17. The Reality of being a Woman in IT.

Nikki Ricks originally studied Town Planning before she became a Web Developer.

After working in her field of study for a while - and discovering that the status quo was more important to her bosses than innovating and moving forward - Nikki, a self-described “intrapreneur”, knew that she needed to get out of the Town Planning industry and throw herself into the start-up world. 

After dabbling in a number of different side businesses and spending more time in the start-up space she wanted to be on the other side of the conversation and learn more about the tech that powered a number of solutions. 

She enrolled in a General Assembly tech immersive and now is working as a fully-fledged web developer. On this path Nikki needed to get comfortable with the value of never ending learning in your job!

We talked about being a woman in tech, being curious and beating imposter syndrome plus bias in the workplace in gender and race. 

Nikki has always been passionate about tech entrepreneurship, but as she spent more time in the space, working in service and product-based tech businesses, she noticed a gender imbalance in her industry, and an aversion to not always knowing everything, in herself.

Before she became a developer, Nikki felt like the aspect of never-ending learning, and the need to constantly upskill, was too daunting. And now? It’s one of the aspects she loves the most about her work. I’ve experienced this in my work in the IT space as well; what needs to be done now is likely to have never been done before. It’s not like finance, where the end of month is the same end of month you run 12 times a year, so if you don’t update and evolve your skills and knowledge, your job will be harder until you become obsolete.

In tech, there’s often not a cut-and-dry answer when you’re making decisions. As new systems and software are created, there’s no telling what will take off and what will be obsolete five years from now.

Upskill vs Re-skill

Nikki feels that the term ‘upskill’ is a little patronising, and suggests that one’s current level of skill and knowledge is insufficient. To re-skill adds a skill to one’s tool belt. It’s driven by where you want to be in the future, and the skills you need to acquire in order to get there. 

Being a woman in IT

During her studies, Nikki noticed biases in the industry when it comes to gender. “When you’re online, all the usernames are male. Even that alone, when you’re on Stack or Flow and you’re Googling answers and seeing the user names… All the blog posts are written by men, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s just ‘how it is’ from the get-go from Page One of Google. I don’t think I’ve taken any online courses or even YouTube tutorials that have been run by women!”

An important decision

For me, I made a decision a while ago to only attend courses that show representation of both males and females – whether that’s conferences with speakers or even a course guide, if I look at it and there are only men represented, I choose not to attend.

The next generation of female 'techies'

One thing I’ve noticed recently is the rise of young female influencers in the beauty space, who have technology knowledge that is OFF THE CHARTS, without them even realising it. I was watching a teenage influencer the other day run through what she uses in terms of tech on her YouTube channel, and I was pleasantly surprised at how effortlessly she used the programs and tools and even how she spoke about her process. 

According to Nikki, recent stats show that while for a while there the numbers of women studying tech were on the rise, today there are less women graduating from tech-based university courses. “Part of the barriers for women in tech is this toxic masculinity that is coming from men – trying to get women to fit into that workplace isn’t going to work. You need men who advocate for anti-sexist, anti-racist workplaces in order for things to change.”

When I was the CIO of a major organisation, I made sure to interview every single person coming in to that organisation in the tech side of things, to ensure that all new hires fit in to the team I was trying to build.

I raised the subject of quotas, and Nikki had an interesting take on the concept:

"If it’s going to keep HR or the executive team accountable, if you keep talking about things qualitatively it’s hard to know if you’ve arrived. Having something quantifiable, such as quotas, allows you to know if you’ve hit the mark."

She went on to raise the excellent point that it’s all well and good to have a 50/50 split of men and women in the workplace, but if those women don’t feel safe to speak up or call out the toxic behaviour and gender biases they see, then the so-called ‘equal representation' is not really all that equal, in reality. However, if you have women in leadership positions, are decision makers who have sway when it comes to the company direction, even if women only make up 30-40% of that organisation, they can make a real difference. It’s also important to look at the roles that women play in the organisation – many companies that boast an equal split of genders have women in admin and client support roles, but not in the key decision making roles that are important to the direction of the company. 

This conversation around gender diversity took a turn towards all types of diversity, including race diversity and disability representation, and I found it really interesting. If you’d like to hear our conversation in full, you can listen to this episode here. To explore other Lady Leadership podcast epIsodes, click here.