Working With Pride

Moon Partnered with Mitsui & Co.’s Diversity Management Department team to celebrate Pride Month.

By being present all over the globe, Mitsui is, in essence, diverse. But its understanding and desire to foster diversity does not stop with geographical presence. Thrive on diversity is one of the company's four core values. Still, many might wonder what diversity really is. Mitsui's HR itself has a whole team of engaged professionals working on Diversity & Inclusion (D&I). With them, there is a wide group of D&I ambassadors, people who dedicate part of their time to engage with this community in order to make Mitsui more diverse and inclusive.

Diversity is plural. It means breaking homogeneity from ethnicity to thoughts, from gender to social structures. It means having different people and different ideas innovating together. Inclusion is providing the same positions and benefits to all people regardless of race, gender, disability, medical, or other needs. Together, Diversity and Inclusion are about embracing differences based on nationality, religious faith, gender, sexual orientation, or whatsoever.

Among all the actions toward diversity that Moon has started, our team partnered with Diversity Management Dept. of Mitsui to create a series of activities during Pride Month in June 2022. Already well known in many countries, June is considered the month not just to celebrate, but to encourage discussions and actions to increase the awareness of LGBTQIA+ people. While at Moon, we collaborated with Mitsui to host a series of activities. Anna Hiraoka from Diversity Management Dept. of Mitsui worked with Machi Rezende, Moon's Lead UX Designer and current researcher of intersections of Corporate Culture and Gender Diversity at Waseda University, to host an online forum for Mitsui's D&I ambassadors.

Through an interactive presentation combined with an interactive quiz, participants had the chance to learn more about gender, sexuality, and ways to increase awareness and create safe spaces for LGBTQAI+ employees and professionals in the workplace. In the end, a Q&A session was held.

Global surveys and research all over the globe, like this one in Japan, show that at least 10% of the world population identifies themselves as LGBTQIA+. This means that one in ten people around us is an LGBTQIA+ person, proving that it is essential for companies to promote policies and actions to create an inclusive and safe space in which everyone can thrive.

Machi Rezende
Lead UX Designer
mateus@mooncreativelab.com