Empowering Women in Tech: Turbine Kreuzberg’s Inspiring Role Models
Women in software development are rare, and they are even rarer at the management level. At Turbine Kreuzberg, we have eight female software developers, but we want to change that. As a growing tech-company, our aim is to increase the number of women by 2025 and achieve at least a one-third share. Why does it seem that females have less interest in science and technology? Or is this just a bias?
To get some answers, I spoke with our female developers Liliana, Ana, Brigitte, Melle, with our technical writer Melisa and with our QA specialist Daria. My questions were mostly about the origin of their interest in computers and programming, about good mentorship experiences in their careers, and what changes they would like to see so that women feel more supported and empowered to start their career in IT.
Taking the first step in IT
The majority of my female interviewees found their way into IT through male family members who were passionate about computers or worked in IT themselves. Ana used to be allowed to play around with her father’s computer and she came into contact with software and game demos through magazine subscriptions. She still had doubts during her Computer Science studies whether programming was the right thing for her and what it actually meant to code in a company.
Melisa’s uncle is also a computer enthusiast and she can remember very well how they played computer games together. She also owned several game consoles. Melle started studying multimedia technology because she was very interested in 3D animation from playing Final Fantasy and wanted to develop games herself. Through an internship at the end of her studies she ended up in frontend development by chance. Fortunately, this changed after she joined Turbine Kreuzberg. After graduating from school, Daria attended a QA Meetup at the new IT school in her city, which led to her taking a QA course afterwards.
Liliana is a career changer. She had initially studied archaeology. The job prospects were not so good and thanks to her cousin, who was already studying IT, she found interest in software development. Brigitte’s father was, as she says, a “computer person” and she studied physics. She decided to take Fundamentals of Computer Science as a non-physics elective course.
Essential skills for successful programmers
Programming goes beyond just having an affinity for technology. According to my colleagues, you don’t need to have an outstanding coding talent, but more like a kind of fearless “Sherlock Holmes” with hands-on mentality. What’s even more important than a logical mindset is the ambition in finding solutions to problems, moreover the ability to adjust themselves to the changes like new requirements, new frameworks, new programming languages or new technologies.
If you can concentrate on a topic for a longer time, enjoy working as a team and love having challenges, then you can consider programming as a career path for you. Programming requires continuous learning, especially from the mistakes. So, you shouldn’t be afraid of making some.
At Turbine Kreuzberg, our main focus in hiring is whether the person fits in our team or not. With all the skills and ability that the person brings with, should definitely be a puzzle piece to the team. We don’t need to mention hard skills and essential qualifications as they are already the must-haves.
What it means to work in a tech profession
It doesn’t mean that you always need to set up the printer at your parents’ house or solve every Internet problem. The answers I got from my colleagues in Turbine confirmed it one more time that the impression that many people have, especially career starters, often don’t know the variety of positions in IT. That’s why I asked my colleagues to give me a little insight about their day-to-day work.
Liliana is a back-end developer in a large development team. She works closely with the customers and the product owners. Her job is to write clean and efficient code in order to create an environment where certain features work smoothly and will be embedded into other systems.If challenges or problems arise during the development, she finds solutions or suggests ways to improve them.
On the other hand,Daria is our QA Specialist. She communicates closely with other developers and discusses complex tickets. She performs software tests on developed applications and systems, documents it and thus, ensures bug-free code and ultimately satisfied customers.
Melisa’s job as a technical writer is to understand complicated technical topics and technologies used by Turbine Kreuzberg or in the IT market and shape the content into understandable articles and social media posts for readers from all levels, whether IT experts or not.
Developing in the front-end is much more than making layout-related changes to applications and websites. Melle prepares the data of the backend visually and user-friendly, this can be e.g. a color change of a button or a new screen input. Larger tasks include defining project setups with frameworks and dependencies, project monitoring, and contributing third-party applications such as tracking. To do this, she is working closely with the backend development team so that everyone knows what needs to be implemented when and how.
These are just a few examples of countless other possible assignments in IT and tech positions that can vary from company to company.
The perks of working in a tech position
Of course, I also asked our female techies about what they enjoy the most in their position. Our female developers find the power of the code very fascinating, for example, how the small code parts come together and create big and complex systems. Daria, Melisa and Liliana love watching the progress of their work and learning new things constantly. Especially Melisa wants to underline how cool it is to be able to follow the recent trends in IT and to keep up with new technologies in daily life. Brigitte prefers to share her knowledge. She enjoys finding creative and logical solutions to problems, which will be even developed further and become a helpful tool.
Overall, IT and programming is an endless world that has various fields of application, such as in health, fashion, physics, design, mathematics or gaming. Our female techies keep up to date with new technology and trends by attending conferences and trade fairs, reading newsletters or simply exchanging ideas with colleagues. Dev Talks is a regularly planned event at Turbine Kreuzberg and we also host our own tech meetups in Berlin, Faro and Bishkek.
