#BeBoldForChange
How the tech community can strive to do better together this International Women’s Day
Happy International Women’s Day! Here’s hoping for a future in which we won’t need a dedicated day for female empowerment.
Unfortunately, 2017 still knows too many glass ceilings and cases of gender inequality. It’s a reality that becomes painfully clear in tech — a sector still dominated by men.
At Unicorn Hunt, we want to do whatever we can to empower women when applying for tech jobs. This sparked the idea to take a look at our data — how do women apply for jobs, and is there anything we can learn from it? By comparing our user database with various aspects of a job posting, we came to an interesting conclusion.
On average, women seem to aim for lower-paying jobs than men. According to our data, the median salary for jobs men apply for is £35,000, while women settle for £31,500. It’s a staggering difference, begging the question why women generally don’t aim higher?
We also found that job descriptions influence potential candidates in a big way. All job adverts are phrased in a positive way, but those containing a higher number of positive words and sentiment attracted more female candidates to apply.
Our data also confirms what we already knew. Men often apply to developer roles, and women tend to be looking for a marketing job — especially tied to a strong social component like incubators or events. Dev roles come in a close second place.
It’s interesting that exactly the same percentage (22%) of men and women apply to the top role for their gender, the difference being that this is dev for men and marketing for women. Only 12% of women apply for dev roles and 11% of men for marketing roles. Also, approximately 5% of women apply to roles relating to social media and event management. The percentage of men applying for the same roles is less than 2%.
Looking at the demographics for co-founder roles, we see twice as many men applying than women. Even though these jobs only represent a small percentage of our listings, that’s a significant amount.
Job tags also seem to vary between men and women. Out of the top 10 job tags for men, 6 of them are technical (referring to a programming language or otherwise). The only technical tag, out of the top 10 for women, is ‘javascript’.
Chief Unicorn Wrangler, Ben Southworth commented: “We over at Unicorn Hunt were fascinated to see what we’d suspected somewhat anecdotally, which is that men are far happier to reach for higher salaries, yet women are far more concerned with internal culture. As often, where we perceive value is not always monetary. Unicorn Hunt is committed to trying to ensure this data becomes less and less true as time goes on. ”
“Perhaps we should be incentivising equal pay grades by experience, as against the accepted salary. I understand the economic argument for not doing so, but a fair internal culture is a right that we all have and should demand. “
“As a community we need to push each other harder to do better. Apply for that role you don’t think you can get — but you’re probably going to be over qualified for. Find new ways to make yourself attractive to more candidates — create that diverse pool of talent. Mentor and share your success, paying it forward so more people can achieve greater things.”
We decided in true Unicorn Hunt spirit to turn to our friends in the community to pass along their thoughts and advice on International Women’s Day. Sharing their wisdom for women, startups and the wider community, to see how we can all do better in championing diverse cultures and seeing more women aim higher — you’ve got it in you, we know you do!
On women applying for jobs with lower salaries.
“Women are terrible at undervaluing their experience, especially in the way we describe it. I caught myself doing that, then I held myself to account on it by writing out all of the brilliant attributes that enabled me to land my role, and all the great achievements I have made there that have enabled me to keep it. That’s a great exercise for anyone to do who needs to start realising the full value of their worth.
When it comes to negotiating, approach these things lovingly but don’t be afraid to say no, and provide data on why you were hoping for a different outcome. If you are doing it on the phone, the best piece of advice I ever had was to state your position and then physically put your hand over your mouth. That will stop you talking and trying to make things more comfortable or even worse, backtracking. Give them the pause to let them consider what you’ve just said and the time to revert.
