A letter from our Co-Founders

The world wasn’t built for women and non-binary folks. Diem is.

Diem operates in a universe where the candid conversations we have with each other —about friendships, birth control, toxic masculinity, harassment, chronic pain, big career moves, enthralling books, easy recipes, and everything in between — become resources.

We exist because the majority of information for women and non-binary people on the Internet today comes from people in the business of promoting items for profit, ranking for search results, and producing hot takes for shock value. Searching for answers online is lonely, frustrating, and full of trolls. Trustworthy subject-matter experts are few and far in between. It often feels like there’s nowhere to go. None of this reflects the real behavior we know exists among women and non-binary folks in the real world, which is to share their lived experiences with each other “behind closed doors” in a helpful, constructive way.

All of the doors are wide open in Diem. Wisdom is like a currency here—we think of every person’s unique experience as a well of knowledge that someone else can learn from. Our goal is to give women and non-binary people open access to all of that expertise because knowledge = power (in this universe and the other one).

But we think about power differently in Diem. Inequalities between genders are one of the most persistent patterns in the distribution of power across the structures that shape our physical and digital worlds. This is why women earn 82 cents for every dollar a man earns in the U.S. This is why the tradition of dowry payments is still normalized in Indian marriages. This is why less than 40 percent of countries offer girls and boys equal access to education. This is why women weren’t included in medical trials until 1993. This is why all the major social media platforms—which are increasingly shaping how we live, work, and communicate with each other on a human level—are founded and built by men.

We’re building the Diem universe differently. We like to think of it as a steady march towards a realm where power does not equal masculinity, but is instead distributed evenly among folks of any gender. We aren’t building addictive technology, because the future of social media isn’t about performative sharing. It’s about knowledge sharing. And in Diem, power comes in the form of talking and listening.

We’re hoping that one small part of that change is The Power Outlet, our publication on gender, power, and the “things we don’t talk about openly.” As we grow, The Power Outlet will share conversations, knowledge and more from within the Diem Universe. We hope it feels somewhere in between reading your favorite section of the Sunday newspaper and Poise Magazine from 13 Going on 30.

We’re currently accepting pitches from freelance writers, and are specifically interested in commissioning stories that tackle the following over the coming months:

• Beauty and Power

• Terms We Call Women

• Gender and Religion

• The History of Marriage

• Sex and Power

• Motherhood

See our Pitch Guide for all the details. We’re looking forward to hearing from you! In the meantime, plug in and learn!

As Gloria Steinem once said (to a bunch of Google employees), “technology doesn’t allow empathy.”

We’re changing that.

We can't wait to meet you in there,

Emma & Divia

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