“We need men supporting the women in tech movement, else really it just becomes a men vs women, women vs men issue.”
Wise words from Rishi Chowdhury, the enterprising co-founder of IncuBus Ventures, a creative early stage startup incubator helping aspiring founders get onto the world’s best accelerator programmes.
It’s fair to say that asking women in tech how to boost female representation in the sector has long been the go-to approach for most industry commentators (myself included). However, switching that around and quizzing men in technology seemed much-needed if not equally befitting.
Not only that, what of the biases that men in tech might themselves be on the receiving end of that we aren’t privy to? For the latest edition of Telefonica’s Digital Futures series, we invited two dynamic men to get their take on the state of play in the tech sector and critically, hear first-hand about the stumbling blocks they’ve come up against.
I thought it might be even more significant to chat to a younger generation given they make up the next wave of thought leaders that will help shape the playing field for future cohorts of females entering the industry.
David de Min, the founder and CEO of editing-on-the-go video app Velapp joins Rishi to take the plunge with us. Here are the take-aways that emerged from our discussion:
“Geeks are cool again,” exclaims David. Over the past five or so years, the skyrocketing career trajectories of seemingly geeky founders has spurred a wider movement. Techies have thankfully now been re-positioned as “cool” and aspirational and this has prompted a much-needed explosion of interest in coding. What might men do more of to move the needle on the gender inequity still rife in the sector however?
Both David and Rishi insist we’ve got to be talking more to parents and educators in order to help them grasp the opportunities afforded by the sector, and in turn nudge the young women in their circle of influence to explore the digital world. There’s clearly a large education piece here in showing not just the girls themselves, but their teachers, mums and dads that this is an increasingly female-friendly industry.
Men are often just as vulnerable to coming up against bias when building their ventures, agree both interviewees. In particular, David explains that he found himself anxious that his age would be a deeply limiting factor in securing funding and “being taken seriously” by potential, older business partners. “At one point, I even wondered if I should lie about my age,” he confides. After a few positive meetings with potential investors however, he quickly realised this fear was largely self-inflicted and a barrier in his own mind. We unanimously agreed that both men and women often hold themselves back, and this can be a very gender-agnostic element.
Encouraging more people, whether they be men or women, to champion themselves and their ideas better, seems to be a recurring issue that the tech community would do well to prioritise. Telefónica’s upcoming Index on Digital Life touches on this issue, by exploring the role that entrepreneurship plays in building a strong digital economy. We’re expecting the Index to show that a strong investment in people willing to test and grow their ideas is just important as more traditional tech investments, when it comes to creating prospering digital environments.
I point out that men in tech often get a bad rap for not doing enough to bring more women into the fold. While personally I meet a number of influential males in the sector who appear to desperately want to hire more women into their businesses, I still hear enough anecdotes reflecting some gender discrimination. David finds that many of his fellow founders do struggle to attract a healthy number of female applicants, but that their desire to bring more diversity into their businesses remains high.
Might there be a fundamental supply issue at play here then, with not enough women in the talent pool? Both men see this issue as shifting at a healthy pace with gender inequity in the digital and tech sector slowly but surely levelling out. “I remember going to meet-ups in 2009 where there were men only. Now it’s often 50-50,” offers Rishi. David nods vigorously and has observed a more or less equal number of female founders in his social and professional circle.
Getting involved in the tech world needn’t be limited to being the hotshot founder or CTO. “You certainly don’t have to be the founder at all,” adds Rishi, revealing that he used to work in the marketing team at a well-known startup but very quickly picked up technical skills. Indeed, I can see that the exposure to different aspects of a tech business put him in good stead to run IncuBus.
Both men agree that there are a gamut of different avenues available – technical and otherwise – that enable both sexes to enter the tech industry. Learning coding is deeply valuable… but what if you don’t want to? Granted you could be a developer, but you could just as well build a deep understanding of the industry by being an industry analyst, tech events producer or handling commercial partnerships for a tech company.
If the gender inequity has to change, surely the venture capital (VC) arena must see more female partners in the mix? A widely circulated piece of research released last year called Startup DNA from accelerator Wayra showed alarming investment bias in the UK, finding that UK digital startups founded by men were 86% more likely to receive investment over ones led by women. Rishi takes this one, qualifying that he isn’t speaking for all incubators rather from his own experience. “From the startups we had in a particular cohort, five of the eight were female-led. However, when all the investors that came in were male, there was a worry that perhaps these VCs might not fully understand apps that are to do with for instance, fashion.”
Lastly, I raise one more contentious issue – why am I still hearing from female founders that an “old boys club” does exist in the industry? Both men are instantly dismayed to hear this. Indeed, they insist that if this has been passed down as legacy and there is a boys club quietly simmering away in the background of the tech industry (and possibly deterring women from making a play for it), they are determined to do all they can to remedy that.
If aspirational male influencers such as David and Rishi continue to fly the flag for a progressive, diverse tech workforce, I can only be positive that we’ll hear more of such pledges in the generation that succeeds them.
Shivvy Jervis is producer of The Trailblazers and Digital Futures – follow her on Twitter @shivvyjervis
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