By Sue-Ellen Wright- Managing Director Aerospace, Defence and Security
Over the course of my career, I’ve often considered what it means to ‘fit in’ at work. I think this is normal for anyone who is a minority in their workforce. For me, this was certainly true of my earlier career in the Australian Defence Force, and it remains true for my current role as head of Sopra Steria’s Aerospace, Defence & Security (ADS) division. Despite amazing experiences and great opportunities, I’ve still sometimes had cause to wonder if I really belonged, especially when there weren’t many other people around who looked, or spoke, like me.
The importance of diversity and the current challenges
Unfortunately, this sense that we don’t really ‘belong’ is still having an impact on the diversity of the UK tech sector, especially its gender diversity. As the technology we work with gets more powerful, and its impact on every aspect of our lives becomes more profound, I think the lack of women, in technical roles and in the UK tech sector generally, ought to be a source of major concern. Examples of what happens when we don’t have diverse input into technical design are already plentiful, from transport systems to crash test dummies. Their impact on women and other under-represented groups ranges from mildly irritating through to potentially life-threatening.
This issue of diversity in design matters even more for the technologies we’re seeing emerge now such as AI and machine learning, which are capable of making complex decisions based on the input we provide them with. Increasingly, this problem isn’t just with the design, but the training and governance of these capabilities. If the data sets used to define what constitutes ‘normal’ parameters isn’t inclusive enough, it can have terrible consequences. We’re already seeing examples of what happens when we don’t achieve this - for example, in facial recognition technology that has a much higher failure rate for female and Black faces. The choices we make about pursuing and training these solutions has real-life impact for millions of people.
Steps towards improvement: Addressing the basics and setting targets
So how do we address this? At Sopra Steria, we know that getting a more diverse group of people involved in the design and management of our solutions is important. We also know that it isn’t easy. Available data shows us that the UK tech sector is still only about 26% women, and we also know that, at the moment, women are leaving the tech sector at a faster rate than men. We also know that, at entry level, technology and technical careers continue to have an image problem with young women.
When I’m talking to my leadership team about this issue, I ask them to address what I call the ‘basics’. By this I mean the factors that can profoundly influence women’s decision-making around their careers. Maternity and parental leave. Support for people with caring responsibilities. Job flexibility. Location flexibility. Mentoring and encouragement. Support for wellbeing issues like mental health, menopause and – to be clear – men’s health issues as well. Making it normal to pay attention to issues of wellbeing and work-life balance for our majority workforce makes it normal for everyone, including the women who stand to benefit most from this.
If attracting more women into our technical roles starts with these ‘basics’, it certainly doesn’t end there. We have to set – and meet – clear, ambitious targets for attracting more women into technical careers. Throwing up our hands and saying “It’s a shame, but no women have applied for this role” isn’t good enough. We need to signal our demand clearly and look further afield for the right candidates. We also need to look at the potential of people who have, say, 60% of what the role needs rather than insisting that we wait for that elusive 100% person to come along.
Leveraging technologies to open doors for women
Technology itself is on our side here, with technologies such as Low Code, No Code platforms offering a way for people to access a technical design career without first needing to acquire deep levels of coding experience. About a third of Sopra Steria’s ServiceNow team is made up of women or other under-represented people who have been given development roles in this technology. We’re also creating some, what I call, ‘alongside’ junior tech roles, in technologies like Oracle, and we’re specifically targeting women with aptitude for those career opportunities.
Diversifying recruitment panels and expanding perspectives
Every recruitment activity we undertake is an opportunity to shift the dial on diversity. This means that it’s also vital to involve the types of people we want to attract in our recruitment activities. I ask my team to always include women and other under-represented people on their recruitment and promotion panels. This diversity of perspective allows us to widen our talent pool and understand the true potential of people who might be coming into tech via less conventional pathways.
Diversity as a central business risk
Finally, and this is possibly the most important thing in my view, is treating the issue of diversity in tech as a central business risk. Diversity and inclusion can’t be side issues that we talk about when we get time, in the margins of our core business. They are part of our core business. For senior leaders, I firmly believe that our behaviour and the priority we place on any issue is ultimately what decides its prioritisation by the people who implement our decisions. In Aerospace, Defence and Security (ADS), we have launched a People Manager’s Charter which sets out what all our people can expect from their managers. Included in that is the expectation that all our managers actively work to attract diverse talent, and to make sure that everyone in their team has the right conditions to thrive. This last point is critical. By increasing our diversity, we’re accepting that this might actually change the way we work. This is genuine inclusivity – not simply assuming that our workplace culture and ways of working are set in stone.
The defence and security sector, and indeed the world generally, has access to technological capability that is life changing. I believe that we have an obligation to make sure that the design, development and management of this capability represents all of the people whose lives it might affect. The defence and security sector is at the beginning of this journey, and I think there’s no time to waste.
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