International Women’s Day 2020: women in tech at SumUp
Katja Belova talks us through the triumphs and challenges of her engineering career to date.
Throughout March, we’re celebrating the incredible women making an impact at SumUp. While we’re proud of the fact that over 50% of SumUppers are female, we’re committed to reducing the gender gap in our engineering, finance and leadership teams. With this in mind, we caught up with a few women currently thriving in these areas.
First up is Katja Belova, a Principal Data Engineer based in our Berlin office. Katja was lucky enough to discover her true calling early in life. “When I was in middle school, I took part in a programming competition. I’d actually been taught quite badly, so I knew virtually nothing about QBasic, the language we were being tested on. But I managed to solve a task in an unusual manner, using a mixture of maths and logic, and I came top in my year group. The teacher assessing us told me that I should go into software engineering, that I had the brain for it. This was helpful to learn in the 8th grade!”
After studying IT and economics at university, she initially considered a career in academia, and began working towards a PhD. “But during this time I realised that it’s not enough for me to teach or study, I’m happiest when I’m programming. When I solve a task, I feel an endorphin rush!” After becoming an Android developer, she was approached to work on a Big Data Project on account of her Java and Linux knowledge. “This turned out to be exactly what I’d trained for at university. I was able to apply my knowledge of marketing, business, statistics, mathematics — all the subjects I was interested in. I’ve since worked as a data engineer in St. Petersburg and Stockholm, and I’ve spent the past 2 years in Germany.”
To the casual observer, Katja’s career trajectory appears impressively smooth. But as a woman in a heavily male-dominated field, things haven’t always been easy. “Attending interviews as a graduate, I was told things like “You’re good enough to join us. You can make coffee for the real programmers!” There were occasions when I was clearly being assessed on my appearance rather than my skills, and I’ve also had people make sexist jokes when I’m the only woman in the room. My experiences have generally been better in Germany, but I’ve still encountered more subtle forms of chauvinism.”
For women who find themselves in similar situations, Katja has some simple advice. “When I see behaviour that makes me uncomfortable, I try to be as direct as possible and make it clear that it isn’t appropriate. It can be helpful to speak directly to the person concerned, if possible. Often, people don’t understand that they’re saying or doing something wrong. It all comes down to the patriarchal society we’ve been shaped by — I think that a sexist worldview is quite embedded in society. In Russia we have proverbs like “long hair, short mind”. People absorb this kind of thing without thinking about it.”
When reflecting on her career to date, Katja is reluctant to single out her proudest accomplishments. “I don’t really dwell on past achievements, but I’ve worked hard at developing and improving myself. If you knew me 10 years ago you probably wouldn’t recognise me today. As a child I was incredibly introverted, it was very difficult for me to meet new people. Today I’m pretty open, and I’m comfortable networking. I was raised in a monolingual environment and have a really bad mechanical memory, so I found learning English very tough. And some of my colleagues don’t believe me, but I’m naturally a chaotic person — I’ve really had to train myself to be self-disciplined and organised at work. So I suppose the message I’d want to send is that it’s important to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and to really focus on things that may hold you back later in life — even if that might be painful in the short term.”
When discussing female role models, Katja keeps circling back to one key figure. “My mum was very attentive to me, I owe a lot to her. She pushed me in the right direction, particularly when it came to learning English. I also think I was lucky to have been born in 1986, at the end of the Soviet era. Obviously there were plenty of social problems during this period, but a lot of progress was made regarding women’s rights. Maternity leave and social security for women were introduced in the Soviet Union before many other countries.”
Katja speaks enthusiastically about SumUp’s culture and commitment to gender equality. “I haven’t encountered any chauvinism here, and Berlin is one of the most equal places I’ve ever encountered. German women are amazing at standing up for their rights.”
As a hiring manager, however, she’s been disappointed to receive relatively few applications from women for engineering vacancies. “We definitely need to do more to attract women to tech roles. I think it’s important for us to form strong relationships with universities and reach out to female students.
“Training around the recruitment process is particularly important for women in the early stages of their career. I was once working with a brilliant software engineer. She decided to change her job and started doing interviews. But she failed 3 or 4 in a row at different companies. I couldn’t understand what was going wrong. So I did a stress interview with her, and the way she was speaking made it sound like she wasn’t sure of her answers. I told her to stop saying things like “I’m not sure, but I think…” and to speak more firmly. The very next interview she did after this, she got the job! This all comes from the way girls are taught to behave — they’re often afraid to be assertive in case they come across as arrogant. I think it’s partly evolution — historically, men needed to be more assertive to survive and conquer. But we’re not animals any more, we should adapt our behaviour to the society we live in!”
As such, Katja believes it’s vital that women continue to make noise around International Women’s Day, even in progressive cities like Berlin. “We shouldn’t get complacent, women’s rights remain under threat around the world. At least once per year, we should really think about the contributions that women make.”
