our guiding principles

WIMDI’s Guiding Principles

We believe that existing power structures in male-dominated industries leave our members shortchanged. We work to support our members creating the yummy careers they’ve always wanted and changing these industries for the better. These are the guiding principles we use to do that work:

We Take An Intersectional Feminist Approach

We work to dismantle systems of oppression that affect the work lives of our membership through all of their identities and intersections -- gender, race, sexual orientation, age, caregiving requirements, ability/disability & neurodiversity, mental health, size/weight, and immigration status/citizenship. We prioritize creating resources that serve our members to create the careers they want, while explicitly centering these identities and their specific challenges whenever possible.

We Create Resources That Actually Help

We’ve been where you are. We know what it’s like to google our problems and find...a bunch of fluff that doesn’t come close to solving our problems. We know you need to understand how your company’s business model works more than you need another article on pantsuits.
We create every resource with your real career and leadership problems in mind. WIMDI’s gold standard is to offer up resources that makes you go, “Sh*t. I need that. It’s like this was written for me.”

We Focus On Individual Agency

We know that waiting for those in power to help us is an insufficient solution. Put simply: we’ve had to rely on ourselves to create the success we want. So, we develop resources that put as much power as humanly possible in each of our members’ hands so we can succeed inside of the corporate system as it exists while we wait for the changes we desperately need.

We Value Consent

WIMDI works to incorporate consent culture at every opportunity in our organization. From email opt-ins to photography at our events, we’ll always give you the option to participate -- or not! We believe that we best serve our community when they have as much choice as possible.

We Are Generous & Supportive

WIMDI is a community of people who care. Our community is helpful, supportive, non-competitive, and generous with our time and resources. We’ll celebrate your #WIMDIwins and help strategize when work is terrifying. And we’re totally jazzed about friendly LinkedIn introductions to members we haven’t met yet!

We work to share and redistribute privilege where we can and strive to use the privilege we do have to serve our most marginalized members.

We Are Self-Funding

WIMDI is community-funded and fully self-supporting. We don’t accept financial corporate sponsorship because we know that money has a tendency to distort priorities. We always want to hold our members as priority number one. We are on your side -- and your side alone.

We Are Transparent, Accountable, & We Clean Up Our Messes

As an organization, WIMDI aims to be as transparent as possible. We commit to showing our work and leading by example, as well as being accountable to our members. We know that trust and safety are built moment by moment, and torn down the same way.

As a community, we are imperfect but committed to deepening our learning. We work to minimize the harm we create, while being ready to clean up the messes we make as we learn and grow. When we make a mess, we focus on addressing our impact, not defending our intent.