Parents in Tech Alliance

The United States leads the world in tech innovation, yet ranks last for working parents to raise a family. Now further compounded by COVID-19, women's workplace labor rate in the US alone is 57% - not seen since 1988, an entire generation's gains lost in the past two years. The amount of increased family-care responsibilities at home, coupled with the amount of pregnancy & family-care discrimination among employers, is growing so quickly that the EEOC just issued warning to businesses to ensure women - particularly mothers - return to the workforce. In parallel, over 90% of Fortune 500s have corporate sponsored ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) directly impacting its inclusive talent strategies, yet only 5% of ERGs are fairly paid - a majority of ERG leaders are women of color & mothers doing even more unpaid labor, and a rise of caregiving-centric ERGs in the past 10 years. Especially in Big Tech, fueling the world's fourth industrial revolution, with the largest equity, gender, racial, and pay gaps of any industry. Our collective future of work & innovation must center care for caregivers.

Founded in 2017, Parents in Tech Alliance (PTA) is a coalition platform enabling healthy tech work for all families. PTA is free to all, provides a safe space for career fellowship & networking, time-saving resource libraries, content to inform & inspire, and virtual events to democratize our know-how. While global in membership, Parents in Tech Alliance prioritizes its focus impacting corporate America and U.S. policy thought leadership.

To solve this challenge with urgency, PTA's three strategic pillars:

1) Ensure companies aggregately measure caregivers within federal EEO-1 reporting data, and share out this annual data to ensure career equity and leadership access for all caregivers.

2) Ensure all employee resource groups (ERGs) are fairly compensated, recognized, and protected from unpaid labor & discrimination.

3) Serve as a B2B marketplace catalyst for #FamTech startups and working parent solutions.

Parents in Tech Alliance primarily serves the voice of the working parent/caregiver, while curating content targeting four key audiences:

• DEI Advocates & ERG Leadership
• CHROs & People Experience Leadership
• Public Policy & Workplace Rights Experts
• #FamTech Entrepreneurs

Because so few companies are investing in or responding to the caregiving crisis with urgency, and so few working families can afford to thoughtfully navigate their career health & wealth, PTA's programming & resources are curated to integrate these audiences together. Examples include worker toolkits like - Starting a Parents/Families ERG, ERG Measurement Frameworks, Proposal Template for Improving Your Org's Paid Leave Policy. As well as Management guides like - Creating Diverse, Inclusive Tech Teams, and, Flexible Work Arrangements. And an online PTA Marketplace for B2B entreprenuers to pitch and pilot tech solutions & employee-benefits at scale.

Parents in Tech Alliance is uniquely positioned to scale as both an industry-steward within organizations, and as a public policy partner to influence broader change. Examples in the past year include:

• PTA is a named participant in the Department of Labor's White House summary: Advancing Worker Equity in the U.S. Department of Labor's Policies, Programs & Procurement National Online Dialogue.
  
• With PTA's direct impact, over 100,000 global Big Tech workers now have access to and/or improved gender-neutral paid family leave & bereavement time-off. Big Tech campuses have installed dozens of onsite lactation/nursing rooms. And over 50,000 US tech workers were provided with additional COVID-19 family care leave in the past year.
• PTA is a co-sponsor of FatheringTogether's global #ThisWorkingDadCares campaign, encouraging workplaces and fathers to end the stigma of taking paternity / paid family leave time - usage is at a 10-year low within the U.S.

PTA is steered with purposeful intersectionality, driving tangible change from within at companies like Airbnb, Amazon, Asana, Eventbrite, Google, Helpr, LinkedIn, Lyft, Oyster, Parenthood Ventures, Pinterest, PL+US (Paid Leave in the US), SalesForce, Superkin, TendLab, Twitch, Twitter, Uber, Western Union, Yext, and beyond. Parents in Tech Alliance is led & owned by Executive Director, Sarah Johal, a mother and tech industry expert with 15+ years experience building brands & belonging. Sarah also serves as a board advisor for LA-based caregiving startup, Helpr, and Bay Area nonprofit, One Percent for Education.

Parents in Tech Alliance is a rapidly growing woman-owned, voluntarily-powered platform, without the business & operational models in place to scale its mission. Solve provides tremendous access to business experts, policymakers, and/or innovative builders who are equally inspired to solve our shared care economy. With this partnership, PTA will no doubt advance its mission to enable even more healthy tech work for all working families.

Parents in Tech Alliance is Big Tech's solve in centering care at work. PTA is the only coalition platform of its kind, and has received written testimony from leaders grateful that a solution like PTA exists.

Through PTA's coalition platform, business leaders have launched parents/caregiving ERGs in their orgs to solve the motherhood penalty,
successfully campaign for significant HR policy & wellness benefits,
add caregivers to DEI training content, and gain exec support for PTA's
proposed policies - inclusive caregiving measurement and ERG fair labor compensation. PTA's impact reaches beyond tech, creating a better work experience for everyone in any industry, regardless of caregiving status.

PTA's five-year roadmap is to be a fully-staffed business operations, including launching a micro-grant fund for mothers of color in tech, and/or those financially impacted by family care bias/discrimination, to accelerate closing tech's equity, gender & pay gaps.

Parents in Tech Alliance recently welcomed its new Financial Director to its steering committee, who will navigate PTA's pending non-exempt status for planned fundraising and donation drives. While scaling national outreach, engagement tools, and content strategies that drive action among PTA's four key audiences.

Parents in Tech Alliance (PTA) measures its purpose-driven progress using the OKR framework, Objectives and Key Results. PTA's current Q1 goals include:

• Objective: Grow brand awareness & community engagement
  • KR: Increase membership by 10%
  • KR: Secure (1) national publication interview/op-ed
• Objective: Scale PTA programming & operations
  
  • KR: Hire & onboard new Financial Director role
  • KR: Increase monthly event attendance by 5%
  • KR: Secure (3) speakers & execute monthly events

Long-term success looks like:

• Full-time PTA staffing
• Recruiting & executive leadership gains among those who identify as mothers & caregivers
• Caregivers added as a protected class at state and federal levels
• Measured corporate accountability that centers care in the workforce
• Increased usage of paid family leave by fathers/men
• ERG compensation frameworks in place at every Fortune 500 company

Parents in Tech Alliance leverages big data, industry trends, knowledge systems, and personal testimonies to shape strategy, planning & execution.

Today, PTA relies on traditional technologies to drive awareness & engagement - email distro-list, website, shared content drives, social media, and video conferencing. PTA is eager to pilot new innovations in crowdsourcing, machine learning, and agile product-thinking to accelerate growth & impact.

Parents in Tech Alliance operates with purposeful intersectionality - ensuring all working families are represented and served. PTA is completely free and open to all, regardless of industry or caregiving status.

PTA Members represent diverse career & family needs, including single mothers, parents of children with special needs, military families, LGBTQ parents, empty-nesters, retirees, and non-caregiving allies.

Parents in Tech Alliance is a woman-owned national nonprofit, pending 501(c)6 charitable non-exempt status. Employer #85-0510212

Parents in Tech Alliance filed charitable 501(c)6 non-exempt status in July 2021, expected to be granted by the IRS by October 2022. PTA received its first angel investment by its Executive Director in 2021 to cover operational expenses until non-exempt status is confirmed. Future revenue streams will include grants, donation drives, and corporate sponsorships.

As co-founder and Executive Director, I made an angel investment of $5,000 to launch Parents in Tech Alliance nationally & file ownership (Summer 2021). This funding stemmed from my first successful campaign advocating for ERG compensation, for co-founding a major tech company's caregiving employee resource group.