The IT industry must transform to survive, says CEO of Code First: Girls

Change isn't easy, but it is necessary to encourage evolution

With the shortage in technology talent plaguing the IT industry, it should be a surprise that some companies are still resisting change. It can be much more difficult to alter an ingrained culture than simply signing an equality pledge - but, says CEO of Code First: Girls Amali de Alwis, it is necessary if the industry wants to continue to evolve.

Code First: Girls is a non-profit organisation that teaches women how to code. It runs paid courses for both genders, but its free courses are only open to women.

"These are the bulk of the coding courses that we run as a social enterprise, mission-led company," said de Alwis. "This semester just gone, that equated to 51 courses across the UK and Ireland, from Aberdeen to Southampton… Somewhere in the region of 1,500 young women taught to code for free."

Later this year, the organisation will increase that number to 90 courses and 2,500 women each term: "From this autumn/winter, going forwards, we'll be teaching somewhere in the region of 5,500 women to do an introductory coding course for free each year."

The goal, of course, is to bring more women into the world of technology by providing them with the skills, knowledge (Code First also runs its own events about the tech sector) and contacts that they need.

"It's about saying, ‘We need to help women with these skills', but also about saying, ‘We want to expose the women to these companies', and about helping those companies get exposure and understand the women as well; both of those sides are part of that puzzle… It's about helping the companies as well as the women understand each other, and trying to fill that gap in between."

Put yourself in her shoes

Bridging the understanding gap is crucial, as many companies - although they fully intend to have equal recruitment - fail to attract female applicants. Sometimes this is a culture problem, but de Alwis thinks that, more often, it is because they lack a way to connect with applicants from outside their normal recruiting pool:

"In most cases it's not that companies are sexist or misogynist… It's more just the case that the ways you've been working, the ways you've been recruiting or managing people, don't lend themselves to supporting people from diverse backgrounds…

"[Equality] is not an easy task. The fact is that...when I think of who I refer to as being leaders, I have decades of people saying, ‘Leaders are white men'. The impact of social conditioning isn't removed by the fact that you are aware of it. This is one of the challenges with bias training: it takes time, and I really do believe that the only way that we can change that is by changing what people see."

Companies are rarely motivated solely by the rosy glow of doing the right thing, even in the age of CSR, but there's good news there, too: de Alwis insists that a diverse workforce will often serve customers better than a homogenous one.

"Companies spend millions of pounds each year on consumer research, the idea being that if we can understand the people who are using our products better, we make better products. I would say that the easiest way to do that is to ensure that the people who are creating your products are also coming from as diverse a background as possible."

Who knows? If more than 20 per cent of Apple's engineers were female when it designed its Health app in 2015, maybe it wouldn't have forgotten that women have periods.

If we want things to be different, we have to do things differently

The final fallback of people resisting change is often, "Aren't you talking about lowering standards by inviting more people to apply?" De Alwis says that this is "a nonsense."

"In what other circumstance can you double the number of people that you can pick from and that lowers the standard? That doesn't make any logical sense; if you're increasing the pool of people...then by definition you're giving yourself more people to choose from."

Change could be as simple as asking a recruitment firm to present a wider selection of candidates, or it could be a lot more complex. It isn't a case of just putting out a job spec and saying that you have high ideals: companies need to enact change at every level.

"It requires work and thinking about how you word that specification; how you talk to the business to define the requirements; who you reach out to; what are the channels you use; how you manage people through that recruitment process. But the only way to give yourself a fair chance of hiring is by having a more diverse group of people that you're considering.

"It's not an easy task, and it requires work. What it really comes down to is if we want things to be different, we have to do things differently; it's really as simple as that."