Closing the Gender Gap: Update

Sam Cameron
HelloTech
Published in
4 min readJun 1, 2017

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When I started working in recruitment for HelloTech, one of the first things we did was to get together and take a look at the distribution of gender in our organisation. It’s no secret that in tech there is a gender gap, and one thing that we reflected on was that as HelloTech had grown, this divide had become more apparent. Looking at our gender distribution data was a sharp wake up call for us to close that gap.

To raise awareness for ourselves and the rest of the industry we followed in the footsteps of other companies by publishing all of our diversity data in HelloTech. A cultural change and initiative should be something the entire organisation is aware of, and the first step is to acknowledge your current state before you can make a change. Talk is cheap, so we wanted to make sure that people knew how serious we are about this by baring all.

We announced this across our org and decided that we would host a public screening of CODE: Debugging the gender gap as an educational tool, coinciding with International Women’s Day and an acknowledgement that we needed to do better in this aspect. The screening was a success and included a discussion afterwards which brought about some interesting views from a diverse range of people with different nationalities.

The commitment we made was to:

  • Help women of all ages achieve their ambitions.
  • Challenge conscious and unconscious gender bias.
  • Call for gender-balanced leadership.
  • Value women’s and men’s contributions equally.
  • Create inclusive, flexible, and diverse cultures.

This commitment for us means not only making sure we hire a more diverse workforce, but actually trying to contribute to closing the gender gap by empowering women to get into tech. There are many benefits to having a more diverse workforce: it increases the company’s performance, creates a better working environment for everyone, and not least is the morally correct thing to do.

A Codebar event we hosted to enable underrepresented groups to learn to code.

Taking Action

Diversity is not a problem that is solved overnight. We wanted to think short term, mid term and long term to achieve continuous improvement. Analysing our quick wins and major projects across the recruitment funnel (we adapt AARRR to our funnel) helped us to structure our approach and break down what we’d focus on first. In HelloTech Talent Acquisition it’s equally important for us to be flexible and rapidly respond to change as it is for our Engineering team.

Firstly, we established a regular meeting including people from all experience levels (CTO to Junior Developer), nationalities (from Portugal and Egypt to the US and UK), and genders in HelloTech ensuring that we don’t have only men talking about how we were going to hire more women.

We quickly identified some of the major areas for change in the funnel:

  • Acquisition: do women think/know HelloTech is a good place to work?
  • Activation: what can close the gap between viewing our jobs and applying?
  • Retention: what are we doing to create a great place for women to work?

Most of these topics require long term changes, so we looked at things we could immediately change, allowing us to deliver a significant amount in the short term.

Some of the immediate actions we took were:

Attraction

  • Running all of our job descriptions through a gender decoder and made them gender neutral.
  • Revisiting our advertising/sourcing strategies (Where are we advertising and sourcing candidates from? How can we work smart and not hard?)
  • Began hosting more inclusive events, starting with a screening of “CODE: Debugging the gender gap” and hosting Codebar.
  • Sat down with our female Engineers and showed them how they can help to refer more people.

Activation

  • Implemented a “Gender Identification” field in our applications so we can measure progress in Talent Acquisition and our Talent Acquisition dashboard. (Thanks to fellow Berlin startup Soundcloud for inspiration of how we can implement this field in applications.
  • Ensured all women interviewing for tech positions with us are given the opportunity to speak with other women working here.

We’re also excited to be the new regular host for Women Who Code Hack Evening and are currently arranging to host other Women in Tech meetups too.

Retention

  • Changing all of our employment contracts to include gender neutral pronouns. Previously we had translated them from German and used “he” to refer to employees.
  • Implemented a regular diversity meeting to review our progress and initiatives.
  • Running “managing unconscious bias” training for staff.

Conclusion

A combination of the changes that we made meant that 21% of the 24 people we hired in Q1 2017 for HelloTech were women. This is a huge improvement from Q4 2016.

HelloTech Q1 2017 Hires Split by Gender

These hires ranged across HelloTech including Frontend, iOS, Android, and QA. Although this is a good start, it’s of utmost importance we continue the momentum and improve.

That concludes our first update on our progress on closing the gender gap. We hope that this information is useful to others that maybe aren’t sure where to start with making a change to diversity. We’re looking forward to the next update where we’re aspiring to have made even more progress!

Looking for a new job opportunity? Become a part of our team! We are constantly on the lookout for great talent. Help us in our mission of delivering fresh ingredients to your door and change the way people eat forever.

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