Despite the overwhelming prevalence of technology in our everyday lives, and the progress of gender equality, women are vastly underrepresented in the tech industry, and movement towards a better balance is woefully slow.

We want to change that. 

Our DEI Toolkit relays actionable insights for employers, employees, leaders, and individual allies who want to play their role in retaining female tech talent, and presents practical guidance on career progression for women working in technology. 

Summarising discussions that took place at our Closing the Revolving Door: Women in Tech event, held in partnership with Preqin and the Tech Talent Charter, the toolkit outlines ways to engage and empower women in tech and support female retention across the industry.  

The challenge

Women working in tech increased by just 1% in 2022.  

While conversations on gender disparity at work have gained traction in a wider sense, the increase of women working in the tech industry is barely marginal. But the issues go beyond poor growth.   

An eye-popping 50% of women working in technology leave by the age of 35. For those who stay, the statistics don’t improve, with 20% of women over the age of 35 still in junior tech roles, and only 22% of senior tech roles held by gender minorities. 

The benefits

Gender diversity at work is better for business. 

Improving gender diversity in tech is not only about fostering fairer and more equitable working environments; recruiting and retaining gender-diverse teams simply makes good business sense.

Diverse teams offer fresh perspectives, generate unique ideas, and present new approaches to problem-solving. Out of this comes a greater readiness for innovation, more valued and engaged employees, higher employee retention, and balanced decision-making. Ultimately, a gender-diverse workforce equates to higher revenue growth and a firm foundation to recruit and attract a diverse talent pool. 

According to a report by McKinsey & Company, gender-diverse executive teams are 21% more likely to have above-average profitability compared to companies with less diversity.

Despite the clear advantages of retaining female tech talent, leaders keen to adopt a more inclusive culture can be doubtful of the value DEI programs bring, with a significant 51% of CEOS reporting that current DEI initiatives are not effective.

The solution

How to promote gender diversity and inclusion in the workplace. 

We each have a different role to play in promoting gender diversity at work. If you’re asking yourself “What can we do as a company? What can I do as an individual?”, we have actionable insights to help you make better decisions.  

Learn how to: 

• Recognise and reduce the gender pay gap 
• Create gender-equal promotion and progression opportunities 
• Foster family-friendly work culture 
• Overcome hostile work environments 
• Educate and create allyship through support networks 

Download the DEI toolkit

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Claudia Cohen, Associate Director at La Fosse, joined four fellow panellists for a discussion around retention and promotion within underrepresented groups.

Full panel:

• Claudia Cohen, 2021 TechWomen100 Winner | Associate Director at La Fosse
• David Henderson, Chief Technology & Product Officer at Global
• Debbie Irish, Head of HR at HP UK & Ireland
• Lopa Ghosh, UKI Cybersecurity Competency Leader at EY
• Shilpa Shah, Programme Director for Deloitte Delivery, Large Scale Implementations, Women in Technology Leader

In this blog, we’ve rounded up 10 key tips from our expert panellists to help you improve minority retention and promotion opportunities within your business.

1. Know your data

Being a data-driven business is vital to understanding where problems lie and measuring your success in solving them. In order to have better conversations around equality in your organisation, you first need to understand your demographics and metrics per role, level and team.

2. Practice active listening

Active listening is something that should take place at all levels of your business. Listening to employees should never be a tick-box exercise, it’s an opportunity to really find out what your employees are thinking. Two key ways of putting this into practice are:

• Survey-based research – this is easy to anonymise and is a great way to find out what would make people stay at or leave your organisation
• Employee networks – this provides a safe space for open discussion among all employees, whether members of underrepresented groups or allies

3. Provide mentorship opportunities

Mentorship or sponsorship can take many forms; it’s up to you to find out what works best for your business and current capability. Even a little will go a long way to help underrepresented employees who wouldn’t have otherwise had the opportunity to get face time with someone higher up in the business. A few successful examples from the panellists include:

• Mutual mentorship – both parties support and learn from each other
• ‘15 minutes with’ executive mentor meetings – a quick elevator-style intro
• Mentor circles – ‘one-to-many’ confidential mentorship groups (great for smaller companies)

4. Build out a career roadmap

Whether general or personal (if capacity allows), your business needs to be fully transparent around growth and development opportunities. Here at La Fosse, we encourage employees to pivot to different roles around the business, but it doesn’t have to be permanent move – some companies like Global are offering temporary project roles in other teams to help give underrepresented groups the chance to try something new and still have a secure job to come back to.

5. Promote role models

Every worker needs someone to look up to within their organisation; someone who not only aligns with their skillset and ambitions, but someone who looks and sounds like them. Senior role models are crucial for retention – especially among early-career employees – and every business has a responsibility to project diverse voices at all levels in order to give their employees something to aspire to, as well as being a friendly face to approach if they ever need support on their journey.

