Could you tell us about yourself and your job role? And one hobby/fun fact?
My name is Sonya Barlow, I am a Pakistani British woman who currently works in the technology space. I’m also the founder of Liked Minded Females, a female empowerment and diversity initiative which has now gone global. From September 2019, I will be starting a research project to understand the barriers for women entering and progressing into technology.
Some of my hobbies include public speaking, staying active, and listening to books on Audible as I’ve recently joined the platform. I like to keep busy and I’m good at always learning and educating myself. One of my proudest achievements is founding Like Minded Females and a fun fact about that is that many people don’t know that I started it overnight via a LinkedIn group, and it was a very impulsive decision.
My other fun fact — most decisions I make are quite impulsive. Overnight I woke up and I was like: “I need to share my story and give a TED Talk!” And so I did.
I make very impulsive, passionate decisions which are all about social good and social impact, and my ethos is just doing it and working it out as it goes along. I just go for it and think there’s nothing better than learning on the job. For me it’s very much let’s try and trial and then work everything out as we go along, let’s create the business strategy and the plan once we have tried it for a while.
What is a typical day like for you?
It depends as I have always worked a full time job whilst I maintain my side-hustle. I do the hours required in the technology industry, so I work 50–55 hours a week and I run Like Minded Females alongside that. On the commute to work I’ll answer emails, do phone calls during lunch time and am most likely to spend my afterwork evenings either connecting with new people, going out to network with people face-to-face, running workshops and initiatives, or actually leading public speaking gigs. I am constantly working, but I have found is that it’s also important to have a work-life balance of some kind. I make sure that I can come home and spend two or three hours with my partner or my family every day.
The busier I am the more productive I am, because I manage my time more efficiently and effectively. If I am time constrained, I am able to do a much better job in a shorter period of time whilst I have to manage other tasks. One of the reasons I made Like Minded Females was because I had a loss of identity and didn’t know who I was. So now I make it a point to do things with a fun element — be that seeing friends, going out or even take breaks to watch Netflix but most importantly making sure that I also coordinate and do my day job as well as my side hustle Like Minded Females, so we can grow the community in an effective manner.
Could you tell us how you got into your role?
The leadup to Like Minded Females started when I was looking for a community that had ordinary people that are just doing great things, especially based in London or Berkshire, which is where I’m from.
When I did find some groups that were relevant, they were super expensive to join and I think that you don’t need to pay so much money to meet great people. Everything we do at Like Minded Females is accessible and affordable by design. I also didn’t want the network to just be about technology (despite being in that industry), I wanted to meet other people from different industries, backgrounds and cultures because then you learn from them.
What motivates you to do a good job?
The leadup to Like Minded Females came from all the thoughts and emotions I was going through in relation to the state of my mental health. The spur of the moment idea was brought on by going to a membership club which I thought had solved my problems, but they asked people for £1,500 a year, I thought that can’t be real, especially for young professionals who are at the start of their career. To meet people shouldn’t cost £1,000s a year when we have social networks. Overnight I said to myself ‘I need to meet people, I need to create social change and most importantly help myself’, so I went on LinkedIn, made a group and I just took it from there.
When you think about your background or when you think about the majority state, in the UK the majority state are either working or middle class and they come from low to middle socio-economic backgrounds. They are the ones who probably need the community and support the most and many of them maybe don’t have the community, role models or the support system around them.
I myself fit into that category, so for me it was about creating an initiative which are by real people, by real females diverse enough for it to cover a range of topics that are inclusive enough for people to feel safe and empowered. We host events where you come to one which includes a drink and nibbles, and you are ultimately paying £5 to not only meet people, but to learn a life skill and to really increase a skillset, which is the most important thing and those are the kind of elements that I feel like is still evidently lacking, especially in the UK where you look at the employment rates and the progression rates, etc. That leads quite nicely to me the future of Like Minded Females, where we will be launching online courses, mentorship programmes and a podcast to share skills and stories
How do you learn at work?
