Women in tech
Privitar’s Victoria Normak Victoria Normark recently joined Privitar from Snow Software. As Privitar’s Chief Technology Officer, Victoria oversees the company’s global engineering and technology strategy. Prior to leading engineering at Snow Software, she was a management consultant who helped large bureaucratic businesses transform into modern agile organisations. Based in Stockholm, Normark spends significant time on-location with Privitar’s global engineering teams. We caught up with Victoria to find out about life as a female leader in the channel.
Here’s what Victoria had to say:
What is your background within the tech channel?
I started my professional career as a software developer, and over the years, my role evolved to be a combination of a developer and scrum master. I felt that what you build and how you build it were equally important to the result. I dug in deep for a couple of years focusing on agile and lean software development, then expanded into agile leadership, which is really just mature leadership. To build highly motivated, self-driven, self-sufficient teams, you really need that kind of leadership. So we shouldn’t call it agile leadership, we should call it leadership needed for agile teams. This kind of leadership should be the model, independent of what methodology you use. It’s all about creating a culture of participation, where people actually understand where we’re going by contributing and being involved, rather than by reading it on a powerpoint slide.
It’s very inspiring to hear of a female Chief Technology Officer. Do you feel there are currently enough women being recruited into such roles of leadership within the tech channel? Probably not. For obvious reasons, people are just not seeing a woman in front of them when you say CTO. Even if companies are actively recruiting women, there aren’t that many female candidates, especially at the leadership levels. If we want more women in tech leadership, we need to start much earlier than looking at the CTO level. We need to work with our kids, and increase interest and participation in STEM early, foster that interest as they go through school, and continue to support them as they begin and develop their professional careers. 32
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September 2021
What can the tech channel do to encourage more women to pursue a career in the industry?
I think we are seeing a positive trend. Girls are playing more computer and mobile games now than 5-10 years ago, which can trigger an interest in tech. I recently saw some statistics on applicants for the Masters program in data science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the percentage of women had gone from 7.5 % in 2008 to 19.6 % in 2021. One thing that is concerning to me is that we are not adequately teaching IT as a subject in elementary school, at least not in Sweden. The students know more about IT than the teachers. For example, I heard from my daughter that they had a course in school where they should learn how to program in Python, but the teacher could not explain it to them, so almost everyone was failing. They also have no basic theory about IT, learning things like what the cloud is, how a wifi works, the difference between SaaS and installed software, basic IT security and so on, largely because the teachers themselves don’t have the knowledge base. We need to start early in the process by teaching the teachers, then build in lessons about basics of IT into the standard curriculum. Having fun labs, like programming Lego robots, should be on the agenda too. I think that could be one way to trigger the interest for tech early, especially for girls who might not be exposed to tech in the same way as boys by their parents. IT is changing society drastically, and we don’t do a good enough job teaching it and encouraging interest in elementary school.
What advice can you give to aspiring young women to pursue a career in the channel? Never ever think twice. Just do it. Don’t ever believe that you
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