Positive action for women in technology

At ASOS, we want to lead the way when it comes to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion being ingrained as part of our culture. We are taking positive action to make sure our company culture, our work and our products, are inclusive and open to as many people as possible. One of the areas where we’ve been working on this is from the perspective of Women in Technology.

What does positive action at ASOS look like for Women in Technology?

It all starts with data. How diverse are our ASOSers currently? What are our problem areas? What do we need to improve? If we don’t know where we’re starting from and what our opportunities are, we don’t know what a stretch goal is or what we need to act on. We need data — we used Workday to collate, asking our ASOSers to complete their own data (always giving an option ‘prefer not to say’) meaning we can anonymously report on the diversity of our ASOSers.

We then broke it down into 3 stages:

• Intention — what is it we want to achieve?
• Delivery — what do we need to do to achieve the intention?
• Lessons — what lessons have we learnt?

Define company level goals

Setting the intention is all about understanding our goals and aims as a company, and then breaking them down at department level too, as there are likely to be different opportunities or challenges depending on what department you work in. We all agree at ASOS that, whilst it’s important to focus on diversity representation, it’s of equal importance to focus and measure our culture. We want to increase diversity and equity, and make sure there is no difference in fundamental inclusion for engagement, attrition, and promotions, which are all measurable.

Here’s what we have committed to as a company (you can find wonderful information about this on our PLC website):

We’ve set our intention at a company level and in analysing our data can see that key focus for our technology department is to increase female representation.

Understand starting position and annual goals

What’s our starting position for Women in Technology?

In August 2021 we had 28% female representation in Technology, that’s against an industry standard of 25%. Here’s your starting point, we need to get from 28% to 40%, meaning we need to grow our female representation in technology by 1–1.5% each year.

Hint: as you start the process, depending on the maturity of your delivery plan and company, you may move the dial quickly in the first few years and then make smaller incremental progress later. Or it could be vice versa as you build your plans and deliver increases as time goes on. As long as you’re making progress that’s the main thing.

So, that’s the easy maths done. What’s not as easy, is making it happen!

We’ve treated this very much like any agile delivery. Define your success measures, see your quick wins, deliver, and iterate, and make sure you keep coming back to those success measures.

For Women in Technology at ASOS we’ve defined these as:

• Attracting amazing talent to ASOS
• Making sure our ASOSers are engaged
• Doing social good because it’s the right thing to do

Define success measures

We wanted to have a balance of data led sources for success measures and feedback to build a rounded picture.

Create a plan and deliver

Now’s the time we start to build our plans. For each of these success measures, what could we do to make an impact? What are the small quick wins and what are the more strategic big wins? We did lots of brainstorming — what did our Women in Technology want to see, what were other companies already doing, our partners? We pulled all of that together into a big long list and prioritised it. Now, I can’t give all our secrets away… but I’ll give you some ideas of the things we’ve been up to and are super proud of!

1. Attracting amazing talent to ASOS

A good example of how we’re trying to increase recruitment of women into technology is to deep dive into one internal initiative. As you now know, we’ve got more male than female representation in ASOS Tech. Following some feedback, we realised most of our interview panels were all male. That’s not representative of ASOS Tech and it can lead to subjectivity and bias.

Solution: introducing gender balanced panels. Where possible, every panel interview should have female representation on it. To implement this, we needed to train up more of our Women In Technology to enable them to feel confident and a valued part of the process — this absolutely would not be about having a ‘token’ person on a panel. We quickly understood a secondary benefit. In addition to giving women in technology at ASOS a chance to have a say in who is coming into the business, we’re reducing bias at interview stage and improving the candidate experience, we’re also providing growth opportunities for our ASOSers and encouraging networking. Brilliant! To make sure it continues we’ve made it the hiring manager’s responsibility to make sure they have a gender balanced panel as part of any interviews they are hosting.

2. Making sure our ASOSers are engaged

We’ve done so much in this space from launching more inclusive people policies for those going through pregnancy loss, menopause, fertility treatment and gender re-assignment surgery, to a specific mentoring scheme for Women in Technology, to hosting socials and book clubs.

