IT TAKES A GUIDING LIGHT TO FIND A WAY THROUGH THE DARKNESS

by David Braue

For all the talk about how to solve the diversity crisis in IT, it is easy to forget that the industry has suffered skills gaps before and, as Leonie Valentine remembers from her own experience, become stronger for it.

Valentine was one of many women who joined the tech industry in the late 1990s, and “sort of fell into technology” as the industry raced to recruit enough staff to address challenges such as the dot-com explosion and the Y2K Bug. She believes today’s skills-starved tech executives should learn from the strategies adopted by their counterparts two decades ago.

Valentine is a former Kaz, Telstra, CSL and Google executive. She was Australia Post’s executive general manager for customer experience and digital technology and now manages a tech-heavy team of more than 70 people. She told the recent ATSE Activate conference, “We had such a dire skills shortage that we were attracting a lot of women midcareer and retraining them.”

Her organisation had an influx of mid-career nurses, teachers and “people who just decided they wanted to be in tech.” It invested heavily in retraining those women to become testers, project managers, project co-ordinators and take on other roles.

“Over time, we actually got them into the higher-skilled positions,” said Valentine, adding that her current organisation maintains pathways from frontline roles “into what we would call the support office.”

She said a few technology team members had come from those frontline roles. “We’ve trained them up based on their desires. We can support their education, and help them through.”

This approach to hiring differs from many companies that evaluate technical candidates based on lists of security and other certifications. However, Valentine said, the flexibility of women and other diverse candidates to grow along with their employers will be crucial in helping today’s companies surmount the challenges of widespread skills shortages.

“Tech really needs a makeover,” she said, flagging the importance of constant vigilance by managers to ensure that diversity objectives are integrated into everyday practice.

“If we’re going to embrace the next generation of STEM leaders we also need to think and act very differently about how we embrace talent. I hold my team to account, to the hiring principles. If I’m seeing there are too many women and too many people from minorities being pushed out of our process too early, I ask questions.”

Mentorship Is Moving The Needle

Bringing more non-technical women into the industry will be crucial to addressing the lingering inequalities identified in the government’s recently updated STEM Equity Monitor, which found the number of women enrolling in STEM courses at university had increased by 24 percent between 2015 and 2020.

Despite the optimism such growth might engender, the cold, hard reality is that women make up just 36 percent of enrolments in university STEM courses and only 27 percent of the STEM workforce. And new graduates enter an industry where just 15 percent of women work in STEM-qualified occupations, and face an average gender pay gap of $26,784.

As Valentine and a myriad other leaders have found, helping women navigate these many challenges requires a commitment to diversity along with a mentor and a network to support their career development and their personal growth in what is often a foreign space.

Efforts to change recruitment strategies have helped CSIRO’s Data61 division dramatically improve the diversity of its new hires over the past 18 months, according to Stela Solar, director of CSIRO’s National Artificial Intelligence Centre (NAIC).

Women now comprise 55 percent of Data61’s new hires, Solar said, thanks to the success of initiatives that systematically retrained managers on the interviewing and hiring of new talent.

According to Solar, there is a lot of unconscious or conscious bias throughout the process, from how employers view resumés to how interviewers communicate with candidates in initial meetings.

“Contributing to our success in being able to attract 55 percent women was retraining managers and really focusing on manager capabilities,” she said. “So we cut through the differences and we find the talent.”

Mentorship has been game-changing for the skilled migrants who have been important in bolstering Australia’s inadequate pipeline of domestically produced workers, and for Engineers Australia CEO Romily Madew, close collaboration with such workers has made all the difference.

By engaging directly with skilled migrants working across a broad range of roles, Engineers Australia has been able to work closely with them to develop career pathways, internship programs and familiarisation programs and provide introductions and networks to help jump-start their careers.

“When you have industry working hand-in-hand with employers and connecting skilled migrants straight into opportunities we’re finding that, once they’ve finished these opportunities, they’re more likely to get a job, either within that organisation or another. There are pathways, but they need to be amplified,” Madew said.

Mentoring Is Not Just About Mentoring

Amplifying those pathways remains a highly individualised pursuit with each manager or industry veteran finding their own comfort zone when it comes to nurturing and supporting their mentees.

However, mentees need more than simply having a mentor imparting advice if they are to succeed.

Corie Hawkins, London-based head of customer engineering with the UK/I retail team with Google

Cloud said during a recent webinar that there was a wide gulf between mentorship and sponsorship: the latter entails actively helping promoting the careers of the women being mentored, but many mentors still see their role as merely advisory.

“In a lot of these forums we focus a lot on mentoring and say, ‘it would be good if only women had someone in a role they could look up to, and see themselves in, and learn from’,” she said.

“However, it’s not everything. A mentor will talk with you, and impart their wisdom, but it’s a one-way relationship in some ways, where you get someone a little bit more senior and a little bit more experienced talking through things.”

According to Hawkins, the true value for women comes when mentors take the relationship a little further. “Sponsorship is where that magic happens. It is where you have someone senior saying ‘I have an opportunity, and I know someone who’s really well suited for this opportunity. Let’s line them up for it’.

“I do think women are over mentored and under sponsored. If you think about it critically, who’s talking about you when you’re not in the room? Who’s thinking about the next opportunities for you, and opening those doors? It’s something I don’t think we’ve unlocked yet.”

For all their good intentions, many managers fall into the trap of having white males mentoring women, simply because those males comprise the majority of management. But it is valuable for companies to also consider ‘reverse mentoring’ in which those managers become the mentees to people from diverse backgrounds who can provide important perspectives on the challenges other employees may be facing.

“The mentors who are senior executives in an organisation need reverse mentoring to see what it feels like to be an employee there, and what else they can change to encourage people from diverse backgrounds,” explained Dr Edwin Joseph, president of the Multicultural Council of the Northern Territory, during a recent Australian Computer Society panel discussion.

“We need to see a good many more people from culturally diverse backgrounds in managerial roles,” he continued. “Because that will really change the actual organisational culture.”

“I do think women are over mentored and under sponsored. If you think about it critically, who’s talking about you when you’re not in the room? Who’s thinking about the next opportunities for you, and opening those doors? It’s something I don’t think we’ve unlocked yet.”

Whichever way the mentor-mentee relationship is structured, keeping it mutually beneficial is not always easy, admits Geetha Gopal, Singapore-based head of infrastructure projects delivery and digital transformation with Panasonic Asia Pacific.

As a self-confessed ‘bossy’ woman who found herself the only female in a team of 150 people, and earning half as much as the men “because that’s how it is supposed to be,” Gopal was regularly told to tone down her opinions and apologise to customers “for no mistake of mine.”

She told the recent FutureCIO conference, “There were mentors for me among those men who saw my potential and saw how consistent I was in my delivery, and saw how I was made to apologise when I was not wrong.

“They were my allies, and over a period of time they handed me the biggest projects, and now I’ve handled the biggest data centre migrations in Singapore. It’s about how consistent you are, how you take feedback seriously, and how you continue to prove you can continue to break down these barriers.”