Canva leads push for greater diversity

Sydney start-up poster child Canva is leading an effort towards more collaboration on diversity in technology.

Melanie Perkins says Canva has many incredible female employees. Picture: Nick Cubbin

Sydney start-up poster child Canva is leading an effort towards more collaboration on diversity in technology, today launching a Women in Tech report that will bring in perspectives and strategies from across the industry.

Canva’s head of people, Zach Kitschke, told The Australian while his company had been focused on diversity and women for the last couple of years, and recently started building relationships with other companies to learn how the likes of Atlassian, Campaign Monitor, Envato and others were tackling the issue.

“The key thing I’ve taken away is around inclusion and being inclusive, and extending that all the way through the hiring process,” he said. “You have to really have a close look at what you’re doing internally to make sure it’s inclusive for everyone. That includes parents, and people with a disability, as well as women in tech … It applies to all groups — not everyone comes from the same cookie-cutter mould.”

The report notes that currently in Australia, just 14 per cent of executive roles in the technology sector are held by women. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, women make up 46.2 per cent of all employees, but in technology roles the percentage of women drops to 28-31 per cent.

Melanie Perkins and co-founder Melanie Perkins said that if you looked at any of the statistics about the number of start-ups that failed, or the number of women CEOs who had raised venture capital, it would probably scare you away from starting.

“But for me, if someone says something can’t be done, I consider that a good reason to give it a shot and make it happen,” she said. “I spend all of my time and mental energy focusing on the things that I can improve, things that I can change, new tactics, new strategy. I spend very little time thinking about other people’s biases and simply try to find people that ‘get’ what we are doing and want to get on board.

“We have the best of the best working at Canva, so it should go without saying we have a lot of incredible women at our company across all aspects of our business. Perhaps having a female CEO (me), people who have any biases against women probably wouldn’t join our company or invest in us in the first place — which helps gives us a nice insulation against archaic, dinosaur views.”

Initiatives Canva is working on to help give its culture a boost include hiring a full-time internal coach and offering an internal Canva university for resources and training.

Vanessa Doake, co-founder of Code Like a Girl, said women accounted for only one in 10 enrolments in IT degrees.

“We often give a priority to ‘let’s stock the beer fridge’, but we forget about the human side of things,” she said, adding employees wanted to work somewhere where they felt included, where there were other people like them, where they could see opportunities for career progress and leadership.

“I think in the media, with women in technical roles, we always hear the really extreme examples of harassment, and things like that. But it doesn’t always have to be those extreme examples. There are a lot of women that have worked in technology who haven’t experienced those very, very negative situations. But it’s more often those small things that really stack up over time, and just chip away at you.

“It gets tiring. I think that factors into the reason why perhaps more women leave the industry than men, and we need to look at that, too.”

Dan Draper, from Expert360 and Males Championing Change, said there was a great deal of evidence to show that diverse teams actually performed better.

“Research shows that when you are in a group of people very similar to you, you all have a similar mindset,” he said.

“You all end up agreeing with each other, and coming to the same conclusion.

“But in diverse teams — teams of different gender, background, race and belief systems — you’re going to have different perspectives, and it’s the process of having to challenge our own beliefs or opinions that gets us to better ­answers.

“And as an industry, that’s what we’re here to do: get better answers.”

According to the report, in the future, better answers must include flexibility and equality for all minority groups, too.

“Supporting women in tech is just one area of justice that is needed to ensure this industry continues to attract leading professionals into the future: LGBTQIA, equal paid paternity leave, flexibility for school hours and school holidays, regardless of gender," it said.

“To continue to be leaders in changing the way we work and communicate, each tech company has a responsibility to continue to ask — how can we make this better?”