Black Girls in Tech x ASOS Event
On Thursday 18th May, we hosted our first ever event at ASOS HQ in collaboration with Black Girls in Tech to introduce their amazing community to Tech @ ASOS.
If you’ve not heard of Black Girls in Tech before, they were founded with the purpose of becoming a community for Black women. Their aim is to provide a community, resources, and opportunities to Black women in tech and those who want to get into tech, they’re dedicated to increasing the representation of Black women in the tech industry.
I love collaborating with Black Girls in Tech (BGIT) as they align with our commitments here at ASOS to diversify the tech industry. We’re committed to increasing female representation across our Tech teams to 40% by 2030. We’re also continually working on improving representation for our ethnically diverse employees, with a commitment for 15% of our leaders to be from ethnic minority backgrounds by 2030.
So, how did it go?
First up, Women in Tech
After a quick intro from me and Karen Emelu (Founder of Black Girls in Tech), Jen Fryer (Engineering Manager) and Hassanat Adedayo (QA Engineer) started us off with a ‘Women in Tech @ ASOS’ talk. They covered all the amazing things that our WIT community get up to. The key highlights being their school visits, raising awareness for women’s issues in the workplace and their work on our new fertility policy.
They highlighted the incredible work that we’ve done to get us to 31% female representation across Tech @ ASOS (6% over the industry average 🙋) and we’re passionate about showcasing that there’s so much more that we can do to improve this! We asked for feedback on everything we’re doing and the BGIT community delivered. Some amazing ideas came out of this, to mention a few — hackathons, providing more direct mentorship, embracing neurodiversity more and putting on job hiring events. We’re looking into how we can incorporate these into our plans moving forwards.
Next up, Customer Journey
Alex Vine (Product Manager), Louise Lynn (Senior Product Designer), Jason Persaud (Senior Web Engineer) & Dawn Rollocks (Data Science Manager) treated us to a super insightful session on their roles in Tech @ ASOS and how what they do, makes a difference to what we see as customers.
My favourite part was their incredibly inspiring anecdotes about their career journeys into Tech. Their passion and dedication to achieving their goals was so clear to see. It was also great to showcase that not everyone has to follow a set career path into Tech; all four ASOSers came from different backgrounds and ideas about what they wanted to do, they tried, tested, and learned what worked for them. Dawn for example has been a land surveyor, a classical singer (singing at the O2!), a spatial data scientist for the Prime Minister, and now works for us here in the AI team as a Data Science Manager. Living proof that there is no “one size fits all”!
Alex and Louise gave us a great run down on Digital Product @ ASOS. There is so much work that goes on behind the scenes in this team and the audience were super engaged. The networking session to follow later was a valuable time for our attendees to network with Alex and Louise (I can’t count the number of times that I was asked if they were free to chat 😄). It was a great chance for them to pass on their learnings, tips & tricks about getting into the world of digital product.
Jason summed up his extensive journey at ASOS in the Web team (he’s been with us for 11 years! 🙌) Learning more and more each year, gaining exposure to different parts of the site as he’s progressed. He gave us a snapshot of what the site looks like now, compared to 11 years ago, and wow! I’d forgotten how much it’s changed — see below.
As one of the founding members, Jason also talked us through some of the amazing work that our Race & Equality, Heads & Hearts group do at ASOS. Heads & Hearts is a space for our ethnic minority ASOSers to connect, share, learn and drive change in the areas that matter most. For example, the great work done on Black History Month 2022:
Dawn rounded the talk off with her inspiring career story, a spotlight on how diverse her team is and their successes because of this, and finally, an insight into our recommender system with machine learning. In her own words, ASOS has a “machine learning model, that learns your style and combines it with large amounts of shopping data to recommend relevant products, unlocking your unique style fingerprint”. Personalised ranking and search touchpoints on the site and app are visible on the homepage, product listings, search, product details, saved items and even emails! Such an amazing feature on the site/app to inspire our customers to shop!
Q&A and Speed Networking
To finish up, we had a thought provoking Q&A session, with the audience and all of our speakers. There were some super interesting questions asked, a big one I wanted to touch on was “What do ASOS want to get out of doing an event like this?” Jason answered this really well for us on the night but just to recap — we’re committed to creating more opportunities for Black women in technology. It’s important for us to connect with the BGIT community to help to build those connections, network, mentor and create a community where we share learnings & tips. Our talks gave us a chance to tell everyone more about Tech @ ASOS and the speed-networking session to finish gave all our attendees the chance to network with ASOSers for the future.
A special big thank you to Maryam Elahi (Employer Brand Advisor), Alex Vine (Product Manager), Sumeera Vanes (Delivery Lead) and my team for helping us to bring all of this together, to Karen Emelu and the BGIT team for collaborating with us, to our speakers and helpers from the ASOS Tech team, and finally to the BGIT community for leaving us feeling so inspired 💜
If you’d also like to partner with us to drive diversity in Tech, please feel free to reach out to me over on LinkedIn to arrange a chat!
Gemma Harvey is a Senior Recruiter at ASOS, recruiting for our Tech & Ops teams. She helps to lead on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategies for the Talent Acquisition team, collaborating with our internal networks and external partners.
