Despite being at the heart of an industry dominated by men, Connect is led by two female Managing Directors, Carole Boardman and Janet Symes and has been for over twenty years now.
However, the technology industry generally is plagued with a serious gender imbalance problem. With women holding just 25% of all tech jobs and only one in four organisations across the UK employing one or more females within their senior management teams, it seems that females are either reluctant or having difficulty launching careers in the technology sector.
Balancing the gender books
Despite positive governmental campaigns such as ‘Your Life‘ and ‘#NotJustForBoys‘ being launched in a bid to combat this imbalance, further changes are still needed to overturn female misconceptions about the tech industry. So, how can the industry encourage more women into technology-based roles?
As part of a bold new vlog series, Sarah Lawson Johnston and Tracy Fry, European Managing Director and Senior Product Manager at ad-tech company, Mediaocean, spoke exclusively to The Wall about the misjudged perceptions and immediate future of women in technology-based roles.
Fry explained that from her experience of working in product development, the more diverse a team is, the more likely that team will be to successfully approach problems and come up with solutions and ideas in a diverse manner.
Lawson Johnston believes it “just makes sense” to have an even gender split in a technical team. She said: “If you look at consumers, half of them are female, so it would make sense to have half the people trying to target them to be female from an agency perspective.”
When it comes to the types of roles that men and women can take up within the technology sector, Lawson Johnston explained this remit is now beginning to widen. She said: “Within the industry I think there are a lot of different technical roles for both men and women. There are strategic positions within technical teams, technical writers and product coders to name just a few.
“The key is making a technical role part of the business. A real mixed bag of skill-sets are required to really flesh out those technical roles.”
Moving forward, Lawson Johnston believes the opportunities available to both men and women within the technology sector will be data-driven roles primarily, but also stressed the importance of the industry instilling the appropriate confidence within eager individuals in order to pursue them.
Clearly Connect already walk the walk when it comes to this issue and we’re proud to be different but we’d always advocate for more women in technology.
Connect is a Digital Technology Specialist to a large number of major public and private sector clients. We offer bespoke web design and app development, data management and secure hosting that deliver tangible benefits for our clients.
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