How to create a culture of belonging and why it matters

by David Braue

Pervasive ‘micro-aggressions’ feed a toxic culture that can stymie equality efforts

Australia’s federal government wasted no time highlighting the positive findings of its second STEM Equity Monitor upon its release in May, suggesting that women were slowly but steadily increasing their presence in STEM-industry jobs and management positions.

The proportion of “key management personnel and senior managers who are women”, the report noted, has increased steadily from 18% in 2016, to 23% last year. And, overall, 28% of women in STEM-qualified industries are women – up from 24% in 2016.

While the current workforce figures suggest that slow and steady change in workforce culture is providing new opportunities for women in STEM industries, behind the numbers’ plodding growth lies an uncomfortable truth: if current growth trends continue, STEM industries won’t reach gender parity until the middle of the 2040s – by which time many of the women in this year’s study will be ready to retire.

To compensate for that natural attrition, the skillsdevelopment pipeline needs to grow at a much healthier rate – but there are few encouraging signs that Australia’s pipeline of incoming female talent is anywhere near mature enough to compensate.

The proportion of women in university STEM degrees increased by just 2% between 2015 and 2019, for example, with women comprising just 22% of VET and university enrolments.

Furthermore, many of those students won’t persist long enough to secure the management positions they would need to keep the STEM Equity Monitor

graph on its present trajectory. Indeed, the report found, men were 1.8 times more likely than women to still be in a STEM job five years after graduating.

For cybersecurity – a STEM industry that has an even more pressing skills gap than most – the realities painted by the report mean that companies simply cannot depend on Australia’s schools and universities to supply enough trained female STEM graduates to close the gap for them.

Consequentially, companies that recognise the value of gender equality are going to have to take matters into their own hands – and as women continue to shout from the rooftops, fixing hostile or just plain unhelpful company culture is a good place to start.

CULTURE CLUB

Building the right culture often makes the difference between wanting to be diverse and actually becoming that way.

Although some companies have made tremendous strides in the right direction, many others are still struggling to translate the desire for diversity into action.

Just 27% of attendees at a recent Stone & Chalk webinar on gender equality, for example, said a diverse culture was embedded within their organisation – with 18% reporting that their organisation was engaging with stakeholders and 45% saying their companies have yet to get past the ‘awareness’ stage.

Asked about the biggest challenges to gender diversity in their workplaces, just one-quarter of the audience said their organisations were “all over it”. More worryingly, 38% said employees aren’t reporting “bad cultural behaviours”, 25% don’t understand the business impact if gender diversity is ignored, and 13% still don’t take the idea of gender diversity seriously.

Those figures don’t surprise Linda Lai, a full-stack developer with Zendesk who believes that – behind the veneer of equality messaging and feel-good messaging – many companies are still riddled with the lingering “micro-aggressions” that, she says, can compromise corporate culture by tainting everyday office interactions.

“Much of these bad behaviours come down to microaggressions, or more minor and subtle behaviours and comments around inclusive and exclusive behaviour,” Lai explained.

“I don’t think it’s malicious,” she said, “but I think there are just people out there who genuinely have lived experiences that don’t make them aware of these types of biases and these types of behaviours.”

Fixing corporate culture is beyond the capacity of any one individual, Lai said, and it’s important not to try to fight battle all on your own.

“It’s very difficult to take on the emotional labour and burden of having to monitor these behaviours,” she said, “and to be in a situation where you see or hear these behaviours.”

“I don’t believe it’s up to the person who’s part of that minority group to always speak up,” she added. “It really is a shared responsibility to speak up about this – and it’s important to learn to manage your own sanity, and to choose when and where you want to bring those things up.”

“It’s totally OK to say ‘I’m not prepared to have this fight today’.”

DRAW THE LINE – OR ERASE IT

Michelle Price, CEO of cybersecurity industry development firm AustCyber, has experienced the insidious challenges of exclusive culture first-hand over years working in the Australian public service (APS).

“There were times when, being a senior person within national security, where not only are you challenged emotionally,” she said during a recent National Press Club appearance, “but being a woman in those circumstances is held against you.”

