Startup News

ACS Women’s Day Event – How To Fix Our Industry.

Marcus Holmes
Marcus Holmes

The Australian Computer Society – Women’s Division held an event last week for International Women’s Day, and I went along to witness for Startup News. It was a great little event, six ladies talking about whatever they want to an audience of slightly geeky ladies and gents in a friendly, supportive environment. After the formal discussion we had a bit of informal chat as a group and then it all broke up into the usual networking. Very fun, full of laughter, and I’m glad I went.

The irrepressible Lainey Weiser talking about pertinent issues of the day
The irrepressible Lainey Weiser talking about pertinent issues of the day

I’ve been struggling with how to write this up for a week. I was going to write it up in the usual local-paper-covers-local-event-for-local-people style. With some nice photos of people looking happy. I even took the photos. Then I wondered if I even should write it up. On the surface it has nothing to do with Startups and precious little to do with Computers. How does six ladies talking about whatever they want to talk about matter to us?

That one hit me a bit. How does six ladies talking about whatever they want to talk about matter to tech startups? It’s been rolling around in my head for a week, my intuition telling me it’s important but my logical code-monkey side unable to see why.

If it was six blokes talking about whatever they want, would that matter to tech startups? Not really, no, unless they were talking about tech startups. But then, both the tech scene and the startup scene is full of blokes talking about tech startups, so most tech/startup events we go to is actually x number of blokes talking about tech startups. So yes, probably, we’d cover it and it’d be normal.

But six ladies talking about everything from following their passions in their career, through the art of dating, to knitting, how does that work?

I’m beginning to get it now, a train of thought that I’d like to share with you. We know that women are massively under-represented in both tech and startup. And that this is a problem because we need balance and diversity to be relevant. How is your B2C startup going to grok your market if 55% of your market is female but only 5% of your employees are female? Every single study done on diversity in teams has shown that more diverse teams perform better, and often much better. This is a known problem, and there are a number of initiatives going to try and solve it. But all of those initiatives are trying to integrate women into existing organisations and structures which are mostly male-dominated and oriented around their current membership; almost all male.

With me so far?

If you’re firing up the comments box to tell me how I’m wrong already, then read a bit more just so you get the full horror.

Because we’re not listening. It’s pretty simple. How do you make your startup attractive to customers? First, you listen to your customers, and I mean *really* listen to whatever they have to say. Same logic applies. We can’t correct the gender balance in our organisations without first listening to women, which to my knowledge we’ve been spectacularly bad at.

So to get more women into both tech and startups, what we need to do first is shut up and listen. This event was actually ground-breaking (from my point of view, I’m sure I’m being sluggishly stupid coming this late to this realisation). We need more of this. More things where we tell women they have the floor and they have the mic in a supportive environment and show them they can talk about whatever they want and we will listen..

I have no ideas about where to take this, I’d appreciate any comments and ideas you have. But I’m intensely grateful for being invited to an event which has opened my mind to new thoughts on an old problem. I really hope the ACS run more of these and more people attend. I think it might actually be vital for our whole industry.

Marjolein Towler and Michelle Sandford - bastions of the Perth women's tech community and all-round shiny happy people.
Marjolein Towler and Michelle Sandford – bastions of the Perth women’s tech community and all-round shiny happy people.

Leave your comments below, I will reply, I want to know what you think.

 

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Marcus Holmes

Marcus Holmes

Gentleman Technologist and co-founder of Startup News. His vision has made //SN a sustainable media cheerleader for the startup community. Former CEO of Phnom Penh Post, he can be found somewhere in S.E. Asia coding away...
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