Building an inclusive culture for women at Canva

When I joined Canva, I was incredibly excited to bring Canva's commitment to building a work environment where everyone can do the best work of their lives and achieve their goals together with my own values and commitment to driving positive change through creating best-in-class people experiences that are rooted in inclusion, diversity and equality.

Over the years we’ve learned a lot and have implemented things that worked well (and some not so well), and now we’re hoping to share more of our learnings as we grow. That’s not to say we have it all figured out — we don’t. We have made progress, and we know there’s so much left to learn and a long way to go.

Our goals and initiatives are all to make Canva a true celebration of diversity and to create a future where everyone feels they truly belong, and that’s a lifetime of work.

An important part of this work is growing representation and creating a welcoming, inclusive, and empowering space for everyone. In this blog, I thought I’d focus on some of our learnings and initiatives around building an inclusive culture for women as one of the important pillars of our current inclusion and representation strategy and hope that by sharing some of the work we’re doing and our goals, we can also provide ideas for other teams earlier in their journey.

You can also expect to hear more from us about our broader inclusion goals and initiatives and what’s working best for us as we grow and learn more from our team, including our work in fostering an inclusive workplace for all genders such as non-binary and gender diverse.

Working towards balanced gender representation

Bringing together a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives has always been embedded in how we build our team⁠(opens in a new tab or window), our product⁠(opens in a new tab or window), and our community⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to achieve our mission to empower everyone to design. Being clear with our team on what we’re working towards and the role everyone plays in building a truly inclusive company has been an important part of this.

In our teams at Canva, we’re focusing on a number of initiatives to continue to build gender-balanced teams, which we define as 40:40:20 (40% men, 40% women and 20% all genders including non-binary, women, men, and gender diverse).

Rolling out inclusive hiring processes is key to increasing representation. At Canva, we use a structured hiring approach focussed on skills and values, and have removed any unnecessary requirements from our roles – including university degree requirements. All of our hiring managers also undergo inclusive recruitment training, including how to support candidates with interview adjustments and minimise potential biases.

Creating early talent programs⁠(opens in a new tab or window) has been an important part of how we're increasing representation in engineering. We host workshops with students from traditionally underrepresented groups (including women and First Nations Australians) to promote careers in tech, and annual internship and graduate programs to empower early talent in these roles.

While it’s a continuous journey, I’m proud of our progress in building a more gender-balanced team. We’ve stayed constant at 46% women across our team overall and continue to grow the number of women engineers and women in senior leadership roles. Since mid last yearwomen engineers grew from 19.5% to 21.2% and women in senior leadership roles grew from 29.7% to 35%.

Equitability in salary, equity and promotion decisions

We’re continuing to make meaningful progress in addressing the gender pay gap⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and more broadly, creating consistency and equitability across our Total Rewards programs.

We have a number of processes in place to ensure that gender pay equity for like-for-like roles remains; in addition, we build on this with a partnership with workplace equity platform Syndio to conduct in-depth pay equity and pay gap analyses twice a year and run multiple rounds of calibration during our salary, equity, and promotion processes, ensuring consistency and equitability in decision-making.

Launching Total Rewards education and pay equitability training has been key in ensuring understanding and transparency around the factors influencing pay decisions. We’ve built a number of resources that help our team navigate how pay decisions are made at Canva.

Building connection and community

Feeling a sense of belonging can mean different things to different people. We’ve learned that offering a wide range of experiences that empower our team to connect goes a long way.

One of the initiatives we hear is most impactful is our Women@Canva collective⁠(opens in a new tab or window). This employee-led initiative aims to create an inclusive space for women and allies through internal events and programming to ensure women feel supported, connected, and empowered professionally - with all the support of Canva.

Recently our Women@Canva collective hosted a month of sessions on topics from how to keep inclusion at the heart of our everyday work, to navigating self-care when living with chronic illnesses including polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis, and migraines.

We’re always thinking about how we can continue evolving our Canva Collectives, which also includes our Pride and People of Colour collectives. Through taking the time to listen to and learn from our teams around the world, we’ve learned about the importance of moving towards ‘locally empowered and globally supported’ collectives. To help bring this to life, we have dedicated collective leaders who help roll out global events and initiatives, and regional leaders to drive local initiatives while ensuring everyone stays connected around the world.

We’ve also mapped out several learning and development opportunities for women to ensure we retain the best talent and support their growth, including programs designed to mentor and coach women in engineering roles.

We’ve been intentional about equipping our team with knowledge about navigating inclusion. We recently rolled out an ‘inclusion at Canva’ training program for our global team which covers topics like microaggressions and behaviours of inclusion for everyone to use daily.

We’ve also created support resources for our team on a range of topics, including inclusive language, neuro-inclusion, women’s health, grief and loss, and family and domestic violence.

We’ve been on an ongoing journey of open-sourcing our learnings and the resources we’ve created when we believe they can help the broader community too. Here are templates for our family and domestic violence support guide⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and grief and loss guide⁠(opens in a new tab or window) if you’d like to use them.

Fostering flexibility

We’ve stayed true to evolving our work environment around balancing flexibility with moments to connect as a team around the world because we believe this plays an enormous role in enabling our team to do their best work and achieve their goals.

With no mandate for office time, we trust our team to design their weeks around what works best for their teams, their families, and themselves. We regularly hear how much our team, who are also caregivers or have accessibility needs, values this flexibility. We reflect on some of our early learnings about building a space that balances flexibility and connection in this blog post⁠(opens in a new tab or window).

Flexibility and inclusivity are at the heart of our parental leave policy. We’ve heard from many of our team that our 10 days of annual leave in the event of a miscarriage or pregnancy loss is incredibly valuable and we recently extended this to include reproductive loss to ensure our team has the time to take care of themselves and their loved ones.

Empowering women through our Two-Step Plan

We’ve always had a much bigger mission beyond just the four walls at Canva. This is our Two-Step Plan: Step One is to build one of the most valuable companies in the world, and using that value, Step Two is to do the most good we can.

From partnering with She Codes⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to run coding courses to enable women to career-switch into software engineering to rolling out a cash-transfer program in Malawi through our partnership with GiveDirectly, we’re continuing to develop initiatives that can create better outcomes for women in the community.

Partnering with TwoGood⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and Dress for Success⁠(opens in a new tab or window) has also enabled us to use our skills to empower more than 300 women facing homelessness, domestic violence, and trauma in their employment journey through hosting workshops and mentoring sessions on things like creating a personal value proposition, using Canva to build a stand-out resume to get noticed during the job search, or helpful tools and mindsets to build confidence.

We also see our product as an enabler for doing the most good we can. We give our premium product away for free to more than 600,000 nonprofits and 70 million teachers and students, and champion artists from underrepresented communities through the Canva Represents Fund⁠(opens in a new tab or window).

Looking ahead

While we have achieved some great moments to ensure our team feels included, represented, and able to do the best work of their lives, we also deeply acknowledge that we have a long way to go, and we are committed to doing the work to ensure our team has the best experience possible.

I’m incredibly proud to work with the team at Canva on all of this – the expertise, the depth of care and the kindness they bring to the table are amazing and I’m energised for the future and the continued impact we can have, while being open to all the learnings along the way.

If you have any thoughts, feedback, ideas or would just like to talk about any of the topics here, feel free to reach out⁠(opens in a new tab or window).

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