Women in Technology: SEEK’s Good News Story
The Technology industry has a representation problem, we all know it and thankfully some of us are up for the challenge to improve it. SEEK is no different and sometimes making progress is hard. I wanted to share a good news story of how SEEK was able to make a positive impact for women in technology.
In this blog I talk about the stages we took to be able to identify a problem, how to tackle it, the execution and the results. I hope this inspires change beyond SEEK and helps continue the conversation on how we can make the tech space a more inclusive and welcoming environment for everyone.
The Discovery
There’s no ‘one problem’ to solve when it comes to improving things for women in technology. It’s multi-faceted, so how do you pick what to focus on? A group of SEEKers worked to answer this question by kicking off a ‘Continuous Discovery’ project. This is the approach of taking customer or end-user feedback and using this to guide the product delivery lifecycle. It is used by agile teams to understand what to build to meet customer needs. In this case, our ‘product’ was to make a positive difference for women in technology at SEEK.
The outcome from the User Experience research that was conducted, indicated multiple areas where SEEK could be doing better to support women in technology. Broadly, these were around career planning, leader support, part-time and remote work, mentoring and networking as well as support returning from parental leave. These are big opportunities to tackle and it was decided that the focus would be placed on an area where the employee resource group could have the most influence and actionable impact, career planning and leader support.
The Problem
The issues faced by women when it comes to career planning and leader support can have big impacts on someone’s ability to take control of their career. This also affects retention as people will seek external opportunities if they can’t progress in their current role. This isn’t just a SEEK problem, this is an industry-wide problem and there have been a lot of studies to highlight this.
For us to make a real impact, we focused on the areas that would have the biggest influence on our goal of increasing the number of women in leadership roles. More specifically, this meant tackling unconscious bias, structured and regular career discussions and promotion rates.
Our senior technical leaders came together and agreed that our vision was for SEEK “to be a leading workplace for women in technology to succeed and realise their full potential.”
The Approach
We had a vision, we had the data, now we had to come up with the ‘how’. Through the excellent work done by our Women in Tech (WIT) working group and the facilitation by our Wellbeing, Diversity & Inclusion Lead, the ‘Women in Tech Careers Planning Program’ was launched.
This was a program targeted to women senior developers across Australia and New Zealand. It was identified that the senior developer to principal developer promotion rate for women was historically quite low, so this was a group of people where we could achieve a bigger impact.
The program was made up of a series of coaching, workshops and training for both the senior developers and their leaders. This included:
- Career workshops targeted for this specific cohort of WIT
- Deep-dive into SEEK’s existing career growth framework for tech roles
- A Leader workshop on career development
- Professionally facilitated 1:1 career coaching sessions
- Pre-scheduled, ongoing career conversations between the participant and their leader.
The design of this program was aimed to address some of the systemic challenges women in tech face, including:
- Often being the only women in a workshop and therefore not feeling comfortable to speak up, and not having peers with shared experiences and challenges
- A reticence to ask for career conversations with leaders, due to already feeling different and that they stand out
- Playing it safe and not aspiring to more challenging roles
- Thinking they had to ‘tick the box’ on every aspect of the next level before going for a promotion
- Not having the profile or the network that proactively taps them on the shoulder for a role.
What Does Success Look Like?
The WIT Working Group agreed that success would be to see an increase in women represented in leadership through promotions.
So, how did it go? Out of a total of 12 participants in the 6-month program that ended in February of this year, four of them are now in Principal developer roles. This increase indicates the impact this initiative had on contributing to the promotion rate of women into senior technical leadership roles.
In addition to this, participants completed a survey before and after so we could have measured assessment of the program’s success, and where we could improve for next time. There were measurable improvements in the following areas:
- Clarity of career goals
- Having Development Plans
- Confidence to talk with their leader about their career
- Confidence to reach out to others for support.
Participants put the highest value on getting an externally facilitated career session, where they were challenged to think bigger, and pre-scheduled career conversations with their leader, which meant the onus didn’t fall on them to have to ask for these.
The Learnings
There are a lot of things we can take away from this initiative from all the people involved.
The importance of creating opportunities for women in tech to connect about career discussions
Participants shared that they felt much more comfortable speaking openly about their career aspirations — and fears — when they were matched with other women, who share similar lived-experience as women on predominantly male teams. With many women in tech spending their days as ‘the only woman’ on a team, intentionally creating opportunities to connect with other women provided support in ways that exceeded our expectations.
The need for leaders to be proactive in discussing career growth with women in tech
We heard a number of participants share that in spite of having managers they described as friendly and having an ‘open door’ for one to one meetings (1:1s) or career conversations, they were not comfortable or willing to ask for these meetings. When we probed deeper, we learned that as a minority member in their team, the women were reluctant to take any action they felt would make them stand out or appear as a ‘squeaky wheel.’ We also heard of their concern that asking for time focused on them, knowing how busy their managers’ roles were. Through the pilot we learned the immediate positive impact of the simple step of managers putting in regular 1:1s in the diary, and scheduling career conversations a few times a year.
Acknowledging that not all leaders are made the same
Training for leaders is really important in supporting them to support their people. Who your manager is can be the difference in someone’s career progression being actively encouraged, and progress not happening at all. This could be for a lot of reasons, management-style, personal working-style, or awareness of opportunities. In a lot of cases managers in technology find themselves managing people because they have been really good at delivering technical solutions — and people are more complicated than tech. Providing managers with specific training in career development sets them and their teams up for success.
A clear promotion framework is really important
It’s really important to have a framework for providing direction for career discussions and promotions. SEEK’s Engineering Growth Framework aims to minimise bias in promotion cases and provides people and their leaders with a tool to help navigate career discussions. Our framework’s success comes from how clearly it guides you through the tech career progressions and allows you to complete a self-assessment that can suggest any gaps to work on to support your promotion case. It’s a framework for our engineering community by our engineering community.
You need to make an investment
Talking about the problem only goes so far. You need an investment of people’s time and budget to give these initiatives legs and to ensure they’re sustainable. Often when you have a small dedicated group of people working on diversity and inclusion initiatives, they are done on ‘magic time’ and sometimes this can lead to burnout and being less effective. SEEK made an investment of time and money to make sure this initiative was successful. This investment was made by the participants, their leaders, the WIT working group and the Wellbeing, Diversity & Inclusion Lead. If you’re not willing to make that commitment, then you’re setting yourself up for another initiative that fizzles out.
Keep the conversation going
To bring this article full-circle, Technology does have a representation problem and it’s a multi-faceted problem — thankfully there are things — impactful things — that companies can proactively do to help improve this for all marginalised groups in technology. SEEK has many initiatives to help improve the representation of women in technical leadership and it’s important to share the stories where we’ve shifted the needle. Keeping the conversation open and transparent can only benefit women in technology and the broader technical community.
