IT Essentials: It’s all talk - the tech start-up ecosystem is neither inclusive nor diverse

Davina Schonle’s experience at LTW shows how little has really changed

Last week, the organisers of London Tech Week accidentally said they quiet part out loud when they said they hadn’t considered the needs of entrepreneurs who also happened to be mothers.

Davina Schonle is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Humanvantage AI and part of the Deep Tech incubator at University of Warwick. She’s also a mother and brought her 8-month-old daughter with her to London Tech Week (LTW) at Olympia last week, keen to attend some pre-arranged meetings with potential partners.

But she didn’t get to conduct these meetings because she was refused entry. Schonle said she was left “humiliated” by the experience.

According to a statement hastily added to the LTW website after Schonle’s Linkedin post about the experience went viral, “the event hadn’t been designed to incorporate the “particular needs, facilities and safeguards that under-16’s require.” LTW has apologised to Schonle and is consulting “the wider tech community” on how to “make London Tech Week as inclusive as possible.”

The organisers could do a lot worse than perusing the furious response of the tech sisterhood (and allies) on LinkedIn. That response shows that gender bias is built into the system. The exclusion of women like Schonle happens because, as campaigners like Caroline Criado-Perez have explained, the default setting of the system is male.

London Tech Week is a majority male event. It simply didn’t occur to anyone in charge that perhaps female entrepreneurs may have wanted – needed - to bring young children with them. The result is exclusion.

One of the many replies to Schonle’s post said the at the recent Digital Construction Week at the Excel, someone brought their dog along and its needs were happily accommodated. That the organisers of DCW were able to “incorporate the particular needs, facilities and safeguards” of someone’s pet pooch yet LTW was unable to do likewise with a baby says a lot about the tech start-up ecosystem – none of it good.

Of course, LTW’s fringe will have been packed with panels earnestly discussing how they can better support female founders and increase the 1.8% of overall VC that currently goes to women only ventures, and how to attract more women into tech more broadly.

Next time you hear a tech or finance bro explaining how they can’t employ/support/fund women because there simply aren’t enough of them coming forward, please do remember Schonle’s story.

Because this is what building inclusive cultures means. Inclusion isn’t about DEI theatre or special treatment based on identity. It’s simply about making everyone feel equally valued and welcome in their workplace. Schonle wasn’t asking for special treatment. She simply wanted to do her job and expected access to a space which would have enabled her to do it.

Late last week we heard that the UK economy contracted in April. Here’s an idea. Why don’t we try to grow that economy (an estimated £250 billion) by removing the barriers to women-led ventures and by allowing more women to participate in the tech economy?

But that would involve thinking about the “needs, facilities and safeguards” that parents need in the workplace. If we can do it for dog owners, we can do it for parents.

Right?