And the winner is……

Source Men Championing Change

Last night was Men Championing Change’s first-ever virtual meetup, using the power of Zoom. Our events have always been quite interactive and I was worried we might not be able to pull that off with a virtual audience, but actually it worked.

We also announced winners of the 2020 Men Championing Change awards, another first-ever! The purpose being to recognise men in our local technology ecosystem who are proudly donning their feminism tee’s, using their male privilege and working hard to influence and activate change. We all know that improving the representation of women in technology is hard, but more and more men are stepping up to not only acknowledge and lament the problem but actually take action to change it. There are not enough of them!

However, we had sufficient nominations to prove there are some seriously good men out there who not only care but care enough to do something about it.

A bit about our winners

MCC of The Year

Dan Draper was the recipient of the prestigious MCC of The Year award. He has been truly outstanding in his field, as a high profile software engineering leader in Sydney and very much a “techie” himself, Dan’s passion for improving equality in technology in recent years is such that he’s making a film about it. An actual real film. Check it out: Debugging Diversity. Dan has also been a regular attendee and contributor to MCC meetups since presenting at our launch event back in Nov 2017.

Ben Meneses-Sosa received the MCC Community Influencer award. A software engineering leader himself, Ben has been a passionate advocate for the advancement of women in tech for a few years now, but his passion has turned to action noticeably in the last 2 years since he has been involved with Men Championing Change. In 2019 Ben signed up to become a volunteer member of MCC’s organiser team and went on to deliver an awesome (literally) talk on Everyday Sexism.

Joe Waller received the Emerging MCC award. Joe is a seasoned, C level leader of technology and people. When he came to MCC’s first “CTO Roundtable” event for our group’s 1st birthday in 2018, he was one of the most genuinely humble and open of any technology leader I’ve met. He told me he was a novice in diversity but believed it to be of the utmost importance and that he would learn and do everything he could to effect change. Since then he’s stood by that in his role as CPTO at Finder and they are the better for it, including championing Finder’s sign-up to Project F’s Program 50/50 to improve the gender balance of their technology teams.

On to the meetup

So what about the Meetup? We held a debate on the validity of Computer Science Degrees in today’s software engineering. Our panel comprised;

Brendan Humphreys — Head of Engineering at Canva

Paul Keen — Global Head of Engineering at NUIX

Mahesh Muralidhar — COO at Simply Wall St

Ted Tencza — VP Engineering at Prospa

The audience wasn’t shabby either, to be fair, with technology leaders from the likes of Microsoft, Deputy, Domain, Finder, Safety Culture, Ansarada, Nine Network and more. Plus a smattering of talent acquisition leads and recruiters who also have an important part to play in this debate as they are on the front line.

Our survey said…

The debate was robust, with strong viewpoints and strongly held beliefs coming into play. The recognition was that even when a computer science degree is desired (even if not essential) for a role, putting this on the job advert is a barrier for a lot of women. Many, who have come into engineering careers through a different pathways (way more prevalent in women than men) actively avoid companies who advertise jobs with these degrees. What they read is “what I have won’t be valued there”. If you haven’t yet read what sparked this meetup in the first place, it was a Project F guest blog on this from Software Engineer, Taryn Ewens, check it out.

Source: Big Machine

The book The Imposter’s Handbook by Rob Conery was put forward from Audience members as an awesome resource for those without a CS degree.

However, the key takeaway from the debate was to define your company’s philosophy on computer science or engineering degrees. And if not deal-breakers for your hires, remove from the job adverts altogether. Trial it for a period, say 6 months, and measure the change in your flow of female applicants. For roles where a CS degree, or PhD, is essential (ie. candidates without would not be considered under any circumstances) keep it in, but only then. If it’s a “nice to have” take it off. There are a million “nice-to-haves” that we don’t list on adverts because we don’t want to narrow the intake of applicants.

The discussion surmised that when listing a computer science degree, you’re effectively cutting off a pool of female applicants. If having women in your teams is important to you and you don’t currently have gender diverse teams, then your job ads are a critical component in changing that.

A final take away as that if inclusivity is important and your company claims to be inclusive, the messaging you send to the talent community is where inclusivity starts and adverts that knowingly put off women (a current minority in tech) unnecessarily can’t really claim to be inclusive now can they (rhetorical question)?.

Midway through the debate we polled our audience:

Source: Men Championing Change

And there you have it folks. Looking forward to hearing who has changed their adverts and what difference it’s made to their applicant flow.

Final thought: Only 16% of Computer Science graduates in Australia are women.

Emma Jones is Founder and CEO of Project F.
Project F helps companies achieve gender balance in their technology teams by uncovering the systemic and environmental barriers so they can remove them. Project F also pipelines female-only tech talent for their clients.

Emma founded Men Championing Change in 2017 to harness the power of the majority (men) in improving the representation of women in tech. Men Championing Change operates across Sydney and Melbourne with a small, dedicated team of volunteer organisers: Jamie Finnegan, Taryn Ewens, Ben Meneses-Sosa, Scott Crowe, Chris Lienert and Simon Davie.