The path to CTO as a woman in Tech
We started a new meetup called Sororitech as a place for women in tech to meet other women facing the same exciting challenges.
Our goal is that women leave the event with some new friends and keys to handle their career in Tech.
On the first edition we focused on 3 different roles:
- 🚂 The path to CTO, with Ludi Akue & Marie Terrier
- 👩💼 Becoming a manager, with Mélyna Boniface & Mélanie Bérard
- 🔥 Expert developer as a woman in tech, with Paola Ducolin
This article will focus on the learnings from the 1st roundtable: the path to CTO 🚀
👀 Why we wanted to present and talk about the role of CTO
We know that representation matters a lot when it comes to career decisions and sadly there are not enough women that are CTO: only 1% in Europe!
Since it is hard to find a role model, it is hard to project yourself when you want to become one. We wanted to give the opportunity to women in Tech to meet CTOs and understand their job better, because it varies a lot from one company to another.
💡 What we discussed
💼 The day to day job of a CTO
There are no similar daily tasks as a CTO from a company to another. The day-to-day job varies because of a lot of factors:
- The size of the company
- The maturity of the company
- The industry
The job of a CTO in an early stage start-up
In an early stage start-up, the CTO mainly focuses on building the product. It means :
- to work closely with the product and marketing teams,
- to meet the users in order to understand their needs,
- to define the Tech priorities,
- to write specs,
- to act as Tech reference,
- to make code reviews,
- … and to code!
So in an early-stage company, the CTO needs to be a Swiss army knife and be able to wear many hats!
The job of a CTO in a scaleup company
During the scale up stage (when a company reaches a high-growth level), the job of the CTO mainly is:
- to hire and build the team
- to manage the development, product and IT teams
- to build the organization
- to help defining the business strategy
🤲 The soft skills needed to be a CTO
According to Marie and Ludi, it depends where you are a CTO but here are the main soft skills needed for them:
- Be able to surround yourself with people that are more experienced than you and learn to trust them and delegate
- Be able to explain technical concepts to people that are not “techy”
- Be able to handle deadlines and regulate your stress levels: as a CTO, you are responsible for when and what things get done
- Be confident in the fact that you belong where you are
- Be curious and try to understand the different roles and challenges of people working with you
✨ What they enjoy most from their job
For both speakers, their biggest joy is to create a team and help people grow.
As CTOs, they are the ones who give a long-term technical vision and they find it exciting to help the people working with them and the company achieve it.
💪 How to encourage more women to become CTOs
As we said earlier, only 1% of European CTOs are women. This is not enough, but how can we change that?
Spread awareness
We realised during the discussions that the job of CTO remained very obscur for the participants, even though we were almost all software engineers.
A first step could be for companies and individuals to give more information about what it actually is to be a CTO.
We could imagine discussions around the different topics:
- Explain in more details the day-to-day job
- Understand the needed qualifications to become a CTO
- How to get a job
- Which areas to focus on
- Understand the different types of CTOs: depending on the size and maturity of the company, or the industry, …
That’s what we wanted to do with this meetup!
50inTech — a community for Women in Tech — also recently organized a bootcamp on the topic and the videos can be found here.
Mentorship
Mentoring could be another way to motivate and encourage women to become CTOs.
This could take the form of:
- Participating at career fairs and events
- Creating training courses for aspiring CTOs (HR topics, Architecture, processes, creating technical culture, …)
- Share learnings through mentor/mentee relationships
The importance of communities
Both speakers underlined the importance of communities for them.
They recommended two for women only:
- Duchess: a good community of tech entrepreneurship
- Ladies of code: mentorship
And another mixed one:
- Techrocks: with really experienced CTOs to learn from
Sourcing talents
It’s one thing to empower women to become CTOs and show them the way, but it’s not enough. The companies and people hiring also need to be aware of this issue and act accordingly.
A few ideas we discussed:
- HR people usually contact women who already are CTO instead of developers that are ready to be CTOs.
- As for developers, try to target more women for a position in the pipelines
- Create a pool of aspiring female CTOs to match with founders
🧐 I am working as a developer, how do I become a CTO?
Ludi and Marie’s advice is to get started! This could mean to start:
- thinking about what you want to build,
- talking to founders,
- talking with CTOs to get a better picture of what their job actually is
- applying for a CTO position. Even if you don’t get the job, it gives you feedback on what to learn
- reading books about the job or CTOs’ testimonies. Ludi recommended “Modern CTO” (book and podcast)
So in a nutshell… JUST GO FOR IT!
😎 How to feel legitimate as a CTO
It can be hard to feel qualified for a job that has so many different definitions and expectations according to the company. It gets even harder when the people around you don’t look like you!
Ludi and Marie shared with us a few stories about people being surprised that they were CTOs or asking them a lot of questions to assess them. We all have stories like that.
But they also said that they were seeing a positive change!
“Confidence is a journey and battle”, Ludi told us. Don’t address the remarks or people that make you doubt and just do the job, the rest will follow!
Marie also shared with us a TED talk that helped her at the beginning: “Fake it until you make it”
Another tip from her is to use the body language to feel more confident, power poses also helped her confidence.
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👩 If you want to join the next Sororitech meetup, you can subscribe to Doctolib Tech Life. There are other events to come!
If there is a topic you would like to cover, please reach out to us as well! We’d be super happy to make it happen
Special thanks to our speakers, the Big Sisters and to Manon Budin who organized this event with all her heart and energy 💙
