different points in their agile journeys from diverse geographies, ethnicities, and varied Scrum backgrounds. We wanted to create a space for these women to share stories and work together to elevate their voices. The women who participate in this group are: Anca Tanase from Romania, Kemmy Raji from Canada, and in the US we have, Nabila Sattar Safdar, Shika Carter, and Sheena Gladden. This is such an amazing group.

Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org are often seen as competitors. How are collaborative events and coalitions like this a demonstration of agile and Scrum values?

Anu: That’s a great question. I have tremendous respect for each of our programs and the people in them. I know it took courage for Daphne to reach out to me. I so admire her gumption.

Daphne: And openness, talk about openness! We want to invite women in our communities to connect with each other and amplify their voices. We don’t care which path they choose, we care about supporting women.

Anu: And focus. We are focused on our overall mission to include more women trainers—and more trainers who are women of color as well—worldwide.

Daphne. Let’s not forget commitment. We are committed to creating a platform for talented women to come together – and for finding ways to give them exposure in the agile community. We ask for their commitment to helping each other grow. And we are asking our larger community for their commitment to encourage and support these women on their agile journey.

Anu: And I can’t think of a better representation of respect than to give people of all backgrounds a voice in the agile community. Plus, this collaboration also represents some of the Agile Manifesto principles, especially individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

A lack of diversity in the agile and Scrum space is a prevailing issue. What can we do to make our communities more accessible to women and people of color? 

Anu: We need to create space for people of diverse backgrounds to share stories, get exposure to a larger network for their own stories. We need to ensure they have opportunities to partner up and speak at conferences, host webinars; write blogs together, to co-train. We need to support many many women to climb that first rung so that there are many of us to break that glass ceiling over and over again. And I am honored to partner with Daphne to start something that will lead to increasing the diversity in our community.

Daphne:  It’s important to actively invite women and people of color to increase diversity in the agile and Scrum space, whether it be hosting classes at times accessible for working parents trying to find a balance between work and homeschooling their kids right now, or seeking to partner with organizations that support people of color. And articles like this help us put out the invitation, and make DEI messaging front and center in both of our organizations. 

Our thanks to both Anu and Daphne for their efforts and for taking the time to talk with us today. We are a proud supporter of Agile Bridges as well as Women in Agile, both groups that exist across organizational boundaries to promote the voices of women throughout the world.

You can learn more about how to get involved with the Scrum and agile community on our Communities page. We look forward to celebrating more collaborative community efforts.