Pride Month at dbt Labs: LGBTQ+ Identity at work

Data transformation is all about taking some raw stuff you were given and building your vision for something more useful, beautiful, and joyful, using all the tools and language available to Become. A queer metaphor if there ever was one.

At dbt Labs, about 1/8 of our employees identify as LGBTQIA. For the most part, you wouldn’t be able to identify the exact impact of that on our product— there’s no specific feature where our queerness is particularly clockable– except that it’s all about transformation. Our queer identities impact our culture, our policies, our values, and the experience we create for our community and users.

So here’s a blog post about how we’re honoring and celebrating Pride this month, and how we support a vibrant and diverse team year-round, including:

• Queeries, our LGBTQIA employee resource group
• dbt Labs’ Trans-Inclusion Policy and Health-Related Travel Policy
• How our LGBTQIA identities are reflected in our values

Queeries: Building community and inclusion

Queeries, our employee-led ERG, is an incredible source of community at dbt Labs. Its mission is to foster an inclusive and empowering workplace, where all people can thrive as their authentic selves.

For Pride this month, Queeries leaders planned a combo of sync and async ways to celebrate and learn something new. There’s an Understanding Pride Month event that’s a primer on LGBTQIA+ history, including the Stonewall Uprising and its impact, along with themed Zoom backgrounds, resources (scroll to the bottom for an abridged list!), and a swag drop.

Queeries is run by a rotating group of around three employees. They have run book clubs, led fundraisers for the National Center for Transgender Equality and the Transgender Law Center, and hosted educational and community-building events. Queeries members mirror internally what dbt community members do externally: connect, make our work better and more fun, and put time and effort into making dbt Labs everything we want it to be.

Many Queeries members come from work or personal backgrounds where being out wasn’t easy and wasn’t safe. At dbt Labs, we get to focus on making things great instead of making things bearable. That’s a big deal to a lot of us.

Trans-Inclusion Policy

Employee-driven projects and events are important for fostering connections and reinforcing a sense of social safety, and backing that up with formal company processes is essential. In addition to a robust budget for ERGs and other Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work, dbt Labs prioritizes a supportive environment for all our employees through our policies and benefits.

This month, dbt Labs added a Trans-Inclusion Policy to our Employee Handbook that lays out our commitment to creating a workplace where all employees feel welcome, valued, and supported. All employees have the right to express their gender identity, characteristics, or expression without fear of consequences, have the right to use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity when they’re in-person at dbt Labs offices, and have the right to be addressed by their preferred name and pronouns and to have those preferences updated in company systems and records. Employees also have access to transition-related medical care through our healthcare benefits.

This matters, because while we're celebrating Pride Month right now, anti-trans laws and rhetoric are on the rise globally. In the US alone, 44 anti-trans laws have been passed so far this year, with another 328 under review currently. Trans people, and especially trans women of color, are disproportionally likely to be targets of violence in the US and globally, and disproportionally likely to die of suicide. The major factors contributing to the suicide risk are discrimination, bullying, violence and harassment, ill-treatment by the healthcare system, and being rejected by family, friends, and community. One policy at one company cannot solve global inequity, but it can help us take care of our people, and show people looking to join dbt Labs that the company is committed to being a safe place for trans people.

The Trans-Inclusion Policy in our handbook complements the rest of our policies. It lives alongside our Health-Related Travel benefit that will reimburse up to USD$4,000 in expenses for travel, lodging, meals, and a caregiver for any team member or dependent who has to travel to obtain medical care that isn’t available in their country or state of residence. The policy was originally conceived in response to Roe v. Wade being overturned in 2022, but it supports trans people who need to travel for transition-related care, along with anyone else who can’t access the care they need in the place where they live.

These policies, alongside our Equal Employment Opportunity Policy, our Anti-Harassment and Discrimination Policy, and all the rest of our Code of Conduct, are designed to keep our employees safe and set a standard of care, respect, and inclusion in our workplace.

Our Values: We are human

Our Values are core to our work at dbt Labs. The “We are human” value includes this in the description:

We bring our whole selves to work, and we recognize that our identities extend beyond the work that we do.

Bringing our whole selves to work means showing up authentically and honoring the identities of our peers, but it also means bringing all the things that make us us into the work that we do. For LGBTQIA employees, that shows up in a lot of ways.

We bring experience from queer community organizing to inclusive event planning for Coalesce and other dbt Labs events. We bring our ethos (and our memes) to the dbt slack. We strive to bring curiosity, empathy, and a sense of communal responsibility to the work we do, which makes us better at working together, solving problems, and supporting the people who use our products.

I’m very proud of dbt Labs this month, and very glad to share that pride with you. Reach out on Slack to give us feedback on how we can make our product, our community, and our events more inclusive and supportive!

Resources

An abridged list of resources collected by our Queeries ERG:

• History:
  • NASCSP: The history and significance of Pride Month
  • Smithsonian: Marsha Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and the history of Pride Month
• Advice on coming out:
  • Advice on coming out, and what to do if someone comes out to you
• Pronouns:
  • Personal pronouns in the workplace
  • Pronouns 101: introduction to your loved one’s new pronouns
  • Pronouns 102: how to stop messing up pronouns
• For managers:
  • LGBT Inclusion at Work: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers