‘Women’s brains don’t work that way’: The female bosses overturning that phrase

CAMBRIDGE graduate Kathryn Parsons said she was sick of hearing that phrase on a weekly basis. Now she’s leading a revolution.

Kathryn Parsons says coding can open doors for women.

KATHRYN Parsons was sick of hearing that women “didn’t need to know what was under the car bonnet” when it came to tech.

So she came up with a radical solution. The multilingual Cambridge graduate is trying to teach the world to code — and her company, Decoded, promises to do it in just one day.

Ms Parsons was one of a whole room of inspiring female technology entrepreneurs who shared their vision and passion in Sydney at the inaugural Vogue Codes event.

Editor Edwina McCann came up with the idea to show that tech was a viable career choice and “make it a fashionable one” for women.

Over high tea and elegant tableware, Ms Parsons opened “the most glamorous tech event in the world” by explaining how women could lead the “fourth industrial revolution”, instead of falling behind.

Female voices are seriously lacking in the sector. The proportion of women working in IT and computer-related fields has dropped from 50.3 per cent in 1990, to 26.4 per cent in 2015, with only one in 20 girls considering a career in science, technology, maths or engineering.

“In the past 10 years, women have been opting out of technology in their droves,” the keynote speaker explained. “Coding is not just an economic educational issue, it’s a feminist issue.

“‘Women’s brains just don’t work that way.’ I hear that once a week. It’s frustrating.

“The future is written in lines of code.”

Vogue editor Edwina McCann launched Vogue Codes to get more women into the tech sector.

Ms Parsons insists women can not only survive, but thrive. And her fellow speaker Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion at successful Aussie start-up Atlassian, is on her side.

“We know bias affects how people read code,” she told news.com.au. “If we see who wrote it, that’s how we read it. We think code produced by women is less quality. If we don’t know who wrote it, that disappears.”

Ms Blanche was brought into solve an obvious problem after a male employee at the company made a video comparing problematic software to an annoying girlfriend — causing international outrage.

She says having more women in tech is not just about numbers but about changing how we work together.

Aubrey Blanche is changing the way organisations think.

“We do two-hour training in the neuroscience of decision-making, and we’re making procedural tweaks. Women tend to rate themselves lower, men higher in performance reviews. So managers would anchor on it and produce a gender skew. Now the reviews happen at the same time and you only see them when they are complete.”

Ms Blanche says interviewers shouldn’t be just looking for people similar to themselves, because diverse teams are stronger ones.

She makes sure people know she’s a lesbian and a Latina woman, in the hope someone might see something of themselves in her, and be inspired to fulfil their dream.

The 28-year-old says she’s seeing a shift in Silicon Valley. “Women have the ability to exude social and empathetic skills, not just following male leadership style but finding a way of doing it that’s their own.”

Successful Australian women from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins to Facebook and Instagram head of brand Naomi Shepherd urged the Vogue Codes audience to embrace technology and to learn every day.

Ms Parsons said the event demonstrated the “power of female networking” and the capacity of technology to be creative and transformative.

“Forget the boys’ club. It’s about the girls’ club now and it’s a force to be reckoned with.”