Hi HN! Cadran here, Elpha's CEO & Founder from the S19 batch.
We are a community of 75K+ women in tech and we surveyed our members asking them to share their comp + detailed information about their thoughts on salary transparency, and whether they believe they are paid fairly. This report includes significant findings we uncovered about the racial pay gap and salary transparency, among other topics.
I'm here to answer questions you may have about the report or the Elpha community. Thanks for reading.
One of our members, Isa Peterson, is a Principal Space Architect at Tesseract Space. I noticed her job title on her Elpha profile and had no idea what her job was, but I was intrigued. So I asked if she'd write up a post telling us a more about it. As it turns out, her job is pretty interesting. Hope you enjoy!
How could one find posts like this without a direct link? Is there some portion of your posts that are public? Every action I try prompts me to sign up, but I do not meet the sign-up criteria. Just wondering if there's a still a way to passively view/read some portion of your content, without attempting to comment/participate.
Very interesting discussion, especially with respect to experience with the SBIR program. And I like seeing hardware startups here. Thank you for posting.
Hi, can you let me know why communities like yours demand a linked in profile to join? I use no social media whatsoever and it blocks me from enjoying communities such as yours. It makes me feel further isolated as a woman in tech who is also strongly privacy-oriented. I understand the need to verify, however could you provide a link perhaps where manual verification could be offered?
You can add a link to a personal website or github profile instead. We'll update language to reflect that. Thanks for the feedback. Please do email us at hi@elpha if you've got other questions. Thanks.
Hi! Leap is spinning out of YC today as an independent company called Elpha. I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Elpha and am here to answer questions. Thanks!!
I attempted to sign up a long time ago, when the only authentication was through FB, which I don't have. So, the email address is in your system but I'm not a member. I cannot sign in or up. Is this something you can fix? I would contact you directly for support.
Congratulations! Do you have a policy regarding non-binary or genderqueer people? And are there any steps you're planning to take to keep your community free of TERF transphobia? I'm curious about building a gender-based community in 2019.
I've used leap for a while and have seen multiple posts from people wanting to learn how to be more inclusive towards trans people, but absolutely nothing that appears to push any sort of transphobia. Remember this is a forum for professionals. Every professional knows that preaching homophobia, racism, transphobia or whatever is wildly inappropriate and uncivil behavior.
I suppose it's something that would get addressed if a problem arises. But for now, why bother creating a whole plan to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist?
It's not transphobic to question whether a women-only organization should include transwomen. It's a legitimately hard question with no 100% correct answer. You have to deal with the possibility of people who identify as female according to their own standards, which you might consider dishonest or confused.
> Do you have a policy regarding non-binary or genderqueer people?
According to the sign-up pitch that appears shortly after you start reading an AMA there: "Elpha is for anyone who identifies as a woman and/or non-binary."
Woah! Even after so long on HN, I'm surprised by multiple downvotes for even a question that merely implies an interest in inclusivity for non-cis people.
Agree to disagree in this case, wherein I believe two or more people's gestures do communicate something real regardless of the eventual balancing out. Thanks for the reminder.
> It's just plain noisy and you don't know what someone is objecting to.
Then why does it rate limit the poster who might have spurred a discussion and wants to find out? They can't even post anymore until hours after the discussion died down even though little can be gleaned from the reason anyone downvoted them? There is some conflicting logic going around
Hi Cadran, congrats on Elpha and this new birth! I'm Marie and I also created a place to support women in this industry, Women Make. I was wondering, why did you change the name?
We landed on Elpha by riffing on the word alpha and the notion that we want to create a place where women come first. We combined alpha with the French word for she (“Elle”) to create ellepha and then shortened it to elpha from there.
Did you have any concerns over brand confusion with Elfa, the shelving system owned by the Container Store, which markets itself heavily to women (and yes, I see the rich irony in that :) ).
Ha, we chose the name Elpha by riffing on the word alpha and the idea that we wanted to create a place where women come first. We combined alpha with the French word for she (“Elle”) to create ellepha. We shortened it to elpha from there. Plus, the .com was available. :)
Thank you! And yes, many of our members are based outside of the US, and we'd love to have more international members to broaden the perspective and discussion topics.
This looks to be a really great resource. I'm curious to know what your business plan is; I'm very interested in how to make a community platform like this sustainable without compromising user privacy. This is especially important when the community is focused on disadvantaged or minority groups, and I'm always on the lookout for the Right Answer. Have you written on this topic before?
Really good point and question! We don't have all the answers and it's something we're actively thinking about. Our goal is to focus on providing access and opportunities and use that as our guiding light. I think especially as members of those underrepresented groups, it makes it a bit easier to reason about what kind of products members will feel comfortable with. We are building for ourselves after all!
Hi HN! We chatted with Emily Weiss from Glossier about how she built Glossier. This conversation is part of an ongoing series of AMAs we're doing on Leap.
Leap is a private online network for women in tech, but these AMAs are available for all to read. Hope you enjoy!
Hi HN! This is part of a series of conversations we’re having on Leap with experts from the community. While conversations on Leap are usually private, we’re experimenting with the concept of some publicly available conversations. Hope you enjoy!
Hey everyone! I'm the founder of Leap, which is a private online network for women in tech. We're doing a series of conversations with experts from the community on a variety of tech-related topics and we're experimenting with sharing the conversations publicly even though the community is private. Thanks for reading!
We are a community of 75K+ women in tech and we surveyed our members asking them to share their comp + detailed information about their thoughts on salary transparency, and whether they believe they are paid fairly. This report includes significant findings we uncovered about the racial pay gap and salary transparency, among other topics.
I'm here to answer questions you may have about the report or the Elpha community. Thanks for reading.