Move to skill women in high technical roles

Analytics, data science, machine learning and security don’t generally attract lots of female professionals but change is happening.

Women at security firm Okta

Analytics, data science, machine learning and security don’t generally attract lots of female technology professionals but change is happening and some women are making big inroads.

A book by Australian university researchers Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy says men vastly outnumber women in programming, robotics and artificial intelligence. “Men comprise between 77 and 83 per cent of the technical positions at Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and General Electric and just over 63 per cent at Amazon,” they say.

“Men make up 85 per cent of the AI research staff at Facebook and 90 per cent at Google. Likewise in academic environments, more than 80 per cent of AI professors are men, and only 12 per cent of leading AI researchers are women.”

Analytics too hasn’t been a popular choice for women, however the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia (IAPA) today has published an online showcase highlighting 30 women in analytics as part of its International Women’s Day commemoration.

“Increasing the number of analytics and data science graduates addresses some of Australia’s talent shortage, but a gap remains,” says Annette Slunjski, Managing Director, IAPA.

“It’s only by encouraging career transition to the analytics profession from roles in finance, IT, marketing, operations and human resources that we’ll get to the level of analytics talent required to sustain business improvement, innovation and leadership in the fourth industrial age.”

In another move today, the Kaplan Business School has announced scholarships for a 30 per cent fee reduction for Australian female students to study analytics. They’ll need to be in a postgraduate analytics course or be taking a single subject.

“We think analytics is a great career choice. This scholarship is designed to help women get the knowledge and skills to advance their career – whether they are just starting out or seeking the next step up,” says Anna Mihaylov, Academic Director- Business and Finance at Kaplan Business School.

Alvina Antar, Computer engineer and CIO of Okta

Sydney this week is hosting a Women in Data Science Festival from March 8 to 12. The festival includes a lunchtime keynote and evening workshop each day.

Some women have been making their mark in the security field. Alvina Antar is the chief information officer at Okta, a $US29bn enterprise that’s well known to corporations and users who use its security system to access their workplace computers.

Okta has more than 100 million registered users and more than 9000 customers worldwide including 20th Century Fox, JetBlue, Nordstrom, Slack, Twilio and News Corporation.

Ms Antar, a computer engineer, says she was lucky. Her father was a professor in geology at the University of Texas and she developed a passion for mathematics, probability and statistics. He urged her to look at related areas and she came across computer science. She was given no encouragement at school.

She said at university “I didn‘t feel like I was blending right. I was one of the very few women in computer science … I just felt like an outsider.”

“I graduated in 1997, but for the entire I felt like the discipline was very male dominated, and I didn’t feel at home. My father would say you‘re an 800 pound gorilla capable of doing anything that you put your mind to.” She relied on her “inner confidence” to succeed.

She began working as a computer engineer at Dell and stayed there for 17 years. She was encouraged to take a management role but at first resisted it, because her love was the technology.

She eventually became a development engineer manager and then took more senior management positions.

She became software enterprise company Zuora’s first CIO in 2014 before moving to Okta as CIO six months ago.

Despite her personal success, she doesn‘t believe sufficient women are entering technology fields.

“I don‘t believe that we’re making the amount of progress and traction that is needed.”

Okta was now sharing “state of inclusion reports” on its drive towards diversity “and I think more and more companies should be doing that”.

Stina Ehrensvärd, CEO of and co-founder of Yubico, also received support outside of the education system. Yubico was founded in 2007 and makes a plug-in computer authentication device called YubiKey.

Stina Ehrensvärd, CEO and co-founder of Yubico

“In the last few years, we‘re seeing what we predicted 14 years ago, that you need the more advanced encryption, as you cannot stop the new kind of advanced phishing attacks called spear phishing.”

She was lucky her parents were architects who gave her the “building blocks” early in life. She studied industrial design in Sweden.

Her husband was a computer science engineer and security expert who helped build security systems for Sweden’s largest nuclear facilities and saw the need for hardware authentication devices such as YubiKey.

Ms Ehrensvärd said there was a higher proportion of women in technology compared to 15 years ago. “There are women who are as passionate about technology as men,” she said.

She said there are progressively more women in senior roles at technology companies.

“There are more women, but some people say it‘s not growing as fast as they would have expected, but I’m sure that it will continue to.”

She said that during her 10 years in Silicon Valley, she’s seen a marked increase in diversity of gender and culture.