Celebrating Our Sistahs Tech-ing what is ours

Black women face barriers in the tech industry, but some sistahs are doing it for themselves.

By

Vic

Motune

WHILE THE tech industry claims to value merit where talent is rewarded, the reality is very different for women of colour.

Despite debates about diversity and inclusion, black women continue to face numerous obstacles in their efforts to enter the industry.

A recent report by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and Coding Black Females (CBF), a non-profit aimed at opening up opportunities for black women in the tech industry, found that whilst black women make up 1.8 per cent of the UK workforce, they only make up 0.7 per cent of IT professionals. That means for black women to be truly represented in IT there would need to be 20,000 more within the sector in addition to the 12,000 already working in IT to fill the gap.

Nnenna Stevenson, a product manager and business analyst, pictured inset below, landed a dream tech job with a leading corporation after completing her university studies in Nigeria. However, the challenge of adjusting to a different workplace culture as the only black woman on her team nearly derailed her fledgling career.

She told The Voice: “In this particular job I was the only black person on the team and the only woman apart from my manager.

“I pretty much hit the ground running but then there were a lot of conflicts with my manager. She began to pick up on small mistakes in my work and spent more time criticising me than the male team members.”

Nnenna was later hospitalised due to work-related stress.

Despite this, her manager questioned her illness and demanded that Stevenson send her pictures with an intravenous drip to prove she was actually in hospital.

“At the time I didn’t really understand it as harassment or bullying,” she recalls. “I only knew that my managers were giving me a hard time.”

A turnaround came when the company she worked with merged with a Canadian firm.

“After the merger they replaced this manager, and the person who took over her role gave me so many compliments about my work and was so supportive. It made me think about why my previous manager had given me such a hard time.”

Stevenson’s experience is not unique. She was one of the speakers at a recent event in London called The Experiences of Women of Colour in Tech.

The panel debate, held by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and sponsored by BCS Women, aimed to highlight the challenges women of colour in the tech industry face.

Over 350 black women were polled in the BCS/CBF report and many respondents felt they had to work twice as hard as their white counterparts, and were required to have more skills and experience than other candidates applying for jobs.

Several of those questioned felt they had to prove themselves constantly as they did not fit the ‘tech bro’ archetype. Others talked about facing microaggressions as the only black women in predominantly white teams.

Inclusive

The report recommended making interview and recruitment practices more inclusive and considering a variety of routes into the industry, promoting flexible working options, reviewing the inclusivity of recruitment algorithms, and conducting outreach events in the local community.

It also called for senior tech executives to develop achievable career progression pathways to increase the number of black female IT professionals in senior positions.

For Stevenson, this is a key step that provides much-needed visibility.

“One big issue is we don’t see enough people of colour as role models or mentors who can help us see the possibility of a tech career,” she says.

Kavita Kapoor, an awardwinning technologist focusing on artificial intelligence, believes that in order to make systemic change, it’s important to change the way that businesses are structured.

She believes the tech industry should follow the lead of the European Union to demand equal representation of men and women on company boards, and go further with representation from diverse backgrounds.

“If you are a company working with customers from different communities or you happen to be an organisation based in the UK but working across borders with people from diverse backgrounds, why shouldn’t your board or investors be representative of that?”

However, it is not only female tech industry employees who face substantial obstacles.

Recent re search looking into how venture capital –a form of financing given to technology startups – is invested according to race and gender makes for depressing reading.

A 2020 report by Extend Ventures revealed that between 2009 and 2019, just 0.24 per cent of venture capital investment in the UK went to black entrepreneurs, just 38 businesses in total.

Out of those, only one black female founder raised ‘Series A’ funding across the 10-year period.

Despite the odds, and with limited funding, diverse entrepreneurs are building thriving businesses in various tech sectors, including fintech, legal tech and proptech. backed these own its compa

These founders are also increasingly making a difference in the emerging field of “tech for good”, where technology is used to bring about positive social change.

It’s a trend that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Google, which has backed these business owners through its Black Founders Fund.

Other companies such as TikTok, Dell Technologies and Deepmind are among those that have supported events like Black Tech Fest, which showcases technological innovation by entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds.

One such entrepreneur is London-based Giselle Frederick, pictured inset. She recently launched Sonaar, a platform that matches grassroots community organisations with diaspora professionals so that they can collaborate on projects that contribute to the development of black communities.

WORK TO BE DONE:

fficial statistics have shown that while black women make up per cent of the workforce, they only make up per cent of IT professionals photo hristina orillo nsplash

Frederick is cautiously optimistic about major companies who are actively showing an interest in supporting diverse female entrepreneurs.

“There’s been a lot of programmes and initiatives trying to increase the numbers of minority and female coders and programmers or people with skills in areas such as artificial intelligence and data sourcing, for example,” she says.

Disparity

“As a result of this, we’re seeing more and more people in the black community launch tech start-ups, certainly compared to five years ago. But there’s still a disparity between who gets to participate.”

Frederick continues: “Just because there’s more data being found on black tech start-ups and programmes to encourage them, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s going to be more successful black start-ups.

“These companies may be producing good technology, but I think there’s still a gap in understanding the black experience among the people providing the funding. We are on a good trajectory, we’re heading in the right direction, we just need to speed things up.”

Celebrating Our Sistahs