Empowered women in tech: The 6th annual Female Week at Cheesecake Labs

In March, we held our 6th annual Female Week event, highlighting women and their accomplishments within Cheesecake Labs and the wider technology industry. This year’s events were empowering, informative, and engaging — here’s what you need to know about our 6th Female Week!

What is Female Week?

Female Week is an annual event at Cheesecake Labs that celebrates, highlights, and empowers female Cakers and women in our wider community.

Launched six years ago to tie into International Women’s Day on March 8th, we wanted this event to encourage everyone to become allies in the ongoing struggle for gender equity in the technology market and society at large.

But we didn’t want to limit ourselves to just one day — that’s why we set aside a week every March to celebrate our female Cakers.

This year’s event was a rousing success! Here’s what happened.

The 6th edition of Female Week

This year, our Female Week theme was “Empowered women, the right team, the right skills,” which focused on centering women as the main characters of their careers and our work at Cheesecake Labs.

Our main events of the week were an introductory Open Discussion Circle, a Women in Product Webinar, and a look at Guilds held by women.

As a remote-first company, all of our internal and external meetings and events are held online, allowing anyone who wants to participate to join from wherever they are. 

Opening Discussion Circle

To kick off Female Week, we held an internal discussion circle event. Hosted by Chief People and Culture Officer Caroline Schmitz and Senior Marketing Analyst Graziela Hanaoka, this event opened our Female Week festivities by highlighting some of the issues, challenges, and opportunities related to gender equity. 

We covered topics including the importance of International Women’s Day and how it came into existence, how the men in our organization can better support their female coworkers and celebrate their achievements, and equality in the work environment. 

One of the most exciting parts of the discussion circle came when our female Cakers shared some of their career achievements and highlights. This was an excellent opportunity for us to celebrate the amazing work that our Cakers do every day. 

Women in Product: A crypto overview

The most anticipated event of this year’s Female Week was, without a doubt, our Women in Product Webinar. We were thrilled to present this session hosted by Cheesecake Product Owner Juliana Pereira and Product Manager Silvanete Iagobucci, with special guest Jessie Serrino, a Senior Product Manager from the Stellar Development Foundation. 

This open-to-the-public session provided insights into how women can contribute to and transform the future of the crypto industry. It was especially exciting to have Jessie join this conversation after working closely with the Stellar team over the last two years.

Watch the recording of the webinar to experience it for yourself!

Guilds held by women

Cheesecake Labs has a chapter and guild structure:

• Our chapters, called Bakeries, are formed around what people do within the company and bring together Cakers with similar backgrounds, skill sets, and expertise.
• Our guilds are groups that come together around projects and subjects they feel most passionate about. They work together to make our company a better place, focusing, for example, on specific Cheesecake Labs initiatives like Respect & Inclusion or Internal Process Innovation. 

At this year’s female week event, we hosted some special edition Guilds and highlighted Guilds run by female Cakers. Our goal was to maintain our dedication to tech education while centering and empowering women as the leaders of these Guild sessions. 

Diversity ‘n Inclusion Guild

The Diversity ‘n Inclusion Guild aims to get everyone at Cheesecake Labs on the same page when it comes to diversity knowledge. The Diversity ‘n Inclusion Guild is also responsible for our self-declared diversity census — more on that in a minute!

Leadership Guild

The Leadership Guild works to boost leadership best practices around Cheesecake’s culture and strategy. It can be useful for any Caker who wants to discuss these best practices — for Cakers in leadership roles, Cakers who are working their way there, or anyone else who’s interested in learning more about leadership.

At Cheesecake Labs, we strongly believe in and encourage career protagonism, so this quarter our Leadership Guild is discussing skills that can support this. This is an essential part of building leadership best practices.

Leadership skills are always a nice to have for Cakers, whether they’re in management roles leading other Cakers or taking ownership and exhibiting leadership in their own career development and progression. 

Special Blockchain Guild

Our Blockchain Guild aims to build our knowledge of blockchain technologies and ecosystems, foster knowledge sharing, and position Cheesecake Labs as Blockchain experts.

As a Stellar Integration partner, our use cases are currently focused largely on the Stellar ecosystem, but we’re always looking to learn more about this ever-evolving space.

This special edition of our Blockchain Guild was held by Software Engineer, Alessandra, especially for Female Week, and discussed the theme of supply chain management with blockchain.

Alessandra found presenting a Guild session during Female Week to be an amazing and empowering experience. She said:

It was great to have a chance to demonstrate that women can actively participate in any field, no matter how technical or niche, and inspire others to explore this technology.

Our Female Week Guild sessions were praised by Cakers. Software Engineer Maria said:

This was my first Female Week and I witnessed the construction of a safe and necessary space to discuss important issues with the contribution of the whole company. Although it’s already common to see women in empowered places day-to-day at Cheesecake Labs, during Female Week the Guilds were led by women and this made me very proud. It is always great to see women leading spaces and bringing visibility to our work.

Self-declared diversity census

One of our most exciting guild initiatives is the Cheesecake Labs self-declared diversity census. This census, headed up by our Diversity n’ Inclusion Guild, gathers up-to-date detailed information about the diversity of our team, which helps us plan strategic projects to make Cheesecake Labs a more diverse and inclusive company. 

The D&I Guild is now analyzing the data they collected and working hard to plan future events, actions, and initiatives to help us meet our diversity goals. 

This year’s census was our second — the first happened during last year’s Female Week. And going forward, we’ll be updating this census every future Female Week so we always have updated diversity information. 

What Cakers thought about Female Week

After the festivities ended, we received some excellent feedback on this year’s Female Week events. Here’s what Cakers had to say:

It’s great to see women leading initiatives and addressing topics that not long ago were considered valid only if spoken about by men. It’s a source of pride.

The event seemed well planned, the topics covered were interesting and engaging, and their execution was excellent!

The event was very inspiring and dynamic.

Rich content, thought-provoking questions, and coherent answers.

Cheesecake Labs champions diversity all year long

Respecting people and embracing differences is one of our core values at Cheesecake Labs. We stand for well-being and respect and know that our diversity helps us build more creative, innovative solutions.

We truly believe that the best results come from teams made up of all different kinds of people. And when we celebrate our differences, that’s when we learn and grow the most. 

So, while it’s great to celebrate women for a week every year, that’s certainly not the only time we highlight our female Cakers.

We work hard to create and maintain a culture of diversity, inclusion, and support every day of the year for everyone at Cheesecake Labs and within our wider community. 

So, what’s next on our calendars? We’re gearing up for our 5th annual Pride Week in June, where we celebrate and highlight the voices and experiences of LGBTQIA+ Cakers. Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram for details of our upcoming events.

To learn more about the culture at Cheesecake Labs, be sure to read our post all about what it’s like to work at a top 10 mobile app company!

And if you’re interested in joining our team, apply to join our Talent Pool to be on the lookout for an opportunity that fits your skill set. You could be our next Caker!