“For someone to feel included and comfortable, you need at least 30% representation within the room.” – Debbie Forster, TTC

6. Make everyone accountable

Ensuring diversity targets are met and inclusivity is promoted is a collective responsibility, but the buck has to stop somewhere. Business targets should be transparently shared both internally and externally, and data collection and analysis should be consistent, with a clear path of escalation and intervention. Most importantly, everyone should be able to hold a mirror up to themselves and consider why people leave the business and what can be done to prevent this in future.

7. Set long-term plans

A roadmap is all well and good, but how will an employee reach the next rung on the ladder? What happens if life gets in the way? As well as holding regular development meetings and setting actionable goals to achieve a promotion or pay rise, employers need to consider each individual’s needs. A couple of ways the panellists’ organisations have implemented this is through emerging leaders development programmes for diverse employees, and holding regular career chats with women in the business to create career plans around their own personal life plans, such as having children.

8. Educate everyone

Creating an inclusive and welcoming environment shouldn’t just be down to HR – it’s the responsibility of everyone in the business. A few examples from the panellists include:

Mandatory training – educating everyone on respect and inclusion is a must to ensure that everyone can act as allies to underrepresented groups and understand how to approach diversity in the right way.

Manager training – technical skills don’t always translate into people skills, so your business should support this growth with added training, especially for those managing teams for the first time. At La Fosse, we understand this challenges and offer management training as part of our support service.

Training for underrepresented groups – in order to help people progress and feel supported by the business, organisations should listen to individual needs and facilitate training to help them grow and develop.

“1 in 4 women would consider switching to a tech career if skills training was provided” – TTC

9. Boost board representation

​Diversity at board level has been shown to directly impact business success, with a recent report finding that companies with higher-than-average diversity had 19% higher innovation revenues. While many businesses are working to diversify their board, this is often not an overnight process. One great way of improving representation is to put a shadow board in place. Not only does this allow diverse voices across the business to discuss the same issues as the board and understand their challenges, it also helps to provide answers that draw from a wider range of backgrounds and experiences.

10. Be flexible

Understanding that people’s needs differ and accommodating them is important for retention; organisations should be mindful that what works for many does not necessarily work for all. In addition to listening to individuals’ needs, consider little things you can do as a business to be inclusive of other people’s cultures – have internal champions to celebrate and educate on different holidays, or as one of the panellists has done in their business, open up bank holidays to be taken freely at a time that suits the individual.

The most important takeaway from this event was that addressing diversity, equality and inclusion is never just a ‘one and done’. Although ongoing discussion is useful, it’s only through listening to underrepresented groups, educating staff at all levels, and delivering enduring change within your organisation to help underrepresented groups that we can begin to fix the diversity gap together.

Where to next?

Catch up on all the session recordings from this year’s Inclusion in Tech Festival.

If you liked this blog, you might also like…

​Why it’s time to change the way you hire

Getting ahead… as a woman in tech

Closing the D&I Gap: A Cross-Industry Movement

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If you need advice on how to improve diversity and retention within your organisation, we can help! Speak to your dedicated consultant today or contact our team.

The post 10 ways leading businesses are tackling retention and promotion through inclusivity appeared first on La Fosse.

The conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) is not a new one. And yet, excessive time spent studying and talking about what the problems are only delays change and results in lost generations of opportunity. The time for action is now, and conversations across the board need to start moving from ‘how do you see the problem?’ to ‘what are we actively doing today to solve it?’

We brought together 25 DE&I leaders from organisations of all sizes to discuss their visions for the future, common stumbling blocks, and how we can support each other to make this vision of equality a reality.

​What DE&I initiatives can I implement in my business?

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for DE&I. Where large organisations may have large spending pots, for start-ups and scale-ups, competing budget priorities mean it’s often hard to implement large-scale projects. But regardless of size, so long as actionable steps are put in place at all levels and a percentage of the organisation’s budget is dedicated to ensuring this can be executed, true DE&I is an achievable goal.

Government legislation is also an effective way of driving change within larger organisations. One example of this is affirmative action planning, something which is mandated in the US for organisations who have over 50 employees and specified federal ties.

An affirmative action plan (AAP) is a written document which outlines an organisation’s specific plans and data on representation within the workplace, including information on how many colleagues are hired, how many leave, a target growth rate for improving DE&I and the plan to make this happen. Currently, the US law surrounding AAPs only measures three strands (female, Black and Hispanic employees) but the scope for expansion of this legislation is promising, and certainly something that other countries and organisations would do well to adopt in the near future.

