The women’s group at the Government Digital Service (GDS) is for everyone, irrespective of gender, who cares about having an equal and diverse workplace. But that’s not a snappy and concise name for a group. So we call it the women’s group. It’s now a year old.
Having an active and supported women’s group can help make GDS a better place for everyone to work. Issues that affect women don’t just belong to women. GDS is still only a few years old and has seen a lot of changes during that time. We faced some of the same problems that many tech startups face, including working so hard to get the job done that we didn’t always focus on promoting an inclusive culture.
People who were naturally more confident and more assertive thrived whereas those who prefer to take time and collaborate could be left out. The women’s group was formed as a direct response to this, and its aim is to make GDS a more inclusive place to work. We’ve been empowered by our senior team and by the whole organisation to make recommendations for change, and we’ve always been listened to and strongly supported.
What we’ve achieved
We started the group in 2015 with five objectives. To:
- Raise awareness and be a voice for women.
- Solve problems.
- Provide support.
- Provide training.
- Socialise and network.
So far, with help from colleagues across GDS, we have started as we mean to go on. We’ve rolled out unconscious bias training to all line managers at GDS. We’ve set up a reverse mentoring scheme for all senior civil servants, to help managers find out what people outside their usual sphere think about working at GDS and open up lines of communication.
We run monthly talks by inspirational women. We’ve already welcomed speakers from tech and digital industries, government and the House of Lords. We’ve also secured funding to host six codebar training events in 2016. On International Women’s Day in March, we published our parity pledge. We committed to send more women to speak at events, and not to send speakers to events where the organisers aren’t working hard to improve speaker diversity. We’ve started work on presentation and public speaking training for everyone at GDS regardless of their seniority, skill or experience.
We’ve ensured all GDS interview panels are mixed and we’ve increased the pool of women who feel confident conducting and chairing interviews by running training sessions.
The GDS executive board has published its objectives and each included one on diversity. We’ve pushed for hiring of more permanent civil servants instead of fixed-term contracts, which can put women off applying and affects maternity leave. And we linked up with the GDS LGBTQ+ group.
What’s next
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve. Our plans include:
- Expanding unconscious bias training to all staff.
- Training members of the group to facilitate these sessions.
- Working with our recruitment team to increase the number of women hired into technical roles.
- Improving how people find out about working here, looking again at what events we should be speaking at and how we write job descriptions that don’t put women off applying.
- Setting up more training sessions, including interview, presentation and public speaking training, and finding more opportunities for women to speak and develop their skills.
- Setting up a work experience programme with Stemettes and Next Tech Girls, to give young women experience of science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) jobs at GDS and learn from the women who work here.
It doesn’t take long to make a change
When we held our first workshop 14 months ago, concern about culture was the number one issue people wanted to tackle. We’ve worked hard to find ways that we could improve things for everyone. In April, we held our third workshop and saw only one sticky note on the wall that talked about a problem with culture.
So things are improving. And they’re improving fast.
Zara Farrar is a creative producer at the Government Digital Service. This is an edited version of a blog that first appeared on the GDS website.
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