International Women's Day at Moon: Lighting the Way to a Brighter Future

At Moon Creative Lab, we’re lucky to work with an amazing group of women that lead and support everyone in our US and Japan offices. 

To commemorate this year’s International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we did a few things to celebrate the wonderful women of Moon and educate ourselves to create a better, more aware, and more equal future:

At both of Moon’s offices in Tokyo and Palo Alto, you can meet women of diverse backgrounds and talents. Celebrating International Women's Day is an opportunity to highlight the diverse perspectives of women, and in doing so, we hope to unite all of our employees and continue to move toward a common vision, one in which each of us, regardless of gender, has a sense of belonging. We want to unleash people's creative potential, create new value, and enrich the world. We created a one-minute video highlighting the women who work here and why all of us at Moon believe it is important to celebrate International Women's Day.

We understand the disparity between men and women in the startup space and love supporting women entrepreneurs. We hosted a workshop with the young women of Mitsui & Co. where we shared our learnings and empowered and inspired them to dream big. 

This year, we also wanted to highlight the amazing women from all walks of life that currently work at Moon. We hosted an online panel discussion with Mary Ann Gallo (CMO), Miki Yamada (Operations Lead), and Yukari Tago (Founder/CEO of Lullaby). In this discussion, we were able to explore the wins and challenges that each of these women have faced, and continue to face, to get to where they are today.

One of the panelists shared a powerful comment that resonated with many of us here at Moon:

“I say to myself, ‘You're here for a reason!'" 

"By adopting such a mindset that I'm here for a reason, that I'm expected and called to this discussion, I can't afford not to speak up and disappoint them. Whenever I feel timid that I might say the wrong thing, these words give me a push. I also learned that even people who seem confident now have underestimated themselves at times in the past, which encourages me to think that I might be able to change.”

Last but not least, we wanted to do something fun, creative, and in-person with our fellow Moon Mates. We wanted to highlight the future of young people in the world and how we can make incremental changes in our daily lives towards making the world a more equitable place for the next generation. The team held an in-person workshop focused on the environment that we grow up in and how our biases as adults can affect and appear in their lives through the decisions we make for them as adults that can dictate their future. 

We first did an activity which forced us to think about not how we perceive careers, but how we think our culture would perceive a career. Through this activity, we had productive discussions about how the media and the world has changed so much since 10, 20, or 30 years ago when we were all much younger. For example, previously in Japan, you may have thought of skateboarding as a sport for males and not females, but because of Japan’s recent achievements at the 2020 Tokyo Skateboarding Olympics, skateboarding has become much more popular and accessible for young women.

Afterwards, we took a Gender and Career Implicit Association Test provided by Harvard University. The goal of the Implicit Association Test is to educate the public about bias and to provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the internet. The test itself was quite standard and is on the older side, but the discussion that it brought up was very relevant to our everyday lives. Some participants that assumed they did not have a strong implicit bias were particularly surprised to have gotten the “Strong Association for Male with Career and Female with Family” result. This led to interesting and productive conversations around the accuracy of the tests, but also about how our perception of ourselves can actually be very different from what is seen by others.

In the end, we wanted people to leave the workshop with the intention to create a more positive world for future generations, and we hope that we all can become more and more aware of our influence in the world.

While we love hosting events and celebrating IWD and Women’s History Month, we recognize that women should be respected and empowered everyday, not just during these times. We hope that by hosting these types of events every year, we are able to encourage other people to support the women in their communities in their own ways, inspired by our stories.