Post Syndicated from Lora Maslenitsyna original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/learn-about-women-in-history-with-us/

March was Women’s History Month, and throughout the month, Backblaze’s employee-led, internal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee educated our team on the contributions of women throughout history. In a company-wide Slack channel, DEI committee leaders shared facts and resources about women who were pioneers in a range of fields.

Many of our team members found these facts useful to inform and expand their own worldviews. Team members shared articles they found themselves, and some even used the content as part of their homeschooling curriculum. (As a bonus, the DEI Committee also surveyed employees to generate a word cloud that describes the women of Backblaze, which you can see in the image above.)

The initiative was so popular with our team, we thought we would share some of the content with you even though we are well on our way into April, because any day is a good day to recognize the diverse range of women who have made contributions to our everyday lives, whether it’s still Women’s History Month or not.

Keep reading to learn about important figures and events in the history of technology, Hollywood, politics, and more!

Women in History

In 1756, long before the women’s suffrage movement gained any traction, Lydia Chapin Taft was legally allowed to vote.
Lydia Chapin Taft’s husband, Josiah Taft, was a prominent member of their community in Uxbridge, Massachusetts; he served several terms as a legislator and presided over town hall meetings. When he died, the townspeople agreed to permit Lydia Chapin Taft to vote in her husband’s place. The decision was made in keeping with the slogan of “no taxation without representation,” since Josiah Taft was the town’s largest taxpayer. Lydia Chapin Taft went on to cast several more votes, contributing to the town’s stance on important matters like financial contribution to the French and Indian War.
Read more about Lydia Chapin Taft here.

The 1900s brought significant milestones for women and money in the United States.
In 1938, the federal minimum wage was established as a result of the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, eliminating many pay differences between men and women for hourly jobs. In the 1960s, women gained the right to open a bank account. Shortly after, in 1974, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed, which aimed to prohibit credit discrimination on the basis of gender. Before it passed, many banks granted credit cards to women only with their husbands’ signatures and outright refused to issue them to unmarried women.
Read more about economic rights for women in the U.S. here.

Wyoming refused to join the United States without a guarantee that women would be allowed to vote.
In 1869, the territory of Wyoming made history when it passed a law granting women aged 21 and older the right to vote. That law was threatened two decades later when Wyoming applied for statehood. Congress stated that it wouldn’t allow the territory to join the Union unless women were disenfranchised. Wyoming called Congress out on its bluff, replying via telegram, “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women.” Congress relented and Wyoming became a state in 1890, with women’s right to vote intact. True to its past, Wyoming’s state motto today is simply, “Equal Rights.”
Read more about Wyoming and women’s right to vote here.

The British suffragettes learned jiujitsu to defend themselves and evade arrest.
Campaigning for women’s enfranchisement was a dangerous act back in the early 20th century. Many suffragettes in the UK were incarcerated, and some were even force fed in jail as punishment for their self-imposed hunger strikes. To protect women from going to jail and facing this abuse, which could have disastrous health consequences, one suffragette had the bright idea to teach her fellow protesters jiujitsu. Edith Margaret Garrud used her martial arts background to secretly train a unit of 30 members of the Women’s Social and Political Union in self defense. The group was alternately known as “The Bodyguard” and “The Amazons,” and was highly effective at resisting arrest.
Read more about how suffragettes in the UK used martial arts to defend themselves here.

Arabella Mansfield became the first female lawyer in the United States in 1869.
Admitted to the Iowa bar, Mansfield made her career as a college educator and administrator. Despite an Iowa state law restricting the bar exam to males, Mansfield had taken it and earned high scores. Shortly after her court challenge, Iowa amended its licensing statute and became the first state to accept women and minorities into its bar.
Read more about Arabella Mansfield here.

In 1964, Patsy Mink became the first woman of color elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Mink’s Congressional career spanned decades (1964–1977; 1990–2002). She was a key author for Title IX, a law that advanced gender equity within federal funding policies for education. This law was later renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in her honor.
Read more about Patsy Mink here.

No list of formidable Irish women would be complete without tomboy icon Gráinne Ní Mháille, aka Grace O’Malley, the notorious “Pirate Queen” of western Ireland.
Born on Clare Island in 1530, O’Malley famously cut off her hair after her father refused to take her on a voyage in case her locks got caught in the ropes. In her prime, O’Malley commanded three galleys, 20 ships, and over 200 men against her perpetual nemesis—the English—and even met with Elizabeth I before living to the ripe old age of 73.
Find out more about Grace O’Malley here.

Cork, Ireland native Annie Moore became the first immigrant to be processed through the newly-opened Ellis Island in New York on January 1, 1892.
Just 17 years old at the time, Moore looked after her two brothers on the ship voyage from Ireland to America, before going on to have 11 children of her own with German Catholic salesman Joseph Augustus Schayer. Moore died in 1924. Her previously unmarked grave was identified over eight decades later in 2006, and a Celtic Cross made from Irish Blue Limestone was later unveiled at her final resting place.
You can read more about Annie Moore here.

