Our road towards gender equality at Supercharge

It’s not news that women are underrepresented in the tech industry. As a woman in IT (especially as a leader), I have felt this disparity up close for years now. It made me wonder why it is that young girls think the tech and engineering paths are boyish ones to take? Why do we tend to move into directions such as finance, HR and design when the first programmers of the ENIAC computer were females. In the 60s, most of the programmers at MIT’s Lincoln Labs were also women who changed the world as we knew it, just like Margaret Hamilton did. Something happened along the way; at Supercharge, we wanted to find out how to fix this.

In an ideal world, every gender would be represented equally, and we, too, would strive to have a perfect workplace balance. If you’re a woman working in IT (don’t even mention non-binary or transgender people), you know that, unfortunately, this is not the reality.

When I joined Supercharge in 2016, there were four women working at the company, compared to the 30ish male Superchargers. It wasn’t weird or out of the ordinary, it was just the way it was. I remember that I was even thrilled that two of them were actually engineers. But as part of the first people operations personnel back then, I wanted to create an example for other companies and show them that gender diversity is something they should invest in, and for that Supercharge needed to be the prime example. And to achieve that, we needed a plan.

I sat down with our CEO, who also deeply cared about the matter, to discuss the next steps to take. We started talking and raising the subject at various management meetings and all company meetings, and eventually, this became a talking point within the company. Our engineers asked me how they could help and how we could achieve our goal together. I responded by saying we’d focus on it and we’d hire female engineers. (Girl, was I naive.)

When we had a job opening for an engineering role, I set myself a goal: “this next hire will be a woman, for sure”. I browsed LinkedIn over and over again and found one or two female engineers; I started talking to them, but they didn’t make it through the hiring process. Then I asked myself: why is it so hard to find females in tech? Where are they?

I had to dig deep and educate myself on the subject. It turned out that out of 1,000 recent computer science graduates, only about 150 of them are women (but fun fact: they’re more likely to graduate than their male counterparts). Which of course means that girls don’t tend to choose engineering as a career choice. (Let’s not go into details on the ‘whys’ because we’d be here all day).

So there we were: as much as we tried to hire female engineers, we couldn’t. I started to talk to other HR professionals to share knowledge and find solutions. I learned about some of the gender quotas (e.g., every fifth engineer hired should be a woman), but as a company that’s not who we are, and that’s not what we stand for. We hire for expertise, not for gender. It’s my personal opinion that hiring based on gender is counterproductive, and it won’t help our cause if we are hired to meet system quotas when these hires are not able to produce the same output level as their peers. Women have enough things they need to fight for every day, let alone justifying their quota-supported position in a company. So instead of applying these rules we decided that we’d go into another direction and created a new guideline for ourselves based on expertise, so from that point on we applied a rule that out of two candidates who are equally qualified for the job, we’ll always aim to hire females.

We wanted to change how girls perceive themselves on their STEM career paths so, eventually this gap will close on its own. And how did we do that? We started to talk to young girls about our work to get them excited about this path.

Everything starts with education. If the situation right now won’t allow us to hire more female engineers, then we’ll do something about the future; the hope is that 3–8 years from now, the gender gap will be a long-lost memory for IT companies due to these amazing programmes.

To start, we began a collaboration with Girls’ Day (Lányok Napja), an initiative created to show girls how exciting it is to work in the field of IT or any kind of STEM-based role. After hosting an open day at a company for a lot of girls, showing them how an application is made from scratch, we felt that we were one step closer to bridging the gap. This was in 2018, and since then we have been participating every year, sometimes even twice.

But these are girls aged 12 to 16, who won’t start working tomorrow. So how did we go from a 13% to around 40% female ratio at Supercharge?

In 2016 we were on the verge of a big scale-up: we wanted to broaden our services (which back then mostly focused on software development), to product design, UI design and testing. And we knew that this was our opportunity to work on our gender ratio. First, we had to determine the domains in which there are a lot of women in the market. The no-brainers: HR; recruitment; finance? Yes, yes and yes. But that was nothing new; what about visual design? Yes. Product? Yes. Project management? YES!

We applied our aforementioned philosophy to the hiring of women when possible.

Right now 50% of our Project Management team, 62% of our Product Design Team and 50% of our Software Tester team are female Superchargers. In addition, with nearly 100% female HR-Recruitment and Marketing teams, we can say that women are well represented within our company, and sometimes even dominate in certain fields, making up for less diverse software teams.

But even when it comes to software development, we have made progress since 2016: 20–20% of our Javascript and Java teams are women, and our next goal is the diversification of the mobile teams as well. (Maybe in another article I will tell you how we make sure that the environment is safe and supportive for all genders.)

So why should you care about hiring more women? Because every single research shows that gender equality leads to more creative problem solving, innovative thinking, more empathy in the workplace and, eventually, greater profitability. Here at Supercharge, we build futures, we strive to change and break barriers.

At Supercharge, we are a next-generation innovation agency working with our clients to create transformative digital solutions. If you liked this article, check out some of Supercharge’s other articles on our blog, or follow us on LinkedIn, and Facebook. If you’re interested in open positions, follow this link.