“It seems hard to believe now but there was a time when if a female technologist was promoted it would be put down to the skirts she wore”.
On meeting Elaine Bucknor in a crowded coffee shop in Central London, it’s difficult to imagine her ever having to field comments questioning her capability, let alone sexist suggestions of using her legs to get ahead. Softly-spoken yet assured and articulate, she’s a leader in the UK technology industry, having spent the last four years as a senior director in the Technology group at Sky. And yet here she is regaling me with (would it be fair to say, horror?) stories dating back to when she started her career in technology over 20 years ago.
“When I took a college course in IT, I was the only woman in the room. My degree in computer science that followed wasn’t much different, with just two of us out of an intake of around 25. Once I got my first role – working in IT for the public sector– it wasn’t long before I was promoted, but instead of congratulating me on my advancement, a number of the entirely male team that I worked within joked that I’d been given the role because I wore a skirt.”
Bucknor tells me this without the slightest hint of martyrdom, but it’s clear it had an impact on her early career and how she approached work. “I changed the way I dressed – swapped the skirts for trousers and made a conscious effort to ‘fit in’. And although I confidently challenged my male colleagues and got on with the job, it did make me wonder whether I was cut out for a life in that environment.”
Years later and she’s celebrating the idea that the tech industry, as well as the UK workplace in general, has changed for the better. “The world that I joined back in the 90’s and the world of tech now are fundamentally different, especially in the approach to women. I love the fact that women can come to work at Sky and be assessed on their performance and attitudes alone What we need to do now is get more of these brilliant women joining our team and technology.”
Given her background, it’s fitting – and perhaps a little ironic depending on your level of cynicism – that years after the sexism she personally faced early in her career, Bucknor is championing the active recruitment of more women into the sector. “It is getting better. Take our rotational graduate programme at Sky; we’ve traditionally had a very small number of women entering the company via this route but this year we saw an even 50/50 split, which is fantastic. And what’s even more interesting is that of the hundreds of candidates that applied, around 20% were female so it essentially means the quality of female applicants is seriously impressive.”
At the mention of barriers to women entering the tech industry, Bucknor responds with an imperceptible shake of the head. Despite industry-wide talk of the difficulties facing women keen to take up technological roles, she’s not altogether buying it – a sign, she says, of just how far the sector has come. “I don’t believe there’s anything intrinsically stopping women coming into technology. The conversation should be around <why> they choose not to and it’s got a lot to do with their perception of what technology is and what a career in it could mean for them. Because of the historic perceptions around IT, women don’t necessarily recognise technology as something they could be interested in or possess the skills for..” I look at my children and they’re living pretty much every aspect of their lives through technology, every day. Technology is central to all our lives. And the breadth of roles and responsibilities that now exist are vast – gone from just pure code writing and physically loading tape drives to run basic utilities to an environment that is more about asking how can we use technology to make a difference to what people do. And for that we need different opinions, backgrounds and genders.
One way that Sky is taking the challenge on is to rethink the way they talk to potential employees. “It’s interesting that in our discussions on getting more women into the business, the language we use crops up time and time again. Instead of classic lines like ‘come and learn to write in Java’, which many women find particularly unattractive and off-putting, messaging like ‘come and be a part of something brilliant’ gets a much better response and positions the industry as groundbreaking and exciting – both of which it is.”
There’s also the development of top-down sponsorship schemes that focus on giving female tech talent the empowerment they need to succeed: “It’s less about telling employees what skills they need and what to do and more focusing on breaking down communication barriers and enabling them to network. We’ve found women are brilliant at using their connections to get the job done, but less comfortable about creating relationships that will help them progress, so sponsors help facilitate those relationships and we’re really seeing a lot of female techs building their own profile and starting to thrive.”
A natural argument might be that, just as in the film, food and finance industries, young female wannabe-technologists purely need successful, inspirational public figures to aspire to, but Bucknor thinks there’s a danger in pressing this point too far. “Happily, women entering the tech industry now don’t know too much about the traditional stereotypes around gender, and to spotlight their achievements in line with these old views – if you’re a woman doing well in technology you should shout about it because it wasn’t always like this! – runs the risk of forcing them into a position where they have to stand out. Instead of heralding a new age of women in tech, I try to focus on the business being a dynamic, exciting place to work rather than questioning the male/female divide.”
According to Bucknor, Technology will continue to evolve and become an even more important part of how we run our lives. It will be used by everyone and will continue to change how we do things. That means we need everyone to develop and build it. Men and women. To generate ideas and create our future, together.
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