Tammy Duckworth, the Illinois senator and retired National Guard lieutenant colonel, is responsible for an impressive list of firsts.
Duckworth is the first Congress member to be born in Thailand, the first to give birth while in office, the first Asian-American woman to represent Illinois in Congress, and the first woman with a disability to be elected to Congress. She lost both of her legs following a helicopter attack in the Iraq War. “People always want me to hide it in pictures,” she told Vogue in 2018. “I say no! I earned this wheelchair. It’s no different from a medal I wear on my chest. Why would I hide it?”
Find out more about her here.

In 1985, Wilma Mankiller became the first woman to be Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, leading the largest tribe in the United States.
During Mankiller’s decade-long chiefdom from 1985 to 1995, “tribal enrollment grew, infant mortality dropped, and employment rates doubled,” according to Time. In 1998, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton.
Learn more about Wilma Mankiller here.

Women in Art

Toshiko Takaezu was a trailblazer in ceramic art making during the 1970s.
Takaezu is best known for creating large, closed-vessel sculptures. At the time, fellow artists expressed shock that a woman could make such large pieces, some taller than the artist herself. Takaezu merged aspects of Japanese tea ceremony, calligraphy, and American Abstract Expressionism to create a new style from these diverse art traditions. She had a long career as an artist and teacher at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Princeton University.
Learn more about Toshiko Takaezu here.

Emily Kauʻiomakaweliokauaionalaniokamanookalanipo Kukahiwa Zuttermeister, also known as Aunty Kauʻi, is a revered Kumu Hula (master hula teacher) from Hawaiʻi.
Zuttermeister trained in the hula pahu tradition of Samuel Pua Haʻaheo before becoming a teacher in 1935. Zuttermeister helped revitalize ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian language) and culture by teaching hula. She was part of a community of leaders who raised awareness about hula as a storytelling art form created by the Hawaiian people to recall and share their knowledge.
Learn more about her here.

No one did sultry better than Anna May Wong.
The Los Angeles-born screen siren landed her breakthrough role at age 17 in 1922’s “The Toll of the Sea.” Wong was also quite the trend setter—in 1934, the Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York voted her the “world’s best-dressed woman,” a massive fashion world honor at the time. Success in Hollywood came, but certainly not equal to her talent. As her Turner Classic Movie biography sums it up, stateside audiences considered Wong either “too Chinese” or “too American.” In Europe, the actress received a wider range of roles and due critical acclaim.
Learn more about Anna May Wong here.

Best known as the frontwoman of 4 Non Blondes, Linda Perry’s prolific behind-the-scenes work—as both a songwriter and producer—helped define modern pop music.
Perry worked on hit songs with P!nk, Christina Aguilera, and Alicia Keys. While a woman has never won a Grammy for Producer of the Year (Non-classical), in 2019, Perry received a nomination for the award from the Recording Academy. The singer-songwriter is one of a handful of women to achieve success in production and with her own music.
Learn more about Linda Perry here.

Delia Derbyshire was an innovator in electronic music who pushed the boundaries of technology and composition.
Derbyshire is most well-known for her electronic arrangement of the theme for “Doctor Who,” an important example of Musique Concrète. Each note was individually crafted by cutting, splicing, and stretching, or compressing, segments of analogue tape which contained recordings of a plucked string, oscillators, and white noise.
Learn more about Delia Derbyshire here.

During a two-decade career that began in the mid-1960s, Sonia Pottinger held the distinction of being Jamaica’s first female record producer.
Cutting tracks with the likes of Joe White & Chuck and Culture, her production spanned a variety of Jamaican genres, from rock-steady to ska to reggae.
Read more about Sonia Pottinger here.

Geena Davis starred in two movies about female empowerment: “Thelma & Louise” and “A League of Their Own.”
As Davis got older, she realized how unempowered women were in Hollywood. In 2004, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media to collect data comparing the number and types of male and female roles and to use that data to convince the industry of the need for change.
Listen to her speak about her career here.

Rita Moreno has influenced the entertainment industry for over 70 years as an actress, singer, and dancer.
Moreno became the first Latine woman to earn the vaunted EGOT: an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. In 2004, she was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her many contributions to the arts.
Learn more about Rita Moreno here.

Women in Technology

Hedy Lamarr was much more than “the most beautiful woman in the world” during Hollywood’s Golden Age.
The Austrian-American actress was also a mathematically-minded inventor who learned about military technology from dinner party conversations between her arms-manufacturer husband and Nazi German generals, before escaping to America where she eventually invented a new torpedo guidance system for the U.S. Navy.
Read more about Hedy Lamarr’s inventions here.

