The Wonder Women in Tech

A woman’s guide to kicking ass in a man’s world

Getting a promotion at your job is usually something worth celebrating, meaning more job security, more bonuses, more decision-making power, among many other perks. However, that is not always the case, especially if you happen to be a black, hijab-wearing woman working in the technology sector.

When Nasira Yassin started working for the National Health Service (NHS) while studying Information Technology (IT) at Plymouth University, she took an administrative role, “like any woman, sitting in that role for three or four years doing the same routine job.” Upon graduation, she moved on to Business Support Management in the emergency department, where her work progression was discouraged time and time again because of senior managers citing “cuts and low budgets.”

Confident in her data analyst skills, Yassin approached the respective department manager, breezily completed a one-day shadowing and landed the new job. She eventually advanced to being an IT business service manager. However, while Yassin might have appeared as if she was thriving on the outside, a storm was brewing inside her. At this point, she was the only woman in the male-dominated department – never mind being “black, scarfed, Muslim” – and it was taking a toll on her.

“The discrimination gets harder the more senior you become and the more difficult it is to progress further. They are not used to people of colour, or educated and strong women. If there are two vastly different interviewees, there is a bigger chance that the white man gets the job even though they do not have the right skills. That is the reality,” says Yassin.

“They hire and promote people they feel comfortable with – someone they can go to the pub with or go out for a cigarette with, rather than someone who doesn’t drink and smoke,” she adds.

The 36-year-old Somali woman is certainly not speaking from paranoia, a shortage of self-confidence or a lack of requisite qualifications. A survey conducted by Geeky Girl with a total of 96 respondents, all of whom are women working within technology sectors around the world, found that the majority do not believe that women have as many opportunities as men today in the industry.

Our study explored the potential challenges that women might face working in technology, such as the gender pay gap, work-life balance and the glass ceiling (an unseen barrier that keeps women and ethnic minorities from progressing in their career), as well as the steps organisations should take to ensure more diversity. Our research found that 65 per cent of women feel that the biggest challenge working in technology is the lack of fellow women in the workplace, followed by 58 per cent of women who struggle with gender stereotyping or overt hostility from their male counterparts.

Cordelia Chui, GINX Esports TV’s community manager and one of the UK’s top players of online collectible card video game Hearthstone, is no stranger to any of these challenges: “As a female gamer who has played multiplayer games online since nine years old, I have experienced a wide spectrum of harassment from other gamers – be it teammates, opponents or audiences – both on the Internet and in real life. From tolerable microaggressions, to outright gendered insults specifically tailored to the fact that I’m a woman.”

The testosterone-heavy technology industry has been programmed to not only tolerate discriminative behaviour against women, but to actively alienate them and drive them out of the sector. For instance, the gender pay gap still very much exists today: women made an average of 20 per cent less than men working in science and engineering in both England and mainland Europe in 2017, a salary survey carried out by the New Scientist and science recruitment specialists, SRG, has found.

It is no wonder that despite the fact that more women than men are earning university degrees today, the fairer sex make up only 13 per cent of board members and 17 per cent of senior executives in leading technology companies, another report released by Inclusive Boards last December has shown.

Why Safe Spaces Can Drive Equality

With their voices routinely ignored and their vast amounts of potential repeatedly shoved aside in the workplace, women have resorted to creating safe spaces for themselves to innovate and close the gender gap in technology.

After speaking at an IT event for the Somali community last January, where she emphasised the need for more representation, Yassin decided to take her own advice to heart and take matters into her own hands. She quit her nine-to-five job at the NHS, after working there for nearly a decade, and set up Quiq Inspire last December. A London-based company offering IT courses for women and girls, Quiq Inspire strives to empower those who wish to pick up basic computer skills and basic IT troubleshooting, as well as the already tech-savvy who are looking to keep up with the ever-changing digital media scene.

“In the Somali community, many people expect you to end up in the kitchen if you’re a woman. Even if there are supportive parents, many girls are not confident within themselves, so they need inspiring and encouragement,” says Yassin.

“We’re also reaching out to mothers and older women with language barriers, who feel intimidated by technology or are judged by others when they express their desire to learn, as well as to young girls who work in administrative roles and want to develop their skills in data and go into the ‘technician’ side of things,” she explains.

When it comes to safe spaces in the gaming community, Chui says that the growth of eSports among women “needs to start at a grassroots level”: at women-only tournaments. While women-only leagues remain a controversial issue as they arguably stimulate further segregation, Chui believes that they are an effective, temporary catalyst to promote diversity in the male-dominated industry: “By encouraging more women to participate in a safe space where they don’t have to be intimidated by being thrust into the top level of a competitive field, and by raising visibility of existing women gamers, it helps to spread the message to other girls and women that they are welcome in the scene.”

However, equipping women with the necessary technical skills and surrounding them with familiar faces is one thing, but giving them the confidence to strut into an industry so determined to trip them over is another. In Geeky Girl’s survey, 61 per cent of our respondents advised women pursuing a technological career to seek connections at various events, while 56 per cent also advocated for mentorship.

Yassin, who had a mentor both at university and at work, and who is “open to mentoring people” now, believes that the latter is highly essential: “You need someone who can say that you can do it. Sometimes it is just that little thing that takes you further in life. It’s very important to have a mentor in IT, especially when you’re starting out, because you don’t know where you want to end up, and a mentor can guide you in the right direction.”

Positive affirmations and stereotype debunking have a huge impact on one’s successes, says physicist Dr Jessica Wade. As one of the two women behind the crowdfunding campaign to bring Angela Saini’s ‘Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research that’s Rewriting the Story’ into every state school in the UK, Dr Wade is passionate about improving diversity within science by uncovering hidden potential in brilliant, but unconfident, girls.

“Men have always outnumbered women in disciplines like physics and engineering, in spite of girls outperforming boys when they choose science and maths subjects at GCSE and A-Level. This isn’t a case of talent or interest, but because society has nonsensical views about what careers boys and girls should be pursuing,” says the research associate at Imperial College London.

“Reading Inferior taught me that there is nothing biological or psychological that makes boys better scientists and engineers, or girls better housewives and secretaries. It showed me how easy it is for facts to be distorted in science, because the people who are in charge cling on to their biased, old-fashioned opinions,” she adds.

Dr Wade urges technology giants to reconsider their outdated patterns: “We need to push these companies to think about how they can develop their staff so underrepresented minorities are given the same responsibilities as their white, male counterparts. Stop paying lip service to diversity initiatives and actually do something about it.”