“There is a cultural dynamic here that doesn’t match

what we hold true to our values in broader society – and it’s a very, very strange thing to put your finger on because it’s not just one thing.”

Yet even an organisation as large and inertial as the APS is slowly pushing in the right direction: “there have been huge amounts of concerted, focused effort put into changing this,” she said, citing the steady climb in representation within the cybersecurity industry.

Just five years ago, Price said, just 4% of cybersecurity industry jobs were held by women – and that had increased to 29% now. Recalling a situation where she was sitting on an expert conference panel – and was approached afterwards by a man who asked why she felt she was qualified to be on the panel – Scott said many women fight the same issues in struggling to be taken seriously in environments where corporate culture still has not accepted them.

“When those things happen time and time again,

“We’re estimating that with the graduates that will come out over the next couple of years, we’re going to get pretty close to 40% within the next five years,” she said. “But whether or not we can retain women within these fields is a completely different thing – and it comes back to culture.”

Although many women have become used to shrugging off divisive language and microaggressions, as Cloudflare community manager Gretchen Scott put it, “having to qualify yourself, day in and day out, is just exhausting.” what you’re actually hearing is ‘you don’t belong here’,” she says, “and ‘what you’re saying is not worth me hearing’. And you start to internalise that a little because it’s just tiresome.”

While changing co-workers’ behaviour can feel overwhelming, technology can play a small part in changing company culture. One regular Slack group that Scott uses, for example, has been set up with a bot that automatically flags exclusive language and raises an alert.

“If anyone writes ‘guys’ in it, it pops up with a link that says ‘we don’t use that [word]’,” she explains. “It takes

all the emotional labour off the people around you – and you’re just sent off without feeling like you’ve been told off by someone. You’re just educated.”

Small wins like that may seem like spitting in the winds of cultural inertia, but it’s all part of shifting left when it comes to diversity – changing culture by embedding diversity-positive behaviours right across the organisation.

Leader advocacy NationSwell offers suggestions for making this happen – ranging from rotating representation on corporate committees and encouraging the active questioning of corporate policies and decisions, to proactively soliciting feedback from younger employees and developing a shared terminology that “accurately reflects your organisation’s values and goals and allows your team to align around language”.

Another transformative force is allyship, in which executives proactively engage with affinity groups and employee networks, giving them the resources and support to help them become a natural element of the company culture – rather than an oppositional force that is seen to be challenging it. Women shouldn’t have to feel like they are fighting the gender diversity war by themselves – and it is incumbent on leaders to remove that mantle so those

“When those things happen time and time again, what you’re actually hearing is ‘you dont belong here. And what you’re saying is not worth me hearing’. And you start to internalise that a little because it’s just tiresome.” -Gretchen Scott, Cloudflare community manager talented women can focus on developing their own skills and just doing their jobs as well as they can. Although the measurement of industry inputs encapsulated in the STEM Equity Monitor suggests the situation is slowly getting better, women shouldn’t need to wait over 20 more years before they are represented equally in cybersecurity and other STEM fields.

COVID-era disruption has created the perfect environment for allyship to thrive, Terell Sterling, CEO of entrepreneurship firm Go Paladin, said during a panel session at the recent Databricks Data+AI Summit. Companies that succeed in creating a welcoming and supportive culture – now – will reap the benefits from decreased employee conflict and more widespread positive engagement.

“It’s interesting how the conversation has changed,” he said. “We have constantly put it on people of colour, women, and the other group to level the playing field – but we need to figure out a better way, where we’re not putting it on the backs of the people that are feeling oppressed.”

“We’re putting the onus on the executives to come to the table with something that can actually work for their teams, and for their corporation. And it’s the perfect time to be having this shift in the paradigm [and] what it means to truly be an ally – and stand up for those that are being oppressed?”

That’s most easily accomplished through proactive executive involvement, which will be crucial to driving the kind of cultural change necessary to realise major changes in attitude.

To truly succeed, those changes must not be ephemeral: ultimately, the success of companies’ efforts during this transformative time will determine the speed at which they can move the needle towards gender equality – and whether they can keep it there.