It was OK back then for my male colleague to tell me
“Girls cannot code, but you’re OK.”
This is how I started my career as an engineer.
This is Carine Daouk.
She’s an Engineering Manager at Facebook.
Carine has been working in software engineering for 15 years.
So what exactly has changed since then?
The main theme that’s happening now
is that everyone in the industry acknowledge
that women are underrepresented,
and they acknowledge why it’s important to have more women.
Acknowledging the problem is one thing,
fixing it is another.
Gender imbalance in tech
is caused by stereotypes
that are deeply ingrained in our culture.
That means there are no easy solutions.
What makes the issue even more complicated,
is that the significant underrepresentation of women in tech
hasn’t always been the case.
In fact, in its very early days,
software engineering was considered a “woman’s job,”
while men focused on building hardware.
So how did we get here?
To answer this question,
we reached out to researcher Laura Jones.
I’m a Research Associate
at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership
at King’s College London.
Women’s representation
in computer science and STEM in this country
hasn’t really shifted that much over the past couple of decades.
Well, so you have, kind of, two really big issues.
The first is the pipeline.
In the UK, only 18 percent of computer science students are female.
With women being the minority of tech graduates,
companies have very few candidates to choose from.
But why are women opting out of tech?
It’s not because they are not interested…
We’ve been trying lots of things in this country
to really try and improve the number of women
taking techy subjects
and there hasn’t really been a lot of a shift.
That’s because we've been trying to do it
by getting girls more interested in STEM,
but that's not really the problem.
Women are already pretty interested in STEM
and they already really enjoy it.
They just don't see it as something that's possible for somebody like them
because of these really deep-rooted stereotypes.
And a big issue in that area is self-confidence.
So we have a really well-documented gap
between boys’ and girls’ belief in their own ability
at the same level of ability.
And he has a value for 'P'.
There is a stereotype that you have to have a boy brain
to do these kinds of things –
which we just know is not true –
but which is a really, really pervasive belief
that kind of infects parents and teachers,
so girls are receiving a lot less encouragement to study these subjects.
But another issue is we ask people in this country
to make a decision at 16
and this is the time when this kind of
stereotypes or biases are at their strongest.
The pipeline problem is just one part of the puzzle.
There’s a huge drop off after about 10 years of women
leaving companies, even when we know that women
who work in the tech sector
are really, really committed to their jobs and they love their jobs.
That's because you can’t really sort of just
add women and stare.
You can't just ask women
to come into a culture
and then not try to do any work
to make them feel welcome once they’re there.
Hiring women is one challenge,
keeping them is another.
Like other tech companies,
Facebook has acknowledged the problem
and is taking steps to fix it.
Here’s what they're doing.
My name is Rachel Burton
and I’m the HR Director for the tech teams at Facebook in EMEA.
So we’ve been reporting our gender diversity since 2014,
and we’ve seen progress.
Specifically in tech,
we’ve seen the number of women go up to 22 percent
and the number of women actually in tech roles in Facebook
in the last five years
has gone up by seven times.
So since 2015,
we’ve been committed to a diverse slate approach.
And what this means is that recruiters
ensure that there are women on the interview panels for all our roles.
Specifically for women,
we find that the topic that comes up is around family,
and juggling that.
A great example that I can share
is around our flexible working.
People flex their start and finish times in the day
to accommodate their out-of-work commitments and interests.
We also have benefits,
very generous parental leave –
both maternity and paternity.
We provide an allowance
for families
who have children under five in childcare.
And then there’s training programs,
teaching employees about bias and privilege,
and how these things affect all of us in the workplace.
So one is for the whole business,
around understanding bias.
We also run trainings for managers
around managing inclusively.
And we’re also looking at some leader immersive programs
to really help them understand privilege and bias
and how that might show up in their own leadership.
All these attempts to improve the retention of female employees are great.
But are they enough to really change the culture?
Well, I think it's really tempting to look for like quick-fix solutions
like a training scheme or a mentoring scheme.
I think those have their place,
but, ultimately,
it’s actually much more about a deeper culture change,
to diversify the different images that we have of
what a good tech worker looks like.
We know that you can’t
change people’s biases just by asking them to.
You can do things like de-bias systems.
So, you know, making things like promotion criteria
really, really clear,
and applying them equally.
But none of that is going to work
if you don’t shift culture
and, you know, we have, you know, reports from tech companies of
kind of marathon working hours being seen as a badge of honour.
That’s fine, but that only works for a really, really small subset
of very privileged people.
There are lots of other ways of showing dedication to your career.
We know that role models are really important
for getting girls into these subjects
and also for keeping women in the pipeline,
but what’s important about a role model is not so much
whether they are the same gender as you,
it’s whether you identify with them.
So relatability is really, really key
when it comes to role models.
One person who takes role modelling very seriously
is Vanessa Sanyauke.
Her organisation provides guidance and mentoring
to young women who are thinking about a future in STEM.
Girls Talk London is a social enterprise,
and we connect women and girls with large businesses
For me, mentoring and role modelling is really, really important.
So that for the very few women that are there,
connecting them with aspiring young girls and women
to explain to them how they’ve been able to get into these sectors,
hopefully, that will encourage more girls and women to get into the sector.
When it comes to women in tech,
a lot is being done.
And a lot more remains to be done.
But the bigger question is, why does it matter?
The reason is simple and important.
Well, why should the company care?
I guess the company should care because
they are making products for the whole of society,
so if the people who are making decisions reflect society then that's really important.
But we as a society should really care
because these companies are so powerful in shaping the world around us
and especially the products they create are shaping the way that we work.
How are you going to best serve your clients, and customers,
and the community, and the world around us,
if your workforce doesn’t reflect that world?
The way how I see tech is
to actually solve problems for real life.
By definition, whatever problem you’re solving,
you’re solving it for people who are diverse.
You’re solving it for women, you’re solving it for men,
you’re solving it for different nationalities, different ages.
And when you have just one subset of people who are thinking about this and solving it,
you’re not just solving it for the whole world, right?
Despite these complicated challenges,
change is happening.
We see it working,
it’s incremental.
It’s definitely progressed but we’re slowly turning the dial.
So in terms of what else we can be doing,
is encouraging people to really consider STEM
and how we can support them with that.
And also being open,
really transparent in the industry.
This is a challenge and an opportunity for us.
Now everyone is listening.
It is the right time to actually speak up and change things.
I think the future is really bright for young women in tech.
I think
it's bright if we keep continuing to mentor
young girls and women,
I think it's bright if we continue to keep showing them
what's available for them in the tech sector as well.
The tech sector’s really well placed to solve this problem,
I mean, they just need to approach it as any other kind of problem that they would,
like be guided by data and see where the leaks in the pipeline are.
It's just about understanding what’s going to work for your employees.