On her first day in her graduate job Dayle Stevens found herself rotated onto a factory floor in Sydney where she built computers, sparking a love affair with technology that has inspired her to forge a better, more inclusive society.
“The role tech has played in changing the world in the last thirty years is astounding,” Stevens says today as NAB’s divisional chief information officer of support services and co-founder of the bank’s Women in Technology program.
“What technology is capable of today is mind-blowing and the future is astounding. What I love is it enables people. Technology is really cool and people really matter, they go hand in hand.”
In her divisional chief information officer role at NAB, Stevens oversees a team of about 400 staff based in Melbourne, Sydney and overseas, providing tech to the business including finance, HR and risk functions.
But as well as overseeing major projects that enable the support services essential to modern banking, she sees her job as leading diversity and inclusion in its range of forms – something the bank has supported “every step of the way”.
“It’s getting people to understand that diversity and inclusion is the real work of leaders,” Stevens says. “Getting people to understand that it impacts everyone and not just minority groups. Being excluded can happen to anyone.”
After running some informal coaching and mentoring at NAB, Stevens and her colleague Nicole Devine started planning the Women in Technology program to help increase confidence for women working in the traditionally male-dominated sphere.
The program was launched at NAB in March 2014 with a vision for active change based on the four pillars of “develop, experience, connect and community” for one of Melbourne’s biggest technology employers.
The program covers a number of areas to ensure staff have the training and development they need to make NAB an employer of choice, not just for women but for women in technology.
Projects so far have included job swapping with other technology companies and study tours to India to learn from different technology organisations and also to visit local NGOs.
“People come back really inspired to make a difference,” Stevens says. “It’s to give people an experience that will broaden their thinking and they bring back that diversity.”
Since launching the program, the percentage of women in senior tech roles at NAB has increased from 18% to 27%, with about 1000 women and men at the bank regularly connecting through the web and at quarterly forums.
“We saw an almost immediate uplift in confidence. In performance reviews people were saying: ‘Something has changed in you, there’s a real spark’.
“The reason I’m so passionate about this is the individual stories of our women and what has changed for them. It’s those stories that have inspired me to keep working in this space. How it has enabled women to chase their dreams. It’s amazing to see the confidence in our women growing.”
One participant told Stevens the program had given her the insight and confidence to re-imagine her whole life, taking action to change her family care arrangements, getting her dream job and buying a home.
Stevens says the success of the program has “put all aspects of diversity and inclusion on the agenda” and that business needs to reflect the true nature and changing needs of the Australian community.
As the mother of two young boys, she sees children in the “melting pot” of the local playground having no sense of exclusion based on different cultures and backgrounds and she wants this to continue into adulthood.
“I want to do everything I can to make sure my children grow up in an inclusive community. I want to know what happens to create the divide and I want to change that. I see unhappiness in exclusion and I imagine what can be different.”
For now, her work on gender diversity includes working with community groups to show young girls what a career in tech looks like and encouraging them to be curious about it.
She worries that focusing on the lack of females taking STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) may put girls off, and so instead works with community groups talking about how much fun they are having.
One of these is Robogals, where Stevens sits on the board, which holds free school workshops run by university students to show younger girls where these subjects can take them.
Stevens sees examples like all-female coding clubs and “hackathons” as safe places to enable girls to talk to their peers and to build confidence to step into a “more confronting space” later on.
She also enjoys taking inspiration internationally as part of the Queen’s Young Leaders Program, mentoring young people who are creating change across the Commonwealth, including in Lesotho and Rwanda in Africa.
Her Women in Technology work has been recognised with the NAB Chairman’s Award for Diversity and Inclusion in 2014 and in July this year with a #techdiversity industry award in the business category. She was also a finalist in the Telstra Business Women’s Awards for 2015.
Her diverse loves outside of work include spending time with her children and husband Michael, the owner and chef at Melbourne’s Royal Mail Hotel on Spencer St, and trying out his new menu creations with the family.