Rear Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was a STEM pioneer.
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper brought the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. The history of computer hardware invention is mostly a male-oriented affair. This isn’t unexpected given that early computers had more to do with heavy engineering than logic. However, when it comes to software, the picture is a little different. Hopper was responsible not only for the development of the Cobol language, but also for continuous advocacy within the industry to make computers and computing more accessible.
Find out more about Grace Hopper here.

Ada, Countess of Lovelace was born 200 years ago, but her name lives on.
There is often an unfairness in the reporting of the history of computing. The software people are nearly always passed over in preference for the hardware people. Ada, Countess of Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine and is generally accepted as the first programmer. Later, in the 1970s, the Ada language was named in recognition of her status as the first computer programmer. In 2009, Ada Lovelace Day was inaugurated to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Read more about her here.

In 1996, after being named a mission specialist on the Space Shuttle Columbia by NASA, Kalpana Chawla became the first woman of Indian descent to fly in space.
The shuttle orbited around earth 252 times in a little over two weeks. Chawla’s second—and last—trip to space came in 2003 when she and six other astronauts completed more than 80 experiments over the course of 16 days. She and the entire crew died when the ship disintegrated upon reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. In 2020, Northrop Grumman named a spacecraft after Chawla in her memory.
Read more about her here.

Share More Information on Women in History

Did you learn something new that you didn’t know before? Or, do you have a fact to share about a woman in history? Comment below and help us expand this list!

The post Learn About Women in History With Us! appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Backblaze original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/were-turning-15-today/

Who doesn’t like birthdays? We definitely do. And we usually celebrate ours on the Backblaze Blog because they’re fun, and we like reminiscing about the time we passed 10 petabytes of data under management and how cute exciting that was (we now have over two exabytes of data storage under management, for context).

But this past year, well, things have been busy! And the last few months have been busier still. Honestly, our 15th anniversary almost slipped right by us. But, we couldn’t let such a milestone go by without marking it somehow.

Today, we thought we’d take a brief look back on our beginnings and where we are now as a public company—a little “how it started/how it’s going” retrospective to celebrate our coming of age—not to pat ourselves on the back, but to celebrate the ways our team and business have grown, especially over the past year.

How It Started

One of the things we’re most proud of is the incredible team we’ve built. Before we founded Backblaze, the five founders and two demi-founders had worked together for 20 years. So, we knew the kind of company we wanted to create when we sat down to hash out what Backblaze would be—a company that’s equally fair and good for its customers, partners, employees, investors, and the greater community.

The team today is a lot bigger than it once was (270+ and counting!), but when we started Backblaze, we wanted to create a culture, both internally and externally, of people who cared about each other, cared about their work, and cared about our product. We knew building that kind of culture would lead us authentically to where we are today, and we fiercely protected it. According to a few sources, we’re still doing well on that count.

How It’s Going

So, what have we been up to recently? Thus far in 2022:

• We launched Universal Data Migration, a new service that covers all data transfer costs, including legacy provider egress fees, and manages data migration from any legacy on-premises or cloud source.
• We enhanced our partner program with two new offerings (in addition to Universal Data Migration, which partners can also take advantage of):
  • Backblaze B2 Reserve: A predictable, capacity pricing model to empower our Channel Partners.
  • Backblaze Partner API: A new API that empowers our Alliance Partners to easily integrate and manage B2 Cloud Storage within their products and platforms.

• We announced new partnerships with:
  • CTERA: An enterprise file services platform that extends the capabilities of traditional NAS and file servers to the cloud.
  • Catalogic: An enterprise and Kubernetes data protection solution.
  • Kasten by Veeam: A Kubernetes backup and application mobility solution.

• We opened our Bug Bounty Program to any security researcher who wants to help us find any vulnerabilities and strengthen the security of our services.
• And we launched the SSD Edition of our favorite Drive Stats series.

And just a few weeks before 2021 came to a close: We went public on Nasdaq under BLZE.

As much as we’d like to reflect* on more of the great things that happened in our past, we’re more interested in keeping our heads down, working away at what’s next. Stay tuned for the next 15 years.

*If you ARE interested in celebrating some past milestones with us, we put together this nifty chart of some other key milestones that happened between our founding date, 4/20/2007 (yes yes, we were founded on 4/20 with a CEO whose name is Budman, we’ve heard it all before) and when we went public. We thought we’d share it here (obviously we can’t help ourselves, we really do love reminiscing).

The post We’re Turning 15 Today! appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Post Syndicated from Natalie Cook original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/building-a-diverse-and-inclusive-workplace-our-learnings-and-goals/

Backblaze started in a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, California. Today, our products serve customers in more than 175 countries and are available in 11 languages. This would not have been possible without the diversity in culture, perspectives, and experiences within our team. Diversity has helped us understand the needs and expectations of the different markets we’re selling to. As a result of our diversity, we’ve come up with new features, solved interesting problems in an innovative way, and connected with our customers all around the world.