To encourage buy-in past implementing formal policies and a DE&I officer, another initiative many organisations are setting up are employee networks (also known as affinity or employee resource groups). Usually run voluntarily by employees, these provide a safe space for their peers to openly discuss thoughts and experiences around DE&I, among other topics. Not only have networks been shown to increase employee retention rates and make organisations more desirable, with the right backing from HR and the executive board (such as rewards or incentives for those involved) they can provide highly beneficial insights in all areas, from D&I to business growth and customer relations.

​What has been done so far to improve DE&I?

Across the board, progress has been made towards improving demographic diversity (gender, race, ethnicity, age, religion, sexual orientation, neurodiversity etc.) but there’s still a lot to be done. Here are some positive examples given by our panellists:

• Women in Finance Charter – over 330 financial firms across the world have pledged to promote gender diversity by committing to implement four key industry actions.
• After hitting its goal of achieving a minimum of 30% female representation on FTSE 100 boards, the 30% club has now expanded its 2023 targets to include there being “at least one person of colour on every FTSE 350 board […] with half these seats going to women”.
• In October 2020, Legal and General told FTSE 100 organisations that they will vote against those who fail to diversify their leadership teams by 2022. They will openly vote against re-election of chairman or head of nomination committee if this is not met.
• The Diversity VC Standard is an assessment and certification process that sets a benchmark for best practice within VC and sends a signal that a fund follows best DE&I practices to the rest of the ecosystem. With more funding, this could be extended to start-ups and scale-ups to better support D&I as they grow and give them more exposure.
• The Investor Leadership Network is currently building a dashboard that allows people to mentor and coach each other. This has a lot of promise for fund/project managers who aren’t ready for institutional capital and perhaps don’t yet have a board of directors but have a lot of potential. With the right attention, this project could help people to get to board level more quickly.
• The Private Equity Women Investor Network (PEWIN) has recently announced plans to expand its US-based Project Pinklight – an accelerator program designed to help women launch their own private equity funds – into London. The project helps female founders to give and receive assistance with upfront capital to get off the ground.
• Investment firms including KKR, TPG and Goldman Sachs have programs which involve office hours for advice and a ‘big sibling relationship’ where they take on an advisory role and lend their name for fundraising – some seed capital needs to be used, but this is not always easy to get in the first place, so smaller organisations could do with more support in this area.

Many organisations, including La Fosse, are also now including socio-economic factors in their D&I plans. Our coding academy was founded in 2018 to tackle the diversity issue within software engineering, and uses a free-for-students policy to provide equal opportunities and focus on applicants’ individual ability rather than their ability to pay.

​What are the hurdles faced when trying to achieve DE&I?

The consequences of not focusing on DE&I are clear: continued employee tribunals, continued BLM protests, and general injustice and imbalance across the world.

And yet, when budgets are tight, DE&I initiatives are often the first thing to come under scrutiny for being a ‘nice to have’ rather than an essential function. Even tech giant Google has recently been accused by employees of reducing their internal D&I training team, leaving vacancies unfilled, and cutting back or dropping some programmes completely.

1. D&I is not simply an HR/CEO/board-level responsibility – although they are responsible for setting tone, every employee is responsible for ensuring D&I. Approximately 50% of DE&I best practices are not directly related to diversity, but are practices desired by everyone, such as fair treatment and organizational flexibility.
2. Currently, there is no consistent measurement system for data regarding the D&I process. This makes it hard for judges to compare when one organisation has data and others don’t, and in most cases, the one with auditable data will win
3. Whether conscious or unconscious, bias exists everywhere. According to blind hiring organisation FairHire, 20% of 540 UK female BAME jobseekers surveyed altered their name in applications and almost all who changed their name reported a higher level of call-backs from potential employers – unconscious bias training can help us to eliminate this.
4. Differences in legislation (such as LGBT rights) between countries can make it difficult to implement a cohesive strategy.
5. There are a lot of barriers in the way for people from diverse backgrounds hoping to start a VC organisation or fund. Founders are expected to have tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds readily accessible, as well as the ability to relocate, which simply isn’t viable for a lot of people.

How can we close the DE&I gap?

Successful DE&I initiatives are not ‘pet projects’ to be put on the backburner, they are long-term, targeted campaigns which include every single leader and hold people personally accountable for meeting objectives. To see results, programs must be connected and aligned at all levels, and also require organisations to invest in doing it properly. D&I results require passion – individuals at all levels need to have the right mindset and be personally committed to achieving positives and contributing towards fighting injustice. As one of our panellists asserted, ‘diversity shouldn’t be a layer on top or a topic of the week, it should be baked into the DNA of the organisation’.

