International Women’s Day 2021 — The Importance of Women in Tech
Caroline Stephenson, Senior Solutions Engineer
Caroline joined the Solutions Engineering team at Ciptex at the start of March 2021, with 10 years experience of working in the tech industry as a developer and a manager.
In 2011 I graduated from Durham University with a degree in Computer Science, one of only two girls on the course and four girls in the department. Technology, especially software engineering, has famously been a male-dominated space, and at times it can feel that the environment has been set up to perpetuate, with primarily male traits prioritised and applauded: tenacity, control, assertiveness.
Now, this is not to say that a woman cannot also have these traits, I have met many a tenacious tech woman in my time, but masculine traits tend to be favoured over those classically seen as feminine in the tech environment.
Things like empathy, humility, and warmth can be very powerful when considering the world outside of just the lines of code. Software is written for a reason, to fulfil a purpose and solve a problem, hopefully having a positive impact on a real person. Caring about the end-user, what they need and want, ultimately results in better outcomes. Empathy allows us to get inside the heads of our personas and design something that just…works.
It is not just in the design process where the ‘feminine’ qualities are beneficial, it’s also within teams, whether they be Engineering, Operational, or Support. Building true and strong relationships within teams that are built on mutual respect are integral, particularly when the team is under pressure.
Empathy and compassion are the core principles in my favourite technical practices: HugOps. Essentially, it’s about building your team with a core value of empathy and remembering that software teams are, in fact, human.
It’s easier to drive these core values and live them if you have a well diverse team of people from all across the gender spectrum, so you’ll have team members whose natural ways of working and interacting come from a place of sensitivity and warmth.
In the UK, 49% of all workers are women, however, only 19% of all tech workers are women. The team at Ciptex is 40% female, which is something we are very proud of.
