Empowering Women at AL

3 common experiences highlighted among women in tech

• Women are still in the minority in tech
• There is an unmet demand for female role models in STEM and Tech?
• Gender imbalance in tech is equal across all size organisations 

(Source: Women in Tech Industry)

And yet, McKinsey analysis found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile. There are plenty more studies of this kind finding the exact same thing – diverse workforces are better.

At Automation Logic (AL) we’ve seen the same struggles as many other companies. There is a lack of women in the industry, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do everything in our power to improve the situation. And we have done some good work; our Graduate DevOps Academy is now consistently onboarding new groups of a 50:50 gender split, and those teams have gone on to progress into outstanding engineers. But that’s not enough. 

We came together with all of the women of AL to talk about what more can be done, from the big things to the little things, to become an inclusive employer that not only attracts and retains diverse talent but also propels women into senior careers that are so deserved by our female engineering team. 

We invited Faz Aftab to come in and give a talk about her life experience of progressing in the industry and showing up as your authentic self, before opening a discussion about what’s important to the women here specifically and what can be done to improve.

Some of the key topics we discussed: 

Mentoring Opportunities

Our General Manager, Vicky, spoke highly about the values and benefits of having a mentor – specially someone external to the company – to help you in your career. We’re now on the hunt for mentorship opportunities for the team, to ensure everyone has a strong role model, champion and confidant to look to when needed. 

Creating opportunities to hear women speak

Public speaking. How many people truly enjoy it? But it’s important: having your voice heard is critical to people taking note of the work you’re not only capable of doing, but probably already doing. 

We’re going to be creating more presenting opportunities at our company-wide meetings for women and create public speaking training opportunities for the team to take advantage of, helping all the women of AL get more comfortable in that position. 

Equal opportunities sick leave

Something that, arguably, isn’t spoken about nearly enough. Once a month, almost all people who menstruate must deal with the side effects that come with periods, often while trying to work. This is something that’s widely accepted as one of those annoying facts of life, but if you have to take a sick day because of this every month – that takes you over your allotted 10 days of sick leave without ever being allowed to actually be unwell, leaving people who menstruate at an unfair disadvantage.

To help with this, for now we’re increasing our full paid sick leave allowance to 20 days a year. We’re still looking for a real solution to this problem, so let us know if you have any thoughts! 

Female Development Programme 

After conducting our first women in tech event, we ran a survey to ask our employees what tools they need to empower them to do an even better job. We quickly realised that there was a combination of resources required to help bridge the gap. This idea is becoming known as a Female Development Programme. 

We are in the process of formalising a programme that will cater to the women of AL in all areas of the business, not just engineers. 

This type of programme takes time so in the coming weeks we will be reaching out to different areas of the business to discuss areas of improvement. 

However, some outcomes from the initial event and feedback forms have allowed us to create a loose map of the programme which will include: monthly workshops, creating a policy to support people who have periods, and creating mentorship opportunities.

For the time being, we will continue to run our events, pull in more research, and start opening up the channels to communicate more with the women in the company. 

We are passionate about providing a framework to empower the women of Automation Logic.

Interested in becoming a part of the team? Check out our vacancies.