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Driving Diversity in the API Industry with Women in APIs’ Claire Barrett

Kay James
June 13, 2024 | 5 min read

"APIs need good diverse thinking and one of the best ways to get diversity is to think about having people across gender, culture, race, sexual orientation, ability, age during that development process. Diverse stakeholders, creators, and consumers are important to be able to create better API products,”
Claire Barrett
Director of APIsFirst, Co-Founder of API Collective, and lead of the Women in APIs program

On the latest Livin’ on the Edge podcast, we took our regular episode in a different direction. Ambassador cares greatly about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the API industry, and we believe it’s important to create spaces and opportunities for all to thrive. We invited Claire Barrett, Director of APIsFirst, to join us on the podcast.

APIsFirst is a UK-based consultancy that focuses on helping organizations navigate complexity and accelerate the digital transformation of API-led business and IT teams.

Read on for upcoming trends, how to get involved with the Women in APIs community, and how you can be either a better ally or gain confidence in the industry as a woman in tech yourself!


The Women in APIs Program

In addition to APIsFirst, Claire is also Co-founder of the API Collective and lead of the Women in APIs program, part of apidays.

The API Collective The API Collective is a group of API specialist consultants who power the people behind APIs. This means providing the API skills to help them realize the full potential of APIs at their organizations.

And as for the Women in APIs community, it’s aligned around the common purpose of helping people be seen and heard in the public domain. Aligned around getting balance at tech conferences and publications, they believe in finding, using, and managing great APIs calls for people that reflect the diversity of use cases in the API Economy. They are currently a global organization with membership spanning 40 countries.

"Gender balance is a problem in Tech at large and the Women in APIs, which is a program under apidays, we focus on one particular piece of that. What the research suggests is that if there are more women and people from underrepresented minorities speaking at conferences and being part of panels and leading conversation, more people will actually attend those conferences,” shares Claire.

Women in APIs offers a variety of programming across the apidays conferences and standalone programming aimed at helping women in the tech industry improve their speaking and presentation skills, meet other like-minded individuals and level up in leadership roles within their own teams.

"We've grown the Women in APIs community to more than 650 people in 45 countries, and we have one purpose, which is to help people be seen and heard in the public domain,” shares Claire.

Ambassador’s Partnering with Women in APIs GET/LinkingIn Program

In addition to all the great work Women in APIs is currently doing, they’re also launching a new program, which kicks off next week, June 19th, at 8:30 am MST. Their pilot GET /LinkingIn program for our Women In APIs community seeks to address a common problem of helping women in the industry improve and level up their own LinkedIn profiles. 

Run in a small group workshop format, with plenty of peer-to-peer feedback, it’s an option for active members of the Women In APIs Community. Ambassador is pleased to sponsor this workshop and be part of this program!

Diverse Development Teams Drive Deliverables

Creating more inclusive and diverse development teams isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s actually incredibly beneficial for creating better API products, driving more innovation, and ultimately creating more ROI for your bottom line.

According to a study done by McKinsey & Company, research shows “that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are 25% more likely to achieve above-average profitability compared to those in the bottom quartile. Similarly, companies with high ethnic and cultural diversity in leadership outperform their less diverse counterparts by 36% in profitability.”​

By bringing together individuals with varied backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences involved in the design phase of your API lifecycle, these teams foster creativity and generate a broader range of ideas and solutions. This diversity leads to more innovative products that can appeal to a wider API consumer base. Additionally, inclusive teams are more adaptable and better equipped to navigate global markets, ultimately driving increased revenue and competitive advantage.

Listen to the rest of Claire’s episodes for API trends and a few best practices for API teams. We appreciate her coming on the show and are looking forward to partnering. For additional insights, check out our other podcast episodes or the Ambassador blog!