Need Advice - How to get more women involved in a community?
Hey Indie Women,
I'm Andrew, and the past few weeks I've been working on bringing people together in small groups (~10) to work on stuff together.
We're 3 weeks in and have had 2 groups that are getting a lot of value out of it, but we've had 0 women.
I'd love to do a group exclusively for women, but I'm not sure how to go about it.
Some ideas:
- bring someone on who wants to help out.
- do marketing around an all women's group
Some hesitations:
- I'm male. Ideally a female should lead the group (any takers?!)
- Not sure how to start marketing or getting loud about this without getting skewered for being a dude.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Edit 1: - Realizing I should just do this right and get someone to co-run this thing with me. If you're interested I'd love to chat.
The "groups" I'm talking about are basically mastermind groups for bootstrappers / indie hackers. We get in groups of 10 as a batch/cohort and help each other build/launch.
the site is just a notion doc at the moment: https://xoxo.vc
im at @andrewpierno on twitter or [email protected]
How many women are in your indie circle? How many do you regularly converse with? How many do you follow with and engage on Twitter?
I'm guessing not many, though I could be wrong. Please correct me if I am.
My guess is that for every 9 indie men, there's about 1 woman. Work on increasing that woman ratio, bit my bit.
In the business world, we hear it time and time, go hang with your people. If you really care about having women as part of your group, go hang with them.
Of course, women won't want to participate in an environment that they don't feel comfortable nor have trust with who is leading it.
Also, the responses to this tweet are insightful - https://twitter.com/rosiesherry/status/1265236681533382657
I posted it after a well-intentioned man asked the same kind of thing.
Thanks @rosiesherry! This is great.
If you've never lead a group with women in it before, your hesitation about leading an all female group is sound. Definitely work on integrating women into your regular groups. After all, we don't want to be separate from men, but equal: participating in the same places with the same level of respect.
Rosie hit the nail on the head. "Getting loud" won't bring women flocking to join your group. Building a relationship and trust will. I'm sure you participate in a variety of communities, which is where you found the original members of these groups. Seek out and participate in conversation with the women there. Directly recruit some of them to join your groups. If I see a community of only dudes, my first thoughts are "I am not welcome here" and "This environment is not safe for me". But if someone says "Hey I've seen a lot of your stuff and it's cool. Would you be interested in doing this thing and working with other cool people doing cool stuff?", then I know that I am welcome. Again, in the beginning they will not come to you, you will have to come to them.
What do the groups do? Who are they for? There are lots of indie women who will probably see this thread. Here's your chance for outreach. I might be interested but I don't really know what we're talking about.
Sure, I just didn't want to make this a pitch for my thing.
Basically 3 weeks ago I asked on IH if people wanted to get in small groups and build stuff. That's it. It's sort of a mastermind group if you will. We do daily stand ups together and a weekly video call.
It's a great way to get to know 10 other entrepreneurs and help each other more intimately with feedback, advice, struggles, etc.
So we're 3 weeks in and have 1 group of 12 (all male).
What I'm trying to say is:
The struggle is really this:
It's hard to get anyone to join right now. But I recognize the problem. And as I'm writing this, bringing someone else on to help lead the female groups, or just exclusively focus on that feels like the right thing to do.
I wouldn't worry about getting skewered. The fact that you want this to happen and you're open about the challenge is a huge step in the right direction (and quite frankly, a huge step ahead of other men who don't notice or bother to try).
I'd start by networking with women in the niche you target. They're probably part of other groups for women, and if you share the plight, they're likely to help spread the word.
Thanks @alexisgrant appreciate it!