I’ll focus on the mentoring scheme as I think it’s a simple and effective way to increase networking and improve career conversations for women. We wanted to make sure it was a great experience for our mentees and that they had a genuine connection with their mentors, so we made sure it was mentee-led. Whilst we could build some super whiz technology to do this, we wanted to keep it simple, deliver it quickly and in a place that all of our ASOSers already use.

We decided to use Confluence as our key knowledge sharing tool across ASOS. We’ve set up a simple page where mentors add details about themselves, allowing them to showcase their skills and whether they’re available or not. Below is a snapshot of my profile as an example. Then we shout about it, periodically, to remind our Women In Tech to sign up as either a mentor or mentee.

3. Social good

We really want to encourage younger women and girls to think about a career in technology as a suitable option for them. There is literally a role for everyone in tech, whether you’re more creative, a logical thinker or organisationally gifted, it’s all about solving problems.

Unless children are exposed to parents who work in specific technology roles, it’s very difficult for them to understand what types of roles exist and what it means to work in technology. Being ASOS, we want to make understanding technology fun and engaging, so we invited schools to visit our offices and see what we all do in real-time. We give technical problems to solve (not too difficult of course) and are also looking at partnerships with local schools and universities where we can visit them.

Tracking data

We’ve delivered a host of changes to attract, engage and do the right thing socially. What does it all mean for our goal of 40% females in tech by 2030?

We’ve made some awesome progress and we’re really proud of it. As of September 2022, we have 31% female representation in technology. The overall tech population of females has increased by 3% — that’s awesome when we see the scale of ASOS Tech and the numbers we’re talking about. In actual terms it means we’ve been recruiting in at 35% female to 65% male ratio, way above industry standard. We always need to keep our eyes on the various metrics I’ve mentioned above so that we can continue this progress, and identify positive or negative trends and address them quickly.

The final stage of our process — how we learn from what we’ve done and continue to reflect and reassess.

Community support

We’ve built a strong Women in Technology community who provide us with great ideas and spearhead the delivery of ‘the plan’. There’s also a strong partnership between Tech and our People teams who enable us to deliver and support on changes we’re making.

We’ve created streams in the community, and asked women who were passionate about each to volunteer to run them, known as our Women in Tech Community Leads:

• ‘Awesome Events’ — think knowledge sharing, ASOS focussed educational as well as socials. Obvs!
• ‘Cracking Comms’ — create a space for ASOSers to find everything they want to know about Women in Technology and spread the word internally & externally more, including the recent launch of internal mentoring scheme!
• ‘Love Education’ — inspire young women or girls, showing them how awesome a job in tech could be through Q&As, technical hands-on learning, or something else uber creative
• ‘Policy & Engagement’ — influence policy and ensure feedback is being listened to, working closely with our people partners
• ‘Community Sponsors’ — make sure the community is set up to succeed, support and champion all of the brave and creative things the streams will be doing

Shout out to Alex Vine, Gareth Waterhouse, Hassanat Adedayo, Jen Fryer, Jen Davis, Laura Annabel Tombs, Nat Huitson and Sumeera Vanes for their dedication 👏 We’ve got a few fresh faces joining the team soon too. I look forward to the new ideas and energy they’ll be bringing to the community.

Reflect & Learn

Be Brave — at first, we didn’t know whether 40% females across tech was going to be possible. We still don’t really, but we are confident we are doing everything we can to achieve it and working hard at it.

Data — without data to track it’s very difficult to measure success — like any tech delivery right? Use the data you have available to you. If you don’t have data start collecting it.

Experiment — not everything we’ve done has had an impact (i.e. posting jobs on random jobs boards) but we need to try them to know this. And once we do it, we measure it and can make a decision as to whether it’s something we want to invest our time and money in. Keep pausing and reviewing for lessons learned. Some things we stop, other things we’ve learned from and amended.

Stop Talking — Start Acting. We’ve really stopped talking as a community about WHY we need to make change. We’re going ahead and doing it, working with the right teams and shouting about our success to our leaders.

Georgie Webster is Head of Tech for our Digital Core Services and leader of the Women In Tech community. Outside of ASOS she can either be found travelling or having a ‘quiet’ night in with wine, Britney (or any power ballad for that matter) and lots of dancing… her poor neighbours!