Diversity Spotlight
Achieving true gender diversity in tech: Be flexible or fail
Marta Blazejewska, Head of Sales at STX Next, outlines how best to promote tech roles to women and successfully address the gender imbalance.
A
ccording to a recent report from McKinsey, jobs held by women were 1.8 times more vulnerable to Covid
than those held by men. While women make up 39% of global employment, they account for 54% of overall job losses. Tis could severely hamper efforts to achieve gender diversity, particularly in the technology industry where women remain heavily under- represented. Te reality is that when many countries
went into lockdown and schools and nurseries closed, women were leſt juggling full-time employment with parenting and childcare. While developments in recent decades have allowed more women the opportunity to establish careers across any industry, the burden of childcare is still disproportionately placed on women. Tis is an area where many tech businesses failed to offer
adequate support for women during the pandemic, and where efforts to make meaningful change should be focused. Below are some important steps to consider to address the
gender divide:
Adjust targets in line with life, not work Pandemic aside, the tech industry has historically been weighted in favour of men. At present, just 19% of tech workers are women and 22% of tech directors are women. Te first step in addressing this divide is assisting women in
reaching a far healthier work-life balance. When the pandemic started, working mothers were leſt with less time to complete their work, yet in many cases, targets remained the same. It’s important to be flexible in this respect, which means adjusting targets, goals and expectations based on people’s practical capabilities, not just their skillset.
Te nine-to-five is dead: Many IT roles can be done flexibly and remotely with no impact on quality of work, so it’s about time we leſt the idea of the traditional working day in the past. Employees will oſten have to attend to their parental duties or
other matters at hours of the day outside of your company’s control, especially if you have a hybrid working strategy. But hybrid working doesn’t just mean offering the opportunity to work from home; it means adapting to people’s lives.
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Offer support: New mothers returning to work may be worrying how to balance work and home life. Make balancing their workload and resettling into a role aſter time away easier for them by staying in frequent contact at all stages of the maternity process and asking women how they can be better supported.
Women are the leaders of today and tomorrow Tis is also important because the must-have skills for a manager have shiſted in recent history. According to a study by the Pew Research Centre, the most sought-aſter leadership traits, such as being compassionate, organised and honest, are oſten those that we more frequently associate with women. Further data from McKinsey has shown that female managers are
better than males when providing emotional support to employees and are more likely to check in on colleagues’ wellbeing. Women are also better at helping employees navigating work-life challenges, which is something that has really come into focus since the start of the pandemic. Te above underlines the potential of women to make a major
difference in the tech industry. Now it’s time for businesses to work harder to make tech a viable and rewarding career choice.
July 2022 | 33 Embrace this by supporting women and
giving them the opportunity to weave their parental responsibilities into their working day and jumping back online later to finish that project or task.
Rethink recruitment: It’s important that gender equality becomes a business imperative, and this means adapting your recruitment processes. In the past, we’ve sought candidates from universities with a higher proportion of women on tech courses in order to promote a healthier gender balance. Where, for example, we’ve had a lower
proportion of women applying for a role, we’ve also looked at focusing our efforts on offering candidates more junior roles with a view to training them for more senior leadership
positions later down the line. Tere are also things that should be promised from the offset to
support women in their careers. Start by offering more maternity support than your competitors, so women can start families with confidence.
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