Supporting female founders in tech

The tech sector still has a long way to go when it comes to gender equality. While progress has been made over the years, women in tech face hurdles such as discrimination and outdated hiring processes. All of this works to drive women out of tech and uphold ingrained, sectoral biases.

Female founders come up against these same challenges time and time again, which robs the industry of innovative firms and stems the flow of progress. For a more diverse sector, more work needs to be done on initiatives to support the next generation of women in tech.

In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Laura Hutton, co-founder and chief customer officer at Quantexa, to discuss women in tech and the role leaders can play in improving equality throughout the sector.

Highlights

“This isn't, you know, women fighting for equity and full equality on their own. We are only going to be successful in this when we have allies in equal numbers to those who are directly affected. And ultimately, it does directly affect all genders, all nationalities, all races in the working world.”

“We need to identify early those female entrepreneurs, those female startups and give them the relevant support so that they know how to approach this world in the right way. And actually, if they are pitching to people who are different to themselves, how do they pitch in a way that attracts the investment level?”

“My view is anybody can code, I didn't learn to code until I was 22. I didn't do any in my degree [and] didn't do anything at school, I was taught in my first job. If you are a logical thinker, then there is no reason why you can't upskill in some of these areas. So there are opportunities to go in and be a pure technical coder, but I think there are opportunities to come into that upper management, where you have a much broader commercial knowledge of how businesses work.”

Footnotes

• From this week women across the UK will effectively work for free - and in tech it’s even worse
• Five common barriers holding back women in tech
• UK deep tech companies have a serious diversity problem
• Surge in female computing degree applications shows the tide is slowly turning on tech sector gender diversity
• UK’s female AI founders receive six times less funding than male counterparts
• “Shoehorning” female tech workers into management roles could harm inclusivity
• Sexism in the UK tech sector is rife and shows no sign of abating
• Tech workers fear generative AI could "drive women out the workforce"
• Women in tech are being forced out of work by the ‘motherhood penalty’
• Tech sector gender gap could take “nearly 300 years” to close without intervention
• Male workers say sexism in the tech industry is “rare” - women would disagree
• Fixing STEM's gender bias with more classroom intervention

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