Lindy Stephens is not afraid to use the ‘Q’ word: quotas. The Australian managing director of international software company Thoughtworks is perfectly comfortable with the term; given her company has a policy of hiring one female graduate for every male graduate who enters the business.
“Our graduate program has a strict 50/50 ratio. If we hire a man, we hire a woman,” she tells Women’s Agenda. “If we find another man, we say ‘we like you and we really want to hire you, but we need to hire a woman first’.”
Finding women can’t always be easy for the company with around 2300 employees globally, 200 of those in Australia. A recent Harvey Nash CIO survey found that 46% of Australian CIOs don’t believe there are enough qualified female candidates in the IT sector, and 27% of IT teams currently have no women within them. Just 17% of graduates with technology relevant degrees are female.
But Stephens believes women are available, you just need to appeal to them. Thoughtworks has not only introduced its 50/50 quota but a suite of programs to support and promote women.
The Australian office now offers 18 week parental leave at full pay for the primary carer, and two weeks for the secondary carer. It’s a particularly generous incentive when you consider the industry standard – just 64.5% of companies within the information, media and telecommunication sector reporting to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency pay anything at all, and the average period is just nine weeks. At Thoughtworks, there are no waiting periods. Join the company pregnant and you’ll still collect the full benefit.
Thoughtworks still has some work to do at the pointy end of its leadership positions, especially internationally. Just four of the 16-person leader team are female and Stephens is the only woman of its seven country managing directors. Stephens says the company recognises this and is taking measures to address the imbalance. Fourteen women globally are currently being sponsored through an intensive program, receiving direct leadership coaching and development training. Meanwhile, each employee receives a training budget of $2000 a year.
Technology’s a sector that’s long had difficulties attracting women. While high profile names like Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg go a long way to proving there are at least some women in the industry, a small handful of women at the top is not enough to solve the sector’s systemic gender woes.
It’s not just a lack of female graduates that spurs the problem. Stephens believes that the few women entering the sector are more at risk than men of dropping out, often due to its long-hour, late-night culture. Meanwhile, with technology changing so rapidly, women who take maternity leave can often find they’ve quickly fallen behind on the latest trends.
The sector also suffers from its media image: it can be seen as being full of geeks and night owls who enjoy all-night coding sessions. This week’s story regarding a woman who was fired for tweeting the photo of two men she believes were making sexist remarks during a technology conference, wouldn’t help either. Such an industry portrait is not necessarily reflective of what it’s actually like, says Stephens.
However, she does concede she’s become well accustomed to being the only woman in a team and encountered some “interesting behaviour” throughout her technology career. “Some of it simply comes down to sheer numbers. You’re outnumbered. There’s sexist behaviour, there’s conscious bias and there’s unconscious bias,” she says.
For Stephens, and no doubt plenty of other female employees at Thoughtworks, she says it’s refreshing to work in a company where the lack of women in the industry is openly discussed and actively addressed. She’s proud to say the Australian office achieved a 50/50 gender split of all positions across the business last year, not just at the graduate level where the ratio is mandatory.
Perhaps, in an industry like technology, there’s a benefit to mentioning the Q word. At least as a temporary measure