International Women’s Day @ HelloTech
Today, March 8th, the world celebrates International Women’s Day. The earliest records of this celebration date back to 1909, and it has taken different meanings depending on when and where it has taken place.
For HelloTech, IWD stands for a year-round commitment to (slightly tweaked from the original IWD pledge):
- helping women of all ages achieve their ambitions
- challenging conscious and unconscious gender bias
- calling for gender-balanced leadership
- valuing women and men’s contributions equally
- creating inclusive, flexible, and diverse cultures
Gender Parity at HelloTech: Painful Numbers
At HelloTech we pride ourselves on having a diverse team. With a little over 120 people, there are 42 different nationalities working together. It brings us great joy to observe how completely different (or sometimes, surprisingly similar) lives “back home” are for each of us. We get to witness, every single day, how this variety of backgrounds and experiences contributes in a massively positive way to the work we do and the products we deliver.
And what happens if we take a look at the gender dimension? Well… disillusionment happens.
Overall, women in HelloTech in general are hugely underrepresented. Only 15.3% of the people working in the team are female. And it gets worse. We split the HelloTech team in two different areas: Engineering and Product.
With “Engineering” we mean: Android, Automation QA, Backend Engineering, Data Engineering, Frontend Engineering, iOS, IT Management (hardware & support) and System Administration.
With “Product” we mean: Agile Coaching, Manual QA, Product Owners, Product Managers, Project Managers, UX and UI designers.
And the sad truth is that if you look only at Engineering those 15.3% take a dive, and become 6.2%.
The reason why we are making these numbers public is not because we are proud of them. It is exactly the opposite: we are making these numbers public because despite of our best efforts so far, this is the hard reality of what we have accomplished.
This is also the very important message behind much bigger companies releasing their own diversity and gender stats. Google, Facebook and other giants in the industry, despite their best efforts, which include investing significant amounts of money into researching and fighting the issue at its core, also show a very slow paced progress.
Women in Tech, where did you go?
Software development had at its inception a very strong female presence.
Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer, is regarded as the first to recognize the full potential of a computing machine, and considered unanimously as the first ever computer programmer. Ada died at the young age of 36, and one has no option but to be left wondering what other disruptive concepts would she have been able to come up with, had she lived longer.
Margaret Hamilton is an American computer scientist and systems engineer, and was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. This means Margaret oversaw the development of the on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. Her code took humankind to the moon! And her work set the foundation for ultra-reliable software design. A concept that is hard to master (and harder to deliver) still today, for any developer (HelloTech included).
These are only two of a long list of women that have done incredible work advancing Software Development forward.
So how is it that a discipline with such strong female references in its early days suddenly becomes heavily dominated by males in the current days? Where are the female developers of today?
It is reflecting in these questions that we celebrate IWD at HelloFresh today. By hosting a public screening of CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap at our Berlin office this evening we intend to raise awareness to this issue among ourselves and those who will attend the event.
Our Plan
Today, with the screening of the CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap documentary, and by following it up with a Q&A session and debate, the goal is to understand the problem and its root causes.
Over the upcoming weeks, we will revisit our sourcing and hiring strategies, as well as implement other measures focusing on mitigating the gender gap in the industry. As a team we need to understand how HelloFresh, HelloTech, and each and every one of us individually, at work or at home, can make a difference in tackling this issue, worldwide.
We will keep you posted on our findings, and on the actions we take, via this same blog. So, stay tuned!
And to all women out there, in Tech or elsewhere, a very happy International Women’s Day!
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