For the final part of the event, attendees were given a hypothetical scenario: with £100,000 and a 12-month window, what can we do to close the D&I gap?

• One of the difficulties in finding talent is that firms often seek highly experienced candidates who are well-established names within their industry. Expanding the pool of candidates to be considered doesn’t necessarily require capital, but instead is dependent on networking and open-mindedness on the part of employers. Organisations should be agile and willing to give opportunities to people without previous board experience, whether it be nurturing internal talent or looking for external candidates with an ambitious mindset.
• Create a database of corporate leaders willing to take board seats within VC-funded organisations. This could also be reversed, giving scale-up leaders the opportunity to sit in on board meetings and gain valuable experience.
• Develop a database of diverse corporate executives and match people from different backgrounds with people at scale-up/start-up businesses to help them develop with D&I in mind. Increased effectiveness could be achieved by pairing people by sectors or specialisms.
• Implement a reverse mentoring scheme whereby executives from diverse backgrounds mentor leadership teams on the benefits of having a diverse executive team. This could be executed within or across sectors.
• Establish the UK’s first DE&I talent investor, funding the program through corporate sponsorship and family capital. Corporates would make a commitment to contribute X% saved from postponing, cancelling or modifying graduate schemes (and the like), with family capital using the broader momentum behind impact investing to entice investment.

Rather than simply recruiting and promoting people in their own personal likeness, leaders should focus on competency-based hiring. Why do you want to hire someone diverse – what soft skills like growth mindset and innovation are we assessing, and what does ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ look like in these areas? Having data and a scoring mechanism could help shift the dial, but it’s up to business leaders to evangelise and bring everyone along on the journey.

​Final words from our event chairs

“D&I leadership and sponsorship has come a long way in the last few years. Today’s executive leaders need to do whatever they can to ensure that in 20 years we are not having the same conversation. We hope this event provided impetus and insights into how we can collectively work together to close the D&I gap.” – Sunil Jindal

“In order to create change we must be bold and decisive. We must stop talking about stats and the issues we have in our society and hold everyone accountable to create change now, not in 10 years’ time. It was a delight to work with our amazing speakers on this event and thank you to everyone who attended.” – Sean Kiff

The post Closing the D&I gap: A cross-industry movement – VC, PE, corporate, and start-up appeared first on La Fosse.

One of the steps we’ve taken is facilitating a programme of Unconscious Bias training, designed by an Organisational Psychologist. From motivating our team (101 consultants), to evaluating our hiring process, we want to develop an inclusive culture of excellence -not only in our own business – but, with other businesses looking to strengthen their workforce by hiring more diverse candidates.

What is unconscious bias?

Unconscious bias occurs when people instinctively categorise others based on observable criteria such as age, gender or skin colour.

It is important to note that this isn’t intentional, and that everyone has unconscious biases. The brain receives information constantly, which is based on our experiences and what we read, hear or see in the media. It then uses shortcuts to speed up decision making, and this, is how unconscious bias becomes a by-product. In certain situations (like when you’re in danger and need to act fast), this is vital.

However, when applied to a hiring process, this can be paramount to discrimination if the bias relates to one of the 9 Protected Characteristics (Equality Act 2010). What’s more, it holds us back from objectively assessing who is the best person for the job, because we’re judging with our “gut feeling.”

How can we avoid unconscious bias?

Being aware of unconscious bias is the first step to mitigating it.

Then, you need to build a hiring process based on Objective Assessment, with four key stages: Observe, Record, Classify, then Evaluate.

Observe

A candidate’s behaviour is the sum of what they say and do. This is really only the tip of the iceberg, through which we understand their emotions, attitudes, beliefs, experiences and skills.

Assessors need to pay close attention to a candidate’s behaviour at each point of the interview process. The key is observing, whilst reserving judgement to avoid jumping to conclusions, or any of the other common mistakes interviewers make (figure 1.)

Record

Make relevant, factual notes of what the interviewee says, recording their speech verbatim rather than summarising or interpreting their speech. Avoid making a judgement about their response in the moment – this often leads to unconscious bias creeping in.

Classify

Based on your written evidence, numerically score the individual against each of the core competencies you are assessing them for. Try and think about each one in isolation rather than thinking about whether the collective sum means you’re going to put them through to the next stage or hire them.

Evaluate

Decide whether you want to hire them from the evidence.

Every organisation has a responsibility to proactively try and remove bias from their hiring processes. However, it’s not just the right thing to do – it’s also a better way to do business. Having a diverse workforce has proven links to financial performance and retention.

If you are an organisation looking to scale in the right way, and would like to share tips on what worked, we’d love to speak to you. Please reach out to Claudia at claudia.cohen@lafosse.com.

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