Most companies have a bit of wriggle room when they make you an offer. If we don’t have that kind of wriggle when I am offering someone a role at Shazam, I manage expectations around that clearly.” — Ruth Penfold, Head of Talent Acquisition, Shazam
“We’re firm believers in confidence breeding confidence, we see it in each GeekGirl event we run. One thing we know from our own experiences and from talking to our community, is that we’re never really taught how to negotiate, how to challenge, or even how to view a job interview. We need to interview the company we apply to as much as it should interview us. We need to realise that we are adding a value to a business, and that we have the right to fight for the value we deserve. I’d say every women should be going into an interview aiming for 10–20 per cent more than they think they can get — we might just shock ourselves and close the pay gap even more.” — Cathy White, Director of GeekGirl Meetup UK and Founder, CEW Communications
“One possible contributing reason to those facts is the ‘confidence gap’ problem, a result of which is that candidates with more self-confidence are likely to apply for more advanced roles (and thus probably better paid), even if they don’t quite meet the criteria, while less confident applicants are less likely to do so. Lack of confidence is a topic that comes up repeatedly from surveying women in tech in the DevelopHer community, and while many women are incredibly self-assured, a large number, particularly at junior-mid levels, are not. My advice to applicants would be to give any application you think is interesting a shot, even if you don’t tick all boxes. For companies, to ask a diverse range of people within the area you’re hiring for to read it over a few times and relay what does and doesn’t appeal to them.” — Emily Atkinson, Director, DevelopHer.
On less women applying to be Co-Founders
“I agree that being a co-founder is still not considered a ‘normal job’ for women. I get that sentiment with a lot of women who I meet through Blooming Founders. Many of them are interested in entrepreneurship, but they don’t think they have what it takes to be a founder (or co-founder). Some of them even say they’d prefer to be the executive assistant of a founder to learn the ropes! I think this has a lot to do with a lack of role models in the startup ecosystem. We need to change perceptions and make this type of job appealing and accessible for women to create a more diverse ecosystem.” — Lu Li, Founder of Blooming Founders
“In 2015, First Round Capital in the US released a study of their past 10 years of investing (http://10years.firstround.com/#one). One of their findings was that female founders outperform their male peers — companies with a female founder performed 63% better than FRC’s investments with an all-male founding team. It has become clear that diversity (in founders, on the board, and in team make-up) is the prerequisite for successful companies of today.” — Kim Pham, Head of Platform, Frontline Ventures
On job descriptions influencing female applicants
“So, Unicorn Hunt has established that positive job descriptions lead to positive numbers of applications from women. I’d hypothesise that by positively hiring positive women, those companies will benefit from a positive company culture, positive contributions from their staff and therefore more positive companies as a whole. Stay positive mofos.” — Gabbi Cahane, Co-Founder of Multiple
“Companies looking to hire diverse teams need to be aware of the impact of their unconscious biases. Optimising job descriptions for a specific type of person is something that happens by accident, whether that’s language targeted at a specific gender or people from a certain kind of background. Companies need to actively counterbalance the effect of these biases if they are to encourage applications for a wider audience. It’s not enough to say you believe in diversity, it needs to be a daily, active practice. Keep testing and iterating the language in your job descriptions until you are confident that your organisation has succeeded in attracting a diverse pool of candidates.” — Alex Bailey, B2B Marketing Specialist at Makers Academy
On more men applying for technical roles than women
“This is no surprise at all, our engineering roles are woefully under-serviced by female talent. We are a tale of two halves, quite literally. One side of our business is completely diverse; essentially everything none tech. We are constantly looking at ways to alter this and to invite more applications from a wider audience. We haven’t yet solved that one though, but it’s something we are looking at each and every day.
We try to get involved with as many different events and initiatives that support diversity growth in the tech sector as we can, with the aim of raising our vibrations as a business from the inside. We’ve already seen a positive impact in the number of female hires in Engineering as a direct consequence.” — Ruth Penfold, Shazam
“I think that the definition of what a technical role is is changing as certain skill sets are needed more than others. Deeper infrastructure and enterprise technology is different to the needs to code HTML/CSS and manage a website. There is talent out there however the industry is working harder to find and attract a diverse pool of candidates which means reaching out to communities that are nurturing such talent.” — Adizah Tejani, Director of Marketing EMEA, Token
On women in tech and diversity
“I’d love to see women across all sectors, not just tech, embrace their success as opposed to apologising for it. We need to overcome the stigma associated with asking for higher or equal pay and hold our employers to account: there’s absolutely no reason as to why men should get paid higher wages for doing the same work we do.