Misconceptions and prejudices still exist
Our female developers are usually the only woman on their project team. However, they have told me that they perceive little or no difference in their treatment compared to male colleagues. However, Liliana told me that she has already experienced some misconceptions. In her previous companies, some male colleagues did not dare to give her feedback because they thought women are “too sensitive”. The other interviewees also mentioned a concept about prejudice against women, which is being accused of not thinking rationally and logically enough to succeed in programming. Liliana thinks this is a shame, because men should treat women like any other person, since everyone has different personality and abilities, independent of gender.
Women also have prejudices and behave in a biased way. Our female developers have observed that especially young women don’t dare to join male-dominated teams or when they do, start being more reserved. It also happens that women fall back into stereotypical behavior, letting their male colleagues solve difficult tasks instead of trying to do it themselves. I also noticed in the interviews that my female colleagues sometimes downplayed their abilities while they should be more confident and believe in their own skills.
How to make technology a hype topic for younger generation and women
I wanted to know from my interviewees why the tech industry is primarily associated with men. Clear answer: there is simply a clear preponderance of men in IT and also, more notable male CEOs of well-known tech companies.Technology and programming seem to be more in line with the interests of men.
Ana strongly believes that computer science and tech initiatives need to be integrated into the school curriculum much earlier, not just in middle school. Some girls don’t have enough access or touch points with computers and technology at home.
Furthermore, it is important to simplify lateral entrants to make career changes easier. Above all, Melisa has noticed this both in her own applications as well as in applications from fellow students, that recruiters and hiring managers sometimes can be a “bottleneck” for female tech professionals to enter tech positions, as they mainly look for experience rather than people skills.
Brigitte finds it a bit tiresome to just repeat the needs of more women in IT and shared quite an exciting viewpoint with me. For her it looks like there are differences between men and women. But does this need to be a problem? Instead of trying to convince more women into traditional IT positions and adapt them, we can consider the process over again. Hiring companies can explore what diversity and other perspectives offer and use this as an advantage. Furthermore, Brigitte thinks that it’s the experiments that are the fun part, and which bring forth ideas and visions.
My colleagues advise all girls and women interested in programming and pursuing a career in IT to embrace experimentation and not let obstacles deter them. They emphasize the importance of trying out diverse opportunities, reassuring them that it’s completely acceptable to encounter failures along the way. This applies to career starters as well as career changers. A lateral entry into software development is also possible at any time. However, there are already positive developments. My colleagues report that they see more and more female speakers at conferences and the number of female gamers is also increasing on gaming platforms.
We need more mentors and female technical role models
When talking about getting more women interested in IT, we should also talk about the importance of role models and mentorship. According to definition, a mentor (all genders) is an experienced person who passes on their (technical) knowledge and experience to an inexperienced person (Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon).
For Melisa, this role is characterized above all by honesty, reliability, professionalism and experience. When our women think of mentors, they mainly think of colleagues who trained them in their previous jobs. Liliana is super happy with the two Technical Directors at Turbine Kreuzberg with whom she currently works. They respect her, are always available, give constructive feedback, and have extensive expertise. Daria fondly remembers her former team leader, who empowered her not only professionally but also personally. She herself was also a mentor at her previous company and would like to do it again in the future. During her studies, Brigitte took care of tutorials for younger engineering groups with other student assistants. She has also taught non-devs the basics of development at Turbine Kreuzberg.
Ana fondly remembers a memorable mentor-like experience in 2nd grade. At that time, she was explaining to her older teacher how to operate a computer. She loved the feeling of being helpful. For her, sharing knowledge is very important. Moreover, since technology is changing a lot in a short time, she is convinced that she would also be able to learn a lot from a young developer while mentoring. Melle has also noticed that mentoring or onboarding goes beyond hard skills. People skills are of the same importance there. Colleagues who have trained her, have always encouraged her to be more confident.
The same goes for role models. By definition, they are persons who someone admires and whose behavior they try to copy (Cambridge Dictionary). Thinking about tech role models, names like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Tim Cook come up most often. Only Ana could tell me some female role models like Susan Wojcicki (former CEO at Youtube), Gwynne Shotwell (COO at SpaceX) and Katherine Maher (former CEO at Wikimedia). This shows that female role models are still rare. But do role models always have to be well-known and in a leading position? Not necessarily. If you look at Ana, Liliana, Daria, Melisa, Brigitte and Melle, they have exemplified magnificently how a career in IT can start.
Wrap-Up: Early access & less of the same!
My conversations with our female tech colleagues shows that girls can also have the same interest in computers, video games and technology as boys do. The tech industry is still male-dominated and lacks female role models. To improve this imbalance, (female) mentors are important to pass on their (technical) knowledge and should encourage women in their skills.
If children are given access and information about computers and IT at a younger age, this could lead to more women in IT professions. Interested women should be given the opportunity to better inform themselves in advance about the different fields of activity in IT. They also should consider whether their soft skills match those of a programmer and, of course, simply try out.
The tech industry needs to abandon the idea that women have to conform to the system. Here are good chances to enhance team culture and assemble a new class of high performing teams by disregarding gender and focusing on the potential of individuals. For me, all my colleagues are already role models in tech as they followed their interests, tried new things and launched inspiring careers in the technology world.
Thoughts? We’d like to hear them. Reach out to Sophie on LinkedIn.
