What is facing the next wave of female technical leaders?

By Jemima Bunbury

Being amongst the buzzing crowd at the Women Who Build event, it would surprise you to hear that this audience were part of just a 26% minority of women who work in technology.

Despite the increasing conversation about female representation in tech, according to one statistic the gender imbalance is worse than it was 35 years ago – whilst 35% of women worked in tech in 1984, that number has sunk to just 32% today, and this number only decreases as you move up in seniority. 50% of women abandon tech careers before the age of 35, creating a dearth of women in senior leadership positions. Turning to the venture ecosystem, women-led start-ups are also disadvantaged, receiving just 1.9% of venture capital in 2022. This is perhaps no surprise when less than 15% of VC partners are women.

This is not only a problem for female opportunity and representation, but also for business; gender-diverse companies are 48% more likely to outperform their competitors and investment in start-ups with at least one female founder outperformed all-male founding teams by 63%.

Recognising the challenges faced by female founders and women in tech and the opportunity in supporting female tech leaders, firstminute capital's Head of Talent, Liv Price founded “Women Who Build,” co-hosted with Kindred VC, Atomico and Google Cloud to provide a forum and community for the minority of women in tech.

The audience gathered to hear from a panel of women on their varied paths into tech, dealing with imposter syndrome, and how to support other women in tech. This was followed by intimate break-out discussions on navigating technical careers and founding your own company.

Our panellists:

Marta Jasinka

Currently CTO of Launchpad a green energy corporate accelerator, and former CTO of Bloom & Wild and Moo, Marta has been in roles from Head of Engineering through to CPO for 7 years, having started her career in back-end development for mobile games.

Flora Devlin

With a background in data science at Intercom Flora joined Monzo to lead their Data Science team and over the space of 6 months found herself promoted to Head of Product and then CPO. She now runs her own coaching practice for product leaders in early stage tech companies.

Gerisha Nadaraju

Beginning her career as an Accountant at PWC and later investment banking. Gerisha pivoted into tech after completing her MBA. Having secured a role in Business Operations at Truelayer, Gerisha now works as Head of Product Operations at Dojo – a payments tech company. On the side, Gerisha runs “Products Ops Podcast” and she’s started a new one called “The Other Half Podcast”, which aims to shine a light on diverse voices in the nascent field of Product Operations.

Lara Suzuki

Fascinated with tech from a young age, Lara would tear apart her mechanical toys to see how they worked. This curiosity paid off. Lara started university at age 15 and has kept touch with academia through her role as a professor of Computer Science at UCL, alongside her role as a Technical Director at Google in the office of the CTO, and as a visiting researcher at NASA.

Sharing their unfiltered career stories and the personal ethos’ that have guided their decision-making, shared experiences and common themes quickly emerged:

Imposter syndrome and lack of senior representation:

With only 10% of women in tech working in a female-majority team, simply being a woman in tech could lead many to develop a sense of being an outsider.[i] For many, this heightens a sense of imposter syndrome which is already known to afflict 75% of women.[ii] Defined as a sense of unfounded self-doubt, incompetence, and being underqualified, imposter syndrome can have insidious impact, even leading some to take themselves out of the running for career progression.

Panellist Flora Devlin experienced this first-hand when she rapidly progressed from head of Monzo’s Data Science team to Head of Product and then CPO within the space of 6 months. Feeling underprepared for the swift ascent, she almost turned down the opportunity until she was convinced by a series of conversations with colleagues and senior leadership. Finding herself at the top table, she quickly recognised that she had been unnecessarily dissuaded.

As Gerisha found herself in meetings with senior leadership, she began to recognise that they didn’t always know that much more, and on balance there was no reason why she couldn’t be a person in that room. She started questioning why she had been taking herself out of the game, whilst her male colleagues were pushing themselves forward. Experiences of this kind were echoed throughout the audience, with participants sharing stories of having turned down senior job offers or choosing not to apply to senior positions that they were approached for, out of fear that they didn’t meet 100% of the job requirements. 

Providing a fair platform for other women:

Panellist Marta Jasinka credits other women in tech for helping forge the path for her success. Joining Launchpad under a female CTO, Marta thrived under her leadership, and seeing a woman in a senior role, was able to envision a future for herself in tech. Little did she know that two years later she would be taking up the CTO position herself. Her talent had been recognised and she was mentored and prepared, making her the obvious choice for the role on her former CTO’s departure.

Gerisha also recognised the importance of hearing from relatable people in senior positions. Inspired by her experience as one of the rare women of colour in tech, in a team of one, and running a function that was relatively new in the space, Gerisha launched her podcast ProductOps to shine a light on diverse voices in product management and operations.

All the panellists touch on ways in which they have sought to support other women and diverse voices in tech, whether through dedicating their careers to coaching and empowerment like Flora, or through tactical actions.

Lara is regularly approached to feature on panels or in articles and will frequently recommend other women in her network instead who are better suited. More generally, having been diagnosed with ADHD and autism, Lara sets an inspiring example for any woman or neurodiverse individual in her clear career and academic success at Google, NASA, Oracle and UCL.

No one route to the top:

An anecdote shared by Marta echoed in each of the stories of the panellists: whilst many refer to climbing the ladder, she prefers to think of careers as climbing a mountain – there are multiple routes to the top, and there’s a whole range of summits to choose from.

Hearing others’ career stories retrospectively, it’s easy to assume that success and fulfilment was destined, but the panellists current positions were never a certainty. Themes such as job switching from tech to product because of more access to progression were discussed. As were being open-minded to roles in order to access top tech companies before rotating into a role you prefer.

As the audience dispersed into break-out discussions the room hummed with conversation.

The themes surfaced by the panellists had sparked conversation and advice-seeking. Whilst it’s disheartening to see that the challenges faced by the panellists continue to resonate so widely, the collaborative approach of the organisations behind the event and the almost conspiratorial support of the women in the room demonstrated that even as the minority, together these women were a force to be reckoned with.

Citations:

[1] TechNation

[1] Accenture and Girls Who Code

[1] TechCrunch

[1] Pitchbook

[1] FirstRound

[1] CIO

[1]KPMG