“We need to get the message out there that we’re just as capable, knowledgeable and talented as our male counterparts and most importantly, we have to believe that we are. Tech is a dynamic and exciting industry and with most technology businesses recognising the advantages of having a diverse workforce, there’s no reason why the sector shouldn’t be gender-inclusive. I’m aware this won’t happen overnight, but I urge both men and women to continue being committed to this objective.” — Yessi Bello Perez, senior reporter, Tech City News.
“In response to the Unicorn Hunt statistics…take the leap this IWD! Apply for the job of your dreams, take your first steps behind the screen or go found that game-changing technology company you’ve been thinking about. I believe the future is being written in lines of code and I want women to be a part of it.” — Kathryn Parsons, CEO, Decoded
“Coming to the application process with a creative and academic background, I certainly hesitated in applying to work for a tech firm. But everything about the process felt different; from the way the job was pitched, to my interview with WERKIN’s CEO, Hayley Sudbury, I got the immediate sense that the working culture promoted wasn’t just a sales-pitch, but a way of operating that was being led from the top. Whilst I’ve never been a huge fan of the notion of ‘bringing your whole self to work’, I was hugely attracted to a real commitment to finding the best way of working for every member of the team. If keeping up my volunteering commitments meant a late start on a Monday morning, then that was encouraged rather than accommodated.
“And in the midst of a free-flowing dialogue, Hayley’s announcement that her co-founder was soon to be a mum gave permission for me to open up about my own personal ambitions to have a family. As a woman in her early thirties, that level of candour so early on established a level of honesty and transparency which has trickled into our working relationship. It undoubtedly makes us far more cohesive and productive as a team to work in a way that accepts that ‘work’ and ‘life’ don’t operate discreetly.” — Katie Underwood, Innovation Lead, WERKIN
“For many, these results won’t come as a surprise. In an industry as disruptive and innovative as technology, it seems we’re able to find solutions for every conceivable problem — at scale — except diversity and inclusion. The industry is making okay progress, but we need to do more. The problem will be solved hand-in-hand, if only organisations would reach out to groups like Series Q to learn how to bolster the representation of diverse communities.” — Josh Rivers, Co-Founder of Series Q
“I have worked in the world of tech startups for four years; I took over and ran a well known, well loved, male dominated business, 3beards and I helped Unicorn Hunt become what it is today. And yet when I looked at male developers embracing a nomadic lifestyle, I felt that that option wasn’t accessible to me because I had no “technical skills”. I’m now in my third month (and third continent) freelancing as I travel using my laptop.
Don’t allow “male smokescreens” to stop you. If you know what you want whether it’s to secure a lead developer role, start your own business or simply learn more about tech and startup, GO AND DO IT. There are so many people, men and women, out there ready to support you. You won’t know unless you try.” — Vicky Hunter, Queen of Unicorns, Nomad for hire
“2016 demonstrated quite clearly that the more things change, the more they stay the same, particularly if you belong to a group vulnerable to discrimination. But we can’t allow other people’s issues and limitations to stop us from realising our dreams. A lot of our entrepreneurs, both male and female, also feel fear and self-doubt, because their worlds are mired in uncertainty and rejection. But they know that they have to fake it until they make it. I think this is a useful approach to life more generally. You can’t allow the haters to win.” — Gary Stewart, Director, Wayra UK
“Just this week, we’ve trained up 28 women in tech from across the North to help them get on stage and into the media — to influence both the tech industry itself to look harder for ‘thought leaders’ and to reach those who never thought the sector was ‘for them’. Although they didn’t all feel it, these women were already experts in their fields and would add colour (literally) to any public appearance because they all look so vibrant and have different experiences from the usual suspects. We need to change the way we judge ‘value’ and talk about ‘success’, not least because we’re very close to having the kind of groupthink in the tech industry that brought down the banking sector. But, also, because we need more diverse people, with all the valuable experience diversity brings, in order to build the products that truly change people’s lives, inside companies that are good for people and planet.” — Kirsty Styles, Head of Talent and Skills, Tech North
A big thank you to everyone who provided their thoughts for International Women’s Day!
If you have some advice you’d like to pass along, comment below or tweet us!
