Inclusive language part of the move to get more women in tech

Recruiting and retaining women in tech still a tough road – but there are strategies aplenty.

Women need to belong to perfom in tech sector.

Men are constantly warned to watch their sexist language around women at work, but here’s one you may not have thought of.

At a Canberra seminar this week, Datacom managing director, Australia Alexandra Coates told of one of her colleagues who regularly closed meetings by talking about “building muscle in something”.

“He had no idea that his language was making me think I had to go to the gym and drink protein,” she said. Coates called him out on it but also noted that language cut both ways, with women also getting it wrong. But working out common language was really important for inclusion at work, she said.

Jade Carson, who is on leave from her role as chief information officer at the National Gallery of Australia, said she had been guilty of using masculine language – because of being “indoctrinated” by her childhood environment – and had had to unlearn those old habits.

The discussion on women in tech was organised by the Reason Group and anchored by Kate Jones, an executive director of the Tech Council of Australia, which is advocating for more diversity in the sector.

Jones opened the discussion by noting that women made up only 25-30 per cent of those studying information and communications technology and only 25 per cent of tech workers in companies were women.

Coates argued that one way to understand the problem of attracting women was that “men need to perform to belong and women need to belong to perform”.

To increase female hires and hold on to them, companies needed to ensure there was real purpose in jobs. They must also sort their recruitment policies, she said.

“We changed (our) recruitment policy so you could not hire anyone into the company unless you had a gender balanced recruitment panel,” she said. “Now that made for an incredibly busy time (for senior women) … There are commitments like that which you can take that drive action and drive change, and they’re not complex.”

She agreed women often self-selected themselves out of tech jobs but said there was also a “spit out”, with women often feeling “spat out” of a sector that still organised work in ways that did not accommodate women with childcare responsibilities.

“If you keep putting meetings at 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon when they’re committed to go pick their kids up from school, they will at some point just say: ‘This is not me,’ ” she said.

“I would argue that there is a whole (group) of women who just don’t feel they belong. I joined Datacom, I was the only female director at 29, so by far the youngest director … and my first recruitment panel for the role was in front of five gentlemen. And one of them said to me, ‘You look too young, you could never do this.’ ”

Carson said another hurdle for women in tech was that they often were employed in data analysis and policy work, looking at “how to fix or cure a problem”, while men were “building the mechanics to make things run”.

“I think there’s a divergence there and if we could get more women into building the mechanics of our society, we would actually have (more connection),” she said.

Carson is researching a PhD that looks at the progress of women in tech in the public service. “One of the things that has come out in the research is that girls are streamed out of tech and science from a very young age, and it starts at about four years old,” she said.

“It’s in the language that we use when we talk to our children, either boys or girls, and it’s in the opportunities that we give them or not give them to experiment and explore tech and sciences from a very young age.

“If we look at other cultures, in particular India, where you’ve got graduates coming out of high school and university, it’s 50:50. It’s a cultural issue and a societal issue.”

Carson said girls and women self-selected themselves out of career and jobs

“We self-select ourselves out because we think it’s too hard, we didn’t do maths in school or engineering. I would say to women, don’t self-select out because, guess what, every job is pretty much the same (in terms of skills needed).”

Carson said job design was important when companies were trying to hire women. Sometimes a recruiter might say to a woman, “This job is 24/7, so you probably wouldn’t be a fit for that because you’ve got kids.” Yet the problem lay with any company that designed a 24/7 job and assumed that if people could not work long hours they could simply leave.

“Well, guess what,” Carson said. “Most people, hopefully, are now choosing to leave.

“We need to design a society so that from a very young age you maximise that pipeline (for women) all the way because at the moment we’re squeezing the pipeline really tight at the very beginning and then hoping that they’ll get past all the barriers put in front of them.”

Reason Group founder and chief executive William Scheer told the seminar the sector almost had to redefine the “rules of engagement” – for example, by talking about engineers as “creative professionals”.

“What are the other ways we can talk about the industry that are more inclusive, that include more people who see themselves in it,” he said.

The Reason Group seminar followed a Monday event organised by the Tech Council and attended by tech leaders, among them Michelle Simmons, Australia’s foremost quantum scientist.

Simmons, who is director of the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of NSW, says the discussion suggested that “fundamentally being a tech leader came down to the individual’s motivation, how one feels on the inside and how ambitious you want to be. And then … the practicality of making it happen.”

She says there is an increase in the number of young women “moving and shaking in the tech realm” but three things are needed to maintain the momentum.

“First, the need to remove any barriers to young girls entering tech by getting in when they are young, and introducing coding at primary schools for both girls and boys,” she says. “Second, the importance of maths and physics teachers trained and passionate in the subject; and third, the need to celebrate and encourage emerging female leaders, thereby inspiring others to follow.”

The Tech Council says while careers in tech are among the best paid, most secure and flexible jobs in the economy, women are not adequately represented in tech. It says a woman is twice as likely to enter a tech job after the age of 25 than before it, while men are more likely to enter direct from training.