Hiring women and minorities can help improve a company’s culture, inspire workers and widen the customer base. It also pays to be inclusionary.
In March, the dating app Bumble and the NBA’s LA Clippers announced a three-year patch deal worth $20 million. The Clippers now have a Bumble patch, or empowerment badge, on their jerseys. The deal carries a pledge to invest in promoting gender equity, according to ESPN.
Bumble is known for empowering women by requiring women to send the first message.
The Clippers have many women in top jobs — one president, a vice president, three directors, the chief financial officer and lead general council are all women — making it the team with the most female in leadership positions. The deal also includes off-court requirements, like education and mentorship programs.
It is exciting to see diversity paying off in sports.
As a former NBA intern, I can attest that there are women in sports, but not nearly enough. And as a former sports reporter, there aren’t enough women in that industry either. So I’m glad Wolfe Herd has picked the sports world to make her mark. The global draw and gender diversity of the NBA makes it the ideal league to begin pushing for gender equality.
The NBA was given a B grade for gender hiring practices by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. Comparatively, the Major League Baseball and National Football League received Cs.
It seems Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and CEO of Bumble, has been able to make the difference she wanted.
Wolfe Herd helped launch Tinder, before leaving the company in 2014 after filing a sexual harassment lawsuit. After the suit was settled, the internet got a hold of abusive text messages sent to Wolfe.
“The way the people online spoke about me, it jolted me in such a way, it completely robbed me of every last ounce of confidence that I may have ever had,” she told Guy Raz, host of NPR’s How I Built This.
This experience helped her pick her next project. She aimed to combat negativity online.
So, Wolfe started working on Merci. The app would be a female-only social network where women could only use compliments. There would be no hurt feelings or bullying, like what Wolfe experienced.
A new business partner liked her idea — but told her she needed to create this positive platform for dating, and Bumble was born.
While I don’t aspire to create dating apps or work in tech, I do admire how Wolfe Herd has been able to create her own company that stands for something and creates a positive experience for women — like me.
Wolfe Herd designed the platform to counter the destructive behaviors society teaches men and women.
“Men are raised from very early age to be the go-getter in a heterosexual relationship. And women, on the flipside, are trained to play hard to get. So here you’re telling men to be overtly aggressive, and here you’re telling women to be in the inverse of that,” she said on NPR.
Wolfe said this sets men up to be rejected over and over, and women are at risk of harassment and abuse.
“When you put women in control, you completely reverse the role. She now has the confidence to go after what she’s interested in,” Wolfe said.
I don’t know about other women, but I can say with confidence I do not want to be in a situation where I’m at risk of harassment and abuse. And when I use dating apps like Tinder and OKCupid, I feel at risk.
Society has given men more power than women for a long, long time. In the wake of the #METOO movement, women are taking back that power. Bumble gives them a platform for taking back some power.
I applaud the Bumble team for pushing the world forward and using their power as an app with millions of users to make the world a better place.
Tess Fox can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @tesstakesphotos