Several years ago, I was invited, alongside my partner – a leading researcher at a local university – to a special themed event to celebrate women in the North East of England that I won’t name here.
We both attended the pre-event dinner at a chain restaurant in the city, where we sat, our food slowly getting cold, as one man after another representing the event and its sponsors stood up to tell us how cherished female entrepreneurship was in the region, and how they felt their female-focused event was long overdue – and would hopefully be the first of a long series of events that could raise up female voices.
Our food got cold. Multiple women I spoke to after that evening felt they’d been talked down to, both from the pre-dinner speakers and the high-powered men they were sat next to and forced to hear condescension from throughout the evening.
And it won’t surprise you to know that the women-focused conference didn’t last long. The organisers haven’t even bothered to keep the domain name.
The tech sector struggles to champion women and as a result, struggles to find companies founded by or run by women that succeed. Just one in five active firms in England were female-led, according to The Gender Index. It’s a countrywide problem.
Yet the region underperforms when compared to an already poor national picture – it’s the lowest-performing region when it comes to female leaders, according to The Gender Index – and what initiatives there are can sometimes be little more than lip service.
That’s something Rojin Yarahmadi, co-founder and CEO at PolyBox, an automated reporting tool for marketers, knows all too well. She moved to the North East from Iran four-and-a-half years ago.
“Back home, I was an extremely technical person. I had so many technical friends that were female, and we’re working together,” she said. “When I moved here, it was shocking the lack of female techy people in this industry.”
Yarahmadi has avoided many female-focused events in the region because she reckons that they often act as little more than talking shops about how to make change, without actually doing so – an experience I recognised at that special themed event all those years ago.
“I can go to another, very technical get-together, and I can get way more out of it,” she said.
She’s not the only one – speaking to several women in the North East tech sector at all levels, there’s a frustration that female founders get very little visibility in the region, with the obvious knock-on effects of not having visible role models for the next generation to follow.
The UK tech industry is already failing disabled people, as others at UKTN have noticed – but it’s also struggling to champion female founders in the way it ought to.
There are some green shoots in among the pessimism. Women In Tech North East, which was founded in 2022 as an informal network to help advocate better for women in the tech sector in the region, recently formalised its existence – and hopefully secured its future – by becoming a Community Interest Company (CIC) last month.
More than 1,000 members have joined the CIC, and attend its regular events – promoted by women, for women, women-identifying individuals, and non-binary and gender non-conforming individuals.
But even those positive shoots come up against the reality: the North East struggles to promote itself properly.
“There are very good startups, but we don’t shout about them enough,” said Yarahmadi. “That’s why they go to bigger cities. And if I were them, I would do the same. If it wasn’t because of economics, we would have moved either to Edinburgh or Manchester.”
The post Does the North East tech sector do enough to champion women? appeared first on UKTN.
previous post