Update Thursday, March 5, 1.44pm: In light of health and peace-of-mind concerns surrounding COVID-19 rhipe has made the decision to cancel the event until further notice
Cloud software distie rhipe planned to again host a special event in honour of women in IT in Melbourne, ahead of International Women’s Day.
The Women in the Cloud lunch for 2020 was themed as #eachforequal, highlighting the role everyone plays in the advancement of gender equality in the workplace and beyond.
As in past years, rhipe brought together a panel of change advocates and diversity delegates to discuss their experiences and share their ideas for building better organisations.
This year’s panel was intended to include:
- Kate Gaffy, Talent acquisition manager, Tennis Australia
- Inese Kingsmill, Non-executive director, rhipe
- Veronica Micich, Senior project manager, Microsoft
- Brendan Major, Head coach, Essendon Football Club VFLW
- Nathan Wheat, Board member and lead for sponsorship, Victorian ICT for Women
Ahead of the event, CRN spoke to four of the panellists to get their views on breaking down the barriers to more inclusive workplaces in their respective industries, as well as more broadly.
How can organisations create the change needed to build gender-balanced, equal workplaces?
Veronica Micich, Microsoft:
I think that there are a couple of areas that organisations should be looking at, and something that Microsoft has focused on is looking at attitudes in the workplace towards women. Where there is the need for that to be addressed we bring that conversation forward. One of the things that we’ve been doing internally and something we want to extend outside of our organisation is around our champions for change.
Where women are speaking up, that’s fantastic, but because in IT we have a predominantly male workforce, empowering our male champions to be able to speak up and support women’s voices as well has been very important.
If that conversation can be shared more broadly, so it’s not always the same people saying the same thing, we can empower more people to speak up.
Kate Gaffy, Tennis Australia:
One of the key things when you’re trying to attract more females into an organisation is to allow individuals to be what they can see, so I think from a board level and an executive-level it’s really important to have that gender balance there.
A couple of points that then flow on from that are obviously women are going to be attracted to work for the organisations that they can see value women. From there, in terms of recruitment, you're more likely to have a panel that is gender-balanced. So we won’t see people just hiring people like themselves.
I think the other element that really comes into play is having the right policies in place that really support people once they come into the business. And I think there’s a saying, ‘Diversity isn’t just having people invited to the party, it’s inviting them to dance’.
I think that, reflected in the organisation, looks like what the parental leave and flexible leave policies are like. Are there mentoring programs for females to help encourage them to keep striving for more and putting themselves forward? I’ve also seen women’s support groups that connect women throughout a business.
Nathan Wheat, Victorian ICT for Women:
One part is to create the environment in which women feel attracted to working there, internally that’s creating an environment that supports diversity, supports the needs of multiple types of people and interests. Essentially to create an environment that’s attractive to join is how you create an influx of diversity amongst people, gender being one aspect of that.
The other is the retention as well. Once people are in the organisation and you may have diversity, the other necessary thing is inclusiveness to make sure that those representing diverse thinking and background and mindsets are included as part of the machinery of operations as a natural way of working as opposed to those who enter an organisation, feel like they are on the outside, and just leave.
Brendan Major, Essendon Football Club:
It’s unique in each organisation but the important factors that span all organisations are leadership, in terms of what leaders and strategies are put in place around education in equality and effective communication.
Another thing is what are your watercooler activities, or what I call the Wednesday rule, which just asks what an organisation is doing on a daily basis to ensure the culture of a workplace is conducive to gender equality, and that it’s a safe space for people to share their ideas and strategies that they have that can improve gender equality.
What’s the most important first step in catalysing organisation change toward diversity?
Veronica Micich: Change needs to come from the top down. The communication needs to come from the highest point in the organisation, the CEO, and be supported at the board level and through the management teams. You would hope there would be representation at each of those levels too to help support the approach and culture.
Kate Gaffy:
I feel quite fortunate in that from Tennis Australia’s perspective, in our leadership we’ve got a female chair, a CEO that is a member of the male champions of change. The Australian Open has had equal prize money from 2001. In this situation I feel very fortunate that there has been the investment.
If you’re in a business that is in its infancy in terms of making this change, I think one of the key things is being able to sell the advantage to the business that diversity brings. Having the executives and senior managers understand the numbers, that prove the value that it will add.
I think we’ve all got people who will be keen to tick the box but if you can actually make it something tangible for them then the investment is a lot more genuine which means when people come into the business then their engagement will be more genuine as well.
Nathan Wheat:
I actually think getting an existing organisation to recognise the limitation of not being diverse is the first step. Once the problem is recognised and the desire to be diverse is there, then the rest of it can be chipped away and worked on.
For me the biggest problem is getting an organisation to admit they have a problem and to see that having a monoculture of mostly white males in a single age bracket is a problem.
I think that recognition is the hardest thing that I’ve seen. Some organisations theoretically support diversity but they still don’t see that they have an issue.
Brendan Major:
For me its effective communication and taking the stigma out of corrective behaviour.
You have to make it a positive conversation. These conversations can become just inherently negative like, ‘What behaviours are you discouraging to improve your workplace culture?’
Whenever we give feedback to staff or players or whenever we get feedback, we want feedback framed well and we want positive feedback.
There's no reason these can't be positive conversations about the strength of diversity within an organisation.
