Make a difference to Gender Diversity

Three things you can do to make progress on Gender Diversity

By Duncan Hewett 

I genuinely believe the tech industry has made progress on its approach to diversity, however there is still a long way to go. In Asia-Pacific, the region in which I am based, a 2020 study by Boston Consulting Group and Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority found that only 32% of the region’s tech jobs were held by women despite women making up 39% of our region’s tech graduates. And while some organisations are leading the way, Deloitte reports that globally the overall proportion of women working for tech companies – whether that be in a technical role or not - is inching forward at less than 1 percentage point a year; still way too slow to be meaningfully changing the gender diversity of the workforce.  

And it’s not due to a lack of jobs. Tech has been grappling with a skills shortage for years.  More needs to be done to bridge the gap.  Evidently, there is more to learn – and do - about the barriers that are preventing women from thriving in our industry. However, a clear picture is beginning to emerge.  

I am proud of VMware, a company that has prioritised all forms of inclusion – including gender diversity – as part of its 2030 Agenda. Research shows that it is critical to have organisations and teams that represent society to ensure the real benefits of diversity are contributing to business progress.

We know that qualified women are out there. So, how do we bring them in?

1. Genuinely Help women Rejoin the workforce

An important piece of the recruitment puzzle is bringing women back to the workforce after a career break. VMware has been taking action on this for several years now through our VMinclusion Taara program in India.

In India’s IT sector, nearly 50% of women drop out of the active workforce after three to eight years and don’t return to work. Yet research shows 91% of working women want to return to work after a career break, but almost half are unable to find suitable opportunities. 

When we became aware of this, and of the growing gender gap in the Indian IT sector, we talked to women who wished to return to the workforce about the barriers they were facing. Many believed their applications would be disregarded if they didn’t have current skills before returning to work, and opportunities to do so were limited and expensive.

Taara addresses the issue by offering free technical education in the latest digital transformation technologies. Working with Women who Code, we are helping more than 16,000 women, who are in the program, upskill and have now supported more than 4000 of these women to return to the IT workforce.

The feedback from many Taara graduates is that the opportunity to bring their skills right back up to date means they feel more confident about resuming their careers in tech. After all, returning to a fast-moving industry after a career break of several years can be daunting. Sharmila Vaithilingam, a Taara graduate who restarted her career after 11 years., sums this up perfectly:

"A long absence from the workforce is tough. It breaks down your confidence and you start doubting your abilities" 

Taara is an initiative that I believe more organisations could choose to join VMware or organisations could choose to replicate, the results demonstrate what can be achieved around the world to help these amazing women, the largest available talent pool, rejoin the workforce with confidence. Watch this space as VMware takes this to more countries across Asia Pacific at even greater scale. As a sector, this relatively small investment would make a difference to the skills shortage , gender diversity and help these women by adding to their existing skills with current knowledge and confidence needed to rejoin the workforce. 

2. Have a Focus on flexibility

Job flexibility and the way we discuss it with our teams and during recruitment also needs examining. A raft of economy-wide studies has shown that flexible work conditions – including flexible working hours and location - are particularly beneficial to women. This is due to a number of reasons, ranging from women being the minority in some workplaces, through to women often taking on additional home or care responsibilities.

Organisations are already seeing the benefits of these changes. Recent research shows that when insurer Zurich began advertising all its vacant roles as flexible or part-time, the volume of female applicants rose from by six percentage points.

This is just one way we can reconfigure recruiting to counterbalance the structural disadvantages women face. Others include clearly articulating progressive parental-leave policies, making longer applicant shortlists and using a uniform structure when interviewing applicants.

At VMware I witnessed the impact of flexible and hybrid working first-hand. A year ago, VMware announced that all of 33,000 employees had the option to work remotely on a permanent basis. This is already having a “huge” impact for women at VMware , according to VMware’s VP of Human Resources, Shanis Windland. 

"Women in particular have had to take on that double burden of managing kids who are being home-schooled and still trying to manage their careers," Windland said. "The opportunity to come into the office because you don't have a space at home where you can work and take care of your kids, or you want to stay at home so that you can be close to somebody who might be still home-schooling or be close to a nanny or a small baby — providing that flexibility to our employees allows them to meet their own needs while still being successful at VMware."

3. Be Open to change  

The more resources we invested in achieving gender diversity at VMware, the more we realised how critical it is to provide support to help flexibility. One experience last year reinforced how important it is to be open to new ideas. 

During the onset of the pandemic, our Japan business, like most, was forced to move to virtual graduate recruitment.  So instead of women attending sessions in the office, typically as a minority, they joined a virtual graduate event. Our experience is the number of women attending these events doubled(!!). When we talked to these women, we learned that the prospect of them being the only woman in the room had put them off attending similar events that were held in-person in the past. 

It was fortuitous that the pandemic allowed us to identify this systemic barrier. With more representation in the first recruitment events, it helped us achieve 50-50 gender diversity in our hiring.

To make meaningful progress, it is important that we continue to commit to trying new ideas, show courage and look at other organisations’ best practices, learn from new experiences that have happened during the pandemic, and more. Not everything will work, but we continue to learn. And when I look at the best practice leaders, I get so energised again in the belief that we can reach 50-50.