While plenty of organizations have programs in place to support women in technology, the experience on the ground for female tech workers can still prove challenging. At this year’s Tech Show London, a panel of women discussed their biggest pain points, and what steps should be taken to close the gender gap in tech.
Tackling the gender pay gap is one of the most important areas, according to Callie Cromer, Director at Women In Tech. She notes:
We're about 17.5% still that women are underpaid in comparison to men. I'm going to keep banging that drum until we get that equal.
The need to close the pay gap between men and women is borne out by new research from Akamai, which reveals the part money plays when it comes to attracting senior women back to the tech industry.
Of the 500 women interviewed who had returned to a tech role after a career break, the top reason for doing so was for a higher salary (52%). This was almost 10 percentage points higher than women citing work-life balance (43%) and better career progression (43%) as reasons for resuming a career in tech.
Cromer would also like to see more understanding among organizations that having women in the tech team, and across the entire workforce, isn’t just a tick box exercise. She adds:
It matters and it means so much. You'll be surprised at the amount of organizations who are still seeing that as just a tick box. But we will change it.
Technically an expert
More acceptance of women in technical roles would help the situation. Ellie Rahimi, Senior Software Engineer at Trainline, developed an interest in technology from an early age, playing video games with her parents and siblings. She explains:
I was always wondering how these games are built. I was in high school and I joined some competition for football simulation, where I learned my first programming language. And that was a time for me that I could picture myself that I wanted to be a person to build things with programming language.
Rahimi went on to study physics and artificial intelligence (AI), before embarking on a career as a game developer, and then switching to back-end engineering. Despite her technical background, she has still experienced instances in her career where she was guided toward more of a management role, or was appreciated for a skill set more around product management. She explains:
In those instances, if I wasn't confident enough in the job that I want to have in my future, I might not be sitting here as a senior software engineer. I might not be the perfect software engineer, but that's normal, no-one is perfect.
More visible role models could improve the situation. Rahimi is aware of some amazing women in tech, but sometimes they’re not as visible as they could be. She says:
The enabler is on us to step up to be more visible, not only for ourselves as individuals, but also to help other women in tech to have some role model to see what is your path so they can learn from that.
Isolation and lack of representation have an ongoing impact on women in tech, according to Kasia Dutch, Software Engineer at Starling Bank. Dutch secured her role after joining a technology boot camp, which had the aim of diversifying the industry and giving opportunities to people who wouldn't have otherwise had access to tech. She notes:
I was still the only woman there in a cohort of 13 people, which pretty much exactly mirrors the statistics around the gender balance in the industry. So that was really disheartening. I've gotten this opportunity and I still don't really see people that I can admire and aim to be like. I had to create that community for myself, essentially, and find those people. But even once I'm in the industry now, the alienation doesn't end because there's still so much unconscious bias.
Baby bias
There’s also plenty of conscious bias. Dutch is on the receiving end of a lot of comments and assumptions around pregnancy. She notes:
I've had recruiters say, by the way, we have comprehensive benefits. One of them is, 'Really great maternity pay, I'm sure you'll love that, I'm sure you're really interested in that'.
More recently, male colleagues have started remarking to Dutch that she’ll be off work soon (after all, she’s a woman of child-bearing age). She adds:
It's just so, so presumptuous. And those judgments, those biases can impact my progression, ultimately, because they might be deciding for me that I'm going to take that time off.
As someone with two small children, Emily Hall-Strutt, Director at Next Tech Girls, has faced similar attitudes. She recalls attending a tech awards ceremony last year, where she was sat on a table with various men. Hall-Strutt says:
One of the guys, we started talking about having small children. He also had a small child, even younger than mine. He said to me, ‘Who's looking after your baby while you're here?'.
While she replied that it was her husband, she wishes she’d instead replied – ‘Who's looking after yours?’ She adds:
I just thought, why did you ask me that? If I were a man, would you have asked me that? There's too many assumptions, and there's not enough understanding of different decisions and different lifestyles and how they impact people differently.
Another perennial challenge is at the younger end of the scale, where girls can still be overlooked for technical subjects. Dutch, whose degree was in Russian and Chinese, fell into HR once she graduated, until the pandemic came and she found herself facing a string of redundancies. She happened to come across the graduate scheme boot camp, which was her first realisation that she had the opportunity to work in tech. She adds:
It wasn't something that was really advertised to me at school. It wasn't something that I'd considered as someone who was more humanities focused. It was seeing the opportunity, being able to try my hand at coding, and realise that there are lots of things that appeal to me about it. But if I hadn't seen that, I wouldn't have any idea. So really, it's about exposure. In order to be influenced, you need to be exposed to something.
No girls allowed
That experience mirrors the reason Cromer co-founded Women in Tech, which was precipitated by a school visit undertaken by the director at her previous company. He and his daughter were touring her secondary school, and when the female student showing them round got to the IT and computer department, she just continued to walk past. Cromer says:
My director said, ‘Why are we not going in there?’ And the young girl turned around and said, ‘That's just for boys’. And then he came back to work and was telling us. It was at that moment that myself and Emily [Irwin], the other Women in Tech director, thought we have to do better, this has to change. And that was really what started Women in Tech for us.
At the other end of the spectrum, change is needed to see more women progress into senior tech positions. Leadership in technology needs to be redefined to focus less on tenure and time spent in industry, as well as less focus on technical experience in a leadership role, according to Dutch. She explains:
Just with the mind that people are moving into the industry as it expands from non-technical backgrounds, non-traditional backgrounds and therefore they bring with them experiences from other careers and they may have built those human skills along the way. Actually focusing on the people that do the work rather than the primary focus being on the business outcomes. If you focus on the people that do the work, those business outcomes will come as a result in any case.
My take
When it came to her top wish for women in tech, Hall-Strutt said in five years’ time, she’d like to see more female-dominated or all-female panels talking about their areas of expertise, rather than simply talking about being women in tech. She notes:
In the same way as we constantly see all male or mostly male panels doing that, it would be really nice if we weren't talking about being women anymore, because being a woman in tech is just a normal thing.
We can all vote with our feet to compel this change, by avoiding all-male panels. Companies and event organizers would soon get the message from half-empty conference rooms.