Enough is enough – best foot forward
Dear readers
I’ve had nearly 10,000 views of my Susan J Fowler post on LinkedIn.
As a reminder I committed to:
“So here is a reason women are not flocking to tech jobs / not staying. It tallies with what women have told me over 20 years in tech.
I love the fact that at last someone is being believed & getting huge support from men & women. So far, she has 18.7k likes. on Twitter for speaking up. Perhaps its a Rosa Parks moment?
We need data & an anonymised survey to find out what is happening here in the UK.
Who will sponsor / fund it ? I will make it happen.
It needs sorting out now.”
The responses came rom a diverse range of countries and backgrounds – so it seems this issue does resonate worldwide – with men and women.
I was interested that so many employment lawyers liked my post so perhaps they are seeing cases like this in their caseloads?
I have also had people contact me from industries other than technology, saying this is happening in their fields too.
So I need to ‘Make it happen’ and the scope may be bigger than I first thought. E.g just the UK or wider? Just technology or wider? Only women or wider?
I am going to spend the weekend drawing up a draft plan and an idea of the of partners or stakeholders to involve, the resources we need and learning about Crowdfunding.
I have a pro-bono programme manager in mind so hopefully I can convince her to help me with the Crowdfunding stage.
Shared Values
I feel strongly that any individual that gets involved must have a very strong ethical stance and any organisation must be committed to implement any findings from the data – in full – root and branch within their organisation.
My thinking is that it also needs to avoid being party political.
Resources
There will need to be a steering group and a delivery team.
We would need to meet in London – which is where I am based.
Some of the resources needed are:
- A journalist for communications (on this occasion I think not the Guardian – somrone more neutral – thoughts?)
- A data science company.
- A web company to design and deliver the survey.
- Security advice to ensure anonymity.
- A programme manager.
- Data from existing sources e.g. LinkedIn
- A high profile sponsor – who – needs a lot of thought ? Which will depend on the scope of the programme.
- What else?
Please comment below so that I can incorporate any views / thoughts into the initial proposal for Crowdfunding.
Many thanks for your enthusiasm and support!
