What needs to improve?

Ideally, we would not need to talk about Women in Tech anymore, because it will have become the new status quo. Unfortunately, it’s still relevant today. So, what needs to improve?

Three things comme to mind:

the sheer representation of women in the industry,
the long-term career opportunities within the industry,
the overall culture.

Before I go any further, I’d like to address a specific point: intersectionality. When we talk about women in Tech, it should address all women in Tech. For example: queer women, black women and women of color, women with disabilities, should be taken into account. There are unique aspects to each of these dimensions. The intersections of them are the reason why we need not just women in tech initiatives but all kinds of diversity initiatives.

Doctolib has started to put in place different actions to attract and retain women.

Our initiatives

On the recruiting part, we worked with talent acquisition teams and leadership to improve our hiring process. This included making sure we used inclusive language in our job postings, having female interviewers, unconscious bias training for hiring managers, external partnerships with schools, universities and coding bootcamps, Girls Day in Germany, etc.

Supporting the growth of women in the organization and making sure they thrive is much more difficult. It often only focuses on official policies and programs such as fair and transparent promotion and compensation policies, mentorship programs, unconscious bias training – which are important! What’s often forgotten is that a culture of inclusion and a sense of belonging isn’t just built through some policies. Inclusion and belonging really are crucial.

So, of course, visibility and awareness for the topic is important to create such a culture. But such a culture isn’t built overnight and that’s why we need a safe space for any employee where they can already feel understood, supported, respected and protected. Building communities as safe spaces – to me – is a fundamental part of making everyone feel included.

Why are communities so important and what are the best ways to build communities in tech?

Psychological safety is not just incredibly important for employee well-being, it actually is also proven to lead to less stress, fewer sick days, less burnout, more engagement, and higher productivity. The ideal is of course that any employee can always feel psychologically safe. It should be the norm to be your authentic self without experiencing any kind of judgment or discrimination. However, that is unfortunately just not the reality, especially for employees from any marginalised group.

Even if a company has a code of conduct against discrimination and all these things in place, it can never 100% prevent unpleasant experiences in all social interactions that happen in the work environment.

As a result, it’s important that we give people the safe space to talk to other affected people if they want to. It should be a space where they can simply share an experience or ask for advice without the risk of first having to explain themselves or experiencing a lack of understanding. You can have all the official policies and programs. But at the end of the day, it’s also about the people and not just some KPIs. And to be clear, you need both – they are mutually dependent! At Doctolib, we started by creating a dedicated Slack group.

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Article taken from the In good Company podcast – Extracts from Saskia Menke’s interview.