If you shape it positively to start with you can actually, I think, curb some of the negative conversations you have to have, you’re pre-empting some of the behaviors that you know you don’t want and you employ positive ones that ensures that doesn’t happen.
What are the challenges you’ve personally faced and what are some breakthroughs and successes you’ve had?
Veronica Micich:
I undertook a project in the past couple of years where I was performing my normal project management duties and was receiving some resistance from the customer side of the engagement.
It was identified that there was a gender issue in play (verified by both parties). It was great to have the backing of Microsoft leadership to address this.
We worked directly with the customer leadership to proactively correct the situation with open and direct discussion with both parties. The project completed on time and the customer leadership was happy with the results and continued relationship with Microsoft.
Kate Gaffy:
So we’re quite fortunate that tennis is a sport that both men and women play, we’re perhaps potentially not as challenged traditionally as AFL or soccer or cricket, which were traditionally male sports so we do attract women in certain areas but we do have other functions where we lack female representation.
One of those areas is actually in coaching, we’ve got a huge focus in our strategy on women and girls, to try and attract girls into playing the sport and retain them in the sport. We have a campaign at the moment called ‘Play for you’ which Ash Barty is the face of. She’s a role model because she wasn’t the traditional stereotype of what a grand slam champion would be in that she was told she was too short, but she did things her way and is now world number one.
This campaign encourages girls to stay in sport, to play their way and hopefully and stay in the sport either by going professional or just keeping up with it for their own wellbeing.
The other element to this that we’re working on is that we've got a whole series of development camps for girls who are very good with the potential to be elite, but we’re also trying to reframe it so that attaining that elite level isn’t the only measure of success. Through these camps we’re trying to introduce girls to the concept of having a career in tennis that isn’t as a player, introducing them to the roles of coaches, sport scientists or strength and conditioning coaches. If we can increase the number of female coaches then for girls coming up through the ranks they’ll see the opportunities there.
Nathan Wheat:
The sort of things that are really easy to observe is the natural tendency to want to entertain clients and customers in ways that are invisibly biased against women’s involvement, specifically there are a lot of marketing or customer events that are to do with sports or beer or going out on Friday or things that don’t consider the interest of people that don’t all want to do the same thing.
On the other hand one of the best examples that I’ve seen where diversity was represented well was in a company I worked at, a management consultancy, where the technology advisory team was seated completely adjacent to the human capital team. The technology and cloud advisory was sitting side by side with conversations about people-impact. The thing that struck me when I entered that environment was the gender diversity, it stood out to me as different and awesome.
The conversations about technology impact just became broader, and much more encompassing of what happens to the people in an organisation when it is going through a technical journey.
Brendan Major:
My leadership style is around trying to establish individual coaches, players, administrator strengths, so identifying what someone’s strengths are and celebrating those strengths, that goes across genders.
There is a big push in women’s football to have female coaches. It’s a great idea and I think we should be pushing towards gender equality in coaching staff, but I think where mistakes are made is assuming that those coaches have to be just for women’s football. I think that restricts our thinking, which will, in turn, restrict action.
When I talk to young female coaches who are getting into development roles, a lot of the conversation is around football in general, not women’s football. So not restricting the role models.
What I hear from a lot of AFLW players and coaches is this idea that, ‘If you can’t see it, you can’t be it’. It suggests that if you can’t see somebody who juggles being a mum, being a footballer and having a job, it’s difficult to envision yourself doing it. We want to endorse and support positive role models within football, in general, to break down that idea.
What do you think we can do to encourage women to take on more roles in tech, business, sports and other traditionally male-dominated industries?
Veronica Micich:
There’s a couple of different levels at which you can attack it, one of those being from the ground up where you start in schools and ensure exposure and classes are available in technology.
Back when I was in high school, they didn’t have computing subjects in VCE. I went to an all-girl school and there weren't enough girls who took up the class. What they did the year after I finished was made the IT subject available at another school which students could go over to in order to take the subject.
More recently I’ve gone back to my school and been sponsoring the academic prize for technology subjects to make sure there is support for girls going through.
Kate Gaffy:
I think within tennis such as a sport, campaigns like the ‘Play For You’ campaign, promoting the health and wellbeing benefits beyond being a certain size or looking a certain way is really important.
In terms of encouraging women to come into the areas of business where they are underrepresented, I think it’s important to have role models who can share their stories so that others can see there is a trajectory for them.
Nathan Wheat:
A part of that answer is going to revolve around changing the expectations of what a leader should represent, I think there have been some very constrictive and narrowly defined qualities of leadership that have come to be associated with the industry, such as that if you’re going to lead an organisation you must be assertive or you must be this or that.
I think that image of what a leader represents probably needs to change in order to encourage different types of people to strive for it, gender diversity being just one expression of that.
Brendan Major:
The first thing we need to do is de-gender professions at a young age. In primary school, in high school, we need to take gender out of occupation discussions. That will then feed through as these kids get older. We have to get better at articulating what we want from leaders and appreciate that gender doesn't dictate the actions of a leader.
So female leaders can be assertive and organised and they can have forthright and honest conversations, and we as men have to respect the positions they are in and respect them for the qualities they bring as leaders.
Different personality types are attributed to different things across genders, so if a man is assertive he’s just assertive, but sometimes if a female is assertive she can be labelled as bitchy. We’ve got to get better at appreciating the roles that these people play and the jobs they are doing already. That will further support women in leadership which will then make the positions more attractive to females in general.
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