For almost two years now, a committee has been working on diversity and gender issues within Pyxis. Its objective: to make issues visible, raise awareness and learn in order to support diversity within the company. One of its current challenges is to support the company to ensure that it is a «safe space» for all its members. The committee has been taking important steps in this direction through workshops, active listening and co-construction to lay the foundations for a «safe space».

A safe space

By safe space we mean an environment that allows people to develop fully without being violated, discriminated against or humiliated because of who they are. It is an environment where no one is afraid of being attacked and ridiculed for expressing who they are, where they can develop without their experience being denied by others.

The concept of Safe Space has long resonated in the Pyxian dictionary. Since last year, Pyxis has been running workshops together with the organisation FAUDS (Familiares y Amigos Unidos por la Diversidad Sexual) to incorporate learning about sexual and gender diversity into our daily lives and to incorporate tools to be able to live diversity in our teams in a more integral and inclusive way. These workshops gave rise to the idea of starting to build a safe space. Several members of the team began to delve deeper into these issues and to take the first steps.

Building a Pyxis for all people

With this approach, we organised the month of diversity, a month where we concentrated activities and workshops to raise awareness and exchange on diversity and gender, seeking to make Pyxis a safe space for everyone. In this sense, our Gender and Diversity Commission organised two workshops to continue integrating coexistence, inclusion and diversity into the ecosystem.

On the one hand, to learn basic notions about diversity and gender and to understand how these factors influence our daily lives, FAUDS offered a workshop with clear and direct information about how we live diversity, how we integrate it into our lives, how to educate and accompany diverse children and adolescents. This workshop provided tools and resources to have a starting point from which to initiate conversations with the different work teams and make visible situations where diversity is at the centre of our daily lives.

A week after the workshop, a space for Active Listening was opened to everyone. Without scripts or rules, the subject of diversity was put on the table for frank, open and respectful discussion. The objective: that conversations could arise and that it would be possible to exchange opinions and feelings in a sincere, honest and open way, listening with respect, empathy and tolerance to what the other person has to say. What does it make us feel to talk about diversity? How can we integrate these concepts into our common dictionary? What do we need?