Hi, everyone! I’m Ayaka (@ayapan) from the Employee Engagement & Data Science Team of the Customer Service (“CS”) division at Mercari. In this article, I’d like to share with you all about the Pink Ribbon Day event that we held at our office on June 19th.

My team has a mission to improve employee satisfaction across the CS division, and in pursuit of this mission, we have been planning and executing initiatives to increase engagement among division members.

Pink Ribbon Day is one of these initiatives. The event was born from the director of the CS division @Kelly’s strong desire to create an environment that allows women to shine and perform at their best. Once we had this idea, we reached out to the Inclusion & Diversity (“I&D”) Team in order to make it happen.

How Mercari’s first Pink Ribbon Day came to be

First, let me talk about how Pink Ribbon Day came to be. We planned the event for June 19th, because the Japan Cancer Society has designated the 19th of every month to be “Pink Day” in promotion of breast awareness.

For the event, we organized two talk sessions under different themes: one sharing an employee’s experience with breast cancer, and another sharing an employee’s message to other working moms.

As women, we experience various life events throughout the different stages of our lives. However, prior to planning this event, we noticed that Mercari did not have many spaces or communities for women to get together and talk about our experiences. There was no one taking ownership of organizing and creating this kind of community.

We believed that many people were yearning for such opportunities and would use them if only they existed, so the CS Team decided to take the lead of organizing Pink Ribbon Day. Initially, we started planning the event for just the COO Division, but we ended up opening it up to the entire organization.

It was also nice to have the support of Marketplace COO @osarin, who gave the following message at the beginning of the event.

Thinking about women’s careers and breast awareness

The event was held in a hybrid format with participants joining both online and offline, and we had about 60 people join us!

Next, I’d like to look back on the event and share some of the thoughts I had after it was over.

This time, we held the event under the theme of women’s careers and breast awareness. There were two sessions, which I’ll go into more detail about below.
・Session 1: Unleashing My Potential After Experiencing Breast Cancer
・Session 2: My Career Path

Session 1: Unleashing My Potential After Experiencing Breast Cancer

While planning the event, we thought it could be a valuable opportunity for people to hear from an actual breast cancer survivor. We heard about an employee (“Employee M”) who has experienced breast cancer and decided to reach out to her, asking if she could share her experience and what she learned from it. She was kind enough to accept the offer, saying that she’d be more than happy to speak, especially if her story could help others.

Up until that point, Employee M had talked about her experience battling cancer with her members whom she is close with, but this was her first time sharing the information publicly. I&D Team manager @choco joined Employee M on stage and facilitated the conversation as she spoke about her life before and after she was diagnosed, how she found out, and how her actions and perspective changed after going through treatment. The conversation ended on a positive note, with her speaking about how the experience helped her unleash her potential and grow as a person.

Session 2: My Career Path

For the second half of the event, @Kelly (who was a strong proponent of this event from the beginning) took the stage and spoke about her career so far.

@Kelly joined Mercari in February of this year, and in her previous company, she also led communities for women and had a passion for advocating for women and working moms. @Kelly herself is a working mom raising a daughter. During her session, she spoke about her own challenges of balancing work with raising a kid and gave some advice and words of encouragement to other working parents.

The event was a success and we received positive feedback from participants, who shared comments like “I was really happy to see Mercari holding an event focused on women” and “Hearing about Employee M’s experience reminded me how important it is to go for regular breast screenings.”

At the end of the event, we were also able to announce the launch of a “Women@” community at Mercari that will be planning more similar events and activities going forward.

Mercari’s new Women@ community

Mercari’s Women@ community aims to support the women working at Mercari and is made up of members of the following three roles:
・Community Members
・Community Leads
・Female Employee Support

Currently, we are working on finding Community Members and Leads from the CS Team and all corners of Mercari. We will start planning more events and activities very soon, so stay tuned!