Let me give you an example, I’ve never worked on a website before. I built the website for Like Minded Females from Wix. Although I didn’t do the back-end coding, I had to teach myself how to create an accessible and useable website with good UX and user interface design. That took several days and I had spent some time going on online forums to see what other people had done, but most importantly I tried everything out myself by publishing the content on the website and seeing what it looks like. I usually did that at night when people were sleeping so that even if I made a mistake, no one was actively going on the site for them to see it.
When we first started Like Minded Females we were doing everything ourselves such as making the event posters or doing the creative content, and now have a great team behind us, it’s a group of girls who are creating this community whilst they have fulltime jobs or other kinds of commitments. The learning element to that was going online and seeing what was already available such as Canva, Sparkpost or other kinds of Adobe sites. I also did research on understanding what colours to use, the psychology behind them and what will attract our audiences.
The exercise of making creative posts, event posts and how the content should look and feel is an exercise we’re still currently going through, so coming from a data background I decided from early on that we would try something for 12 weeks and then evaluate it through insight and analytics, before we change it going forward. This is an ongoing process and the learning element for me is always do it on the job and do it yourself because you learn how to do it, when someone else takes over you appreciate the time and commitment it takes and to use data and analytics to back-up your research, understanding or insight — be that through a click-rate, conversion or engagement piece.
The great thing about Like Minded Females is that we are an ever-improving group. I make it a point to say we are normal, ordinary and real females trying to do something great. We will make mistakes, we’re looking for feedback and continuously improving as we go along. That authenticity and realistic approach is genuinely what our community favours.
Stakeholder management and soft skills are quite a key skill from a group perspective but also from an individual learning perspective. One way I connect with people is to do brief research about them, understand their vision and see if their values are aligned with what I’m trying to do. When I message and connect with them I also make it really clear and say ‘Hey I love what you’re doing, I’m also interested in this space. I’d love to grab 15–20 minutes of your time to discuss XYZ with you, would that be possible? And through learning to create value-led messages and keeping the sentiment quite short and snappy, I’ve been able to engage with three key stakeholders and build our advisory board that consists of founders and leaders in their fields. We’ve also been able to access those experts to come into our workshops to present them for us for free and that’s the power of learning on the job, but most importantly learning how to connect through a value-led message.
What are your aims for the next year? For example, if you work in accessibility do you have any plans to help make workplaces more inclusive? If you work in Learning and Development how are you going to promote workplace learning?
I would like to start my masters research in relation to understanding the barriers for women in technology and to do a lot more public speaking appearances such as workshops, panels and most importantly keynotes. I’d like to start working on my book around empowerment, social connection and community — but most importantly not having the fear of saying yes to things and working it out as you go along, which is the ethos of how I live right now.
For Like Minded Females I would like to grow the community to a place where we are providing significant and to some extent lifechanging workshops for our community across the UK. We are looking to expand out to not only to the Berkshire area, but to the Midlands in 2020 and globally end of 2020 — and become the core place where you can come to find initiatives which really are changing culture both for females and for diversity as a whole, and to work with corporate partners. For me it’s important to get corporate sponsorships and the partner sponsorships at the beginning of the year and from my own kind of growth and understanding I want to be known as a female leader in technology, a woman of colour who is challenging the status quo and empowering females to break their own glass ceilings! It’s very much how I would like to be known in my professional and personal life because everything I’m trying to do is for social good and social impact, so it’s great to be noticed for that.
I’d like to also publicly thank the team in us achieving so much in such little time — Jui Joshi, Chiara Ronga and Beatrice Sutcliffe.
YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT LIKE MINDED FEMALES ON THE FOLLOWING PLATFORMS:
The Like Minded Females website: www.likemindedfemales.com
The Like Minded Females twitter account: @Lmf_network
Like Minded Females Instagram: @lmf_network
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