The Rise and Rise of Women in Tech
As a woman at university with just five other women on my engineering course it’s safe to say that my window into the world of women in STEM started early on in my career and continues today as my career has evolved from Tech into business and now back to Tech again.
I hate to suggest that women in Tech is a ‘hot topic’ but with the Girls Can Code series on BBC Three and Eileen Burbidge’s recent appointment as the Chair of Tech City UK there is certainly a lot of coverage of women and the careers they are carving out in Tech right now.
Leading the Tech World
And it’s no wonder that this is the case. Look at Leanne Kemp. This year she applied and took part in Barclays Techstars Accelerator with Everledger, a detection system and permanent ledger — the first of its kind — to combat diamond fraud. The ledger is built on blockchain, the same technology used by bitcoin, giving each entry to the ledger the permanence needed to bring trust and transparency to any system of this kind. Ground-breaking technology delivered and run by a women shouldn’t be a rare thing but even in the field of rare stones it appears that it is.
Entrepreneur First is a pre-seed investment programme for technical founders was set up by the same team behind Codefirst:Girls, a non-profit that works with companies and young women to increase the numbers of women in Tech. This is such a great partnership. Working around the issue that many start-ups have a great idea, or sometimes just an idea, and no technical knowledge or capabilities alongside the lack of women in the Tech sector these two initiatives are going to create more viable start-ups based around core capabilities and encourage women to be involved at all levels in the future of Tech.
A New Approach: No More ‘Jerks’
Women approach Tech differently, take Eileen Burbidge’s proclamation that she won’t work with ‘jerks’ as an example, and this new perspective is key. Helping women see that Tech is a sector that is open to them and their ideas will bring about continuing change in this area of business and continue to be reflected in senior positions.
It isn’t just the case that we should encourage women to take part in Tech careers, we need them to. A recent Quartz article focusing on the largely male-dominated landscape of Artificial Intelligence featured many leading women in this field expressing concerns that the true potential of AI is not being explored if the technology is not developed by a diverse group of scientists. Tessa Lau, a computer scientist and co-founder of robotics company Savioke, points out that even the physical presence of a robot can be intimidating and we need think about how to ensure people’s first interaction with robots and robotics is a pleasant one whoever they are interacting with. Without women, and other diverse voices, as part of the development process AI is going to represent a very narrow view of those that created it.
In fact, if we continue by using Artificial Intelligence as an example, I googled ‘Women in Artificial Intelligence’ to see what other resources were out there to add to the example above. The top six results included: an article about why robots and AI voices are often female (not about any women who create them), the article I cited above, two lists of women in AI (that does sound promising, one was from 2013 — not very current for such a cutting edge sector) and a round up of an AMA by Stephen Hawkings where he talks about AI and then jokes that women are the last mystery he can’t solve. This isn’t a very impressive list of resources for the budding female looking to be inspired into a career in AI. It’s no wonder that there are so many initatives encouraging women to think that a career in Tech is for them as the evidence is otherwise thin on the ground.
Lessons from my own Career
My career has changed so much since I studied engineering from software engineer and business analyst to corporate strategist and business architect working with and advising C-Level Executives. I worked the corporate career ladder but found my job unfulfilling and was disillusioned with the career I had chosen, perhaps at times even depressed at the idea of waking up every day to a job I just didn’t enjoy any more. And even when I didn’t enjoy my job I found the idea of leaving it far scarier.
But even so I took a leap. At first it really worried me. Everyone around me seemed to be an entrepreneur in Tech or FinTech and I whilst I found the change liberating, especially a break from the politics of my former career path, financing really worried me. I wanted to revel in the joy that data and technology and my new techpreneurship was giving me that my last jobs lacked but I often felt the pressure of needing to balance that with my investments and the feeling that I could be throwing money at a startup that wouldn’t work. I had to learn to bootstrap too which, let’s face it, is not something that anyone from the corporate world is used to, but it was necessary for me to be able to try out my new business model and see where my success would lie.
Since leaving my corporate career behind I’ve spent a year pivoting my business model until I actually found a gap right in front of me with my core skill sets and focus on strategy, architecture and technology, or being the glue between them, enabling me to help people just like me out of their own corporate rut. By taking the leap and founding Stratability I’ve not only changed my own career and life but I will now be able to bring that new outlook and inspiration to others just like me.
I write on a range of topics from AI through Tech to Banking and beyond on my #PositiveDisruption blog — www.juliechoo.com. If you’re interested to learn more, you can subscribe to my RSS feed and find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
