Heap Celebrates International Women's Day

At Heap, we’re excited to celebrate International Women’s Day!

March 8th is renowned worldwide as a celebration of the historical, cultural, and political achievements of women. Observing this special day also helps generate awareness, support, and positive action for gender equality.

At Heap we’re proud of the work we’ve done to attract and retain great women employees. We celebrate the women on our executive leadership team, and are particularly proud that we’ve been able to achieve gender parity on our Product Team under the guidance of our SVP of Product, Rachel Obstler.

(Read Rachel’s blog on why diversity is so important in the product world, and on what she does to help produce it.) Like all companies, we still have work to do, but we’re moving in the right direction.

As a company driven to help teams create great digital experiences, our mission is in part to offer leadership to the wider product world about what a better and more inclusive future can look like. Studies have proven that the more diversity a team has, the better its outcomes are. After all, digital experiences are used by all sorts of people, so they should be created by all sorts of people!

As we’ve focused on building a culture that attracts and retains a diversity of talent, we’ve learned that putting effort in the right direction can go a long way.

What makes Heap a good place for women in the tech world?

Here are three principles we rely on to help attract and retain female employees.

1. Culture and values

We have worked hard to create an inclusive culture that allows all people to be themselves. Our goal is for Heap to be a place where your gender, race, ethnicity, or disability status is irrelevant and you can feel comfortable sharing your voice. Our values codify these goals: We treat each other with respect, seek to understand before seeking to be understood, and we separate facts from stories so we can deliver honest constructive feedback.

Practicing respectful candor is how we achieve the highest levels of teamwork and collaboration, and our strong values give us perspective and help drive our behavior. (Read more about how we iterate on our values!)

2. Flexibility and benefits

We strive to offer one of the best benefits packages in the business, with a solid family leave program and extremely flexible time-off. That includes unlimited PTO — plus the encouragement to actually use it! Our monthly company-wide “ME” days (ME = Mental Escape) is where we all get at least one day off per month so more people will actually take advantage of the PTO policy.

We often tie these to three-day weekends so employees can get four days free of work. Plus a special “Treat Yo’Self” stipend — $100 a year to spend on self-care to treat yourself to anything you like — spa time, massages, hair care, dinner, or whatever rejuvenates you.

3. Support systems designed for humans

We’re not only about the data! We care about our people, and show it with mental health support for our employees and their dependents through Modern Health. We also feature a generous parental leave policy — four months of leave for the birthing parent and three months for the non-birthing parent, along with a two-week part-time reentry period. And for students working their way up, we offer $100 monthly toward student loans through Commonbond.

We wish we had the space here to acknowledge each and every one of our terrific female-identifying employees personally. On this day, we want to express just how much it means to have you on board at Heap.

If you’re a woman in our industry, we salute you today, along with our mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. After all, we wouldn't be here without you.

And if you’re a woman looking for a great job in tech, come join us!