Today, we are sharing some stories of how diversity has helped our business throughout the years as well as our efforts to make our workplace more diverse and inclusive. We know we still have a lot to learn. Our initiatives are always evolving and changing as we strive to foster a diverse environment, and we hope that by sharing these stories we can do our part to promote diversity and inclusion more broadly.

How Diversity Helped Our Business

Building the Storage Pod Was an International Effort

Every true Backblaze fan knows that we built our own Storage Pods. After all, our blog post about how to build cheap cloud storage is one of our most popular posts. What fans may not know is that our staff’s bilingual skills are what helped us make our own Storage Pods. When the founders opened up the disk port multipliers they had just bought, they noticed there was a board inside with the name of the manufacturer: Chyang Fun Industry (CFI Group). This was a Taiwanese company, and they only spoke Mandarin. One of our founders, Billy Ng, spoke to them in Mandarin and explained that we needed 150 boards. These boards were essential pieces to building our Storage Pods.

Not only was Billy able to speak to the manufacturer in their native language, but he also knew the cultural standards so he was aware of what was culturally appropriate. After that initial sale, Backblaze continued to have a great relationship with CFI Group. Over the years, they continued to sell us boards which we used to make our Storage Pods. Brian Wilson, our chief technology officer, said, “Without Billy’s bilingual skills, the company would not have survived because we could not have survived without the Storage Pods.” As a result of Billy’s bilingual skills and bicultural understanding, we were able to build our own Storage Pods and store data from customers all around the world.

Translating the Product Into 11 Languages

Since we are an international company, our products and website are available in 11 languages. When the language features were initially created, our developers internationalized the product/website using Google Translate. However, they quickly realized these translations were not completely accurate. Backblaze then hired an external localization firm, but they were a bit pricey for us at the time—we were still a small, bootstrapped startup. We then looked internally and realized there were employees who were bilingual and even multilingual. These employees began reviewing the translations and fixing any errors. They even roped in friends and family to help with the translations. As a result of our diverse staff, we were able to fix the translations internally rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars on hiring an external localization firm.

Creating a Diverse and Inclusive Workplace

Diversity and inclusion have always been valued at Backblaze. More than half of our founders were born in a country outside the U.S. (Fun fact: some of those countries don’t even exist anymore!) They collectively practice five different religions and speak various languages. Their diverse backgrounds have helped them build the company that Backblaze is today.

In the past year and a half, we’ve made a conscious effort to reinforce and further our commitment to diversity through a number of initiatives. We established a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee made up of staff members from many different teams across the organization who are passionate about creating a safe and diverse workplace for their peers. Of their many initiatives, two we’re highlighting today include our hiring efforts and our inclusivity efforts.

Building Diversity in Hiring

The DEI Committee approached diversity in hiring by building out an internship program, which allowed us to bring on interns at various levels who come from different ethnicities, genders, socioeconomic statuses, etc. As a result of the program, we brought on some of the interns full-time, and we are excited to see them grow their careers at Backblaze!

In addition to the internship program, we’ve also worked with a variety of organizations that help bridge the gap between tech companies and underrepresented talent. These organizations have also provided internal training sessions which contributed to creating a safe and welcoming environment and continuing our positive retention rate.

Fostering a Safe and Inclusive Environment

We realize that it’s not only important to hire diverse employees, but to also create an inclusive and safe environment that supports these team members. The DEI Committee often hosts training sessions such as implicit bias training and gender inclusion training for employees, managers, Human Resources, and executive staff. The DEI Committee also hosts events like virtual panel discussions and movie nights to elevate social justice issues. These events lead to conversations afterward where employees engage in thoughtful discussions about the event, diversity, and social justice.

How Diversity and Inclusion Support a Strong Company Culture

By creating a diverse and inclusive environment, we are enhancing our company culture and reducing employee turnover. According to Gallup, U.S. businesses lose around $3 trillion every year due to employee turnover. As a result of our company culture where we value diversity and employees treat one another with respect, we have a very low attrition rate. Check out our Glassdoor reviews to get a glimpse into our culture!

We’re Always Learning

We understand that as an organization, we still have more to learn. We’re continuously looking for more opportunities to educate our employees and leadership team, whether that be through diversity training sessions or having more open conversations about difficult topics. We’re also listening to our employees and looking into how we can continue to build a workforce that encourages and strengthens our diversity.

We don’t have all the answers yet, but as an organization that encourages learning and development, we are continually refining our approach to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We look forward to sharing future learnings and using our platform to continue to promote these values to other organizations.

The post Building a Diverse and Inclusive Workplace: Our Learnings and Goals appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.