Ameera is an entrepreneur and medical doctor with a PhD in applied mathematics / computational neuroscience from the University of Cambridge.
After a period of working in the NHS, she was approached to join Microsoft Research’s Healthcare AI team. She has invented internationally-adopted signal engineering methods (now in use by >240 of the top academic institutions worldwide, as well as in industry), and built / commercialised healthcare infrastructure software to manage terabytes of medical imaging data as a founder of Naitive Technologies. She has advised several funds on healthcare AI investments and was responsible for launching TidalSense‘s cloud platform in 2020. As CEO, she continues to be responsible for overall software and AI technical leadership.
Common Misconceptions
As a female CEO working in healthtech, I’ve spent a lot of time on recruitment, poring over CVs, interviewing candidates and trying to build a high-performing, well-balanced and happy team. We’ve made a big effort to be inclusive in all of our hiring efforts and have been able to welcome some exceptional female engineers into our team in recent months. But I’m always concerned that we may be missing out on other engineering stars of the future, due to the continued perpetuation of popular myths about how tech recruitment processes typically work. It’s important that we dispel these misconceptions – here are some of the ones I’ve come across most frequently.
Just Apply
On average women have a higher barrier to applying for jobs than men. They apply for fewer jobs; in other words they are more selective. This poses a problem for normalising gender imbalances in the tech industry, particularly when companies fail to invest time into writing inclusive job descriptions. If x years of experience is always required (hardly a cast-iron guarantee of competence) in a male-dominated field, by definition very few women will meet the eligibility criteria. There is a lot of interesting research examining why people don’t apply for jobs, but consistently top ranking is not meeting the requirements, for whatever reason.
Top tip. Moderate the inner voice saying “But I don’t meet all of the requirements so I can’t apply / will waste my time / am not good enough” and take the plunge. Not meeting all of the requirements isn’t stopping other people from applying. The worst-case scenario is that you waste a bit of time. But the upside might be amazing.
Myth-busting. Job requirements are not a divine set of rules. When employers write these listings, they often write down absolutely everything without realising that those skills don’t exist in one person, let alone moderating for inclusivity.
Be ambitious
In my years of hiring, I’ve seen a recurring pattern with engineers, which is that women are less likely to apply for a job role more senior than their current role. In the latest set of software jobs we posted, we advertised a junior/mid-level position and a senior position. We had zero female applicants for the senior engineering role, but plenty for the junior/mid-level role. In many cases, women who applied for the junior/mid-level role had the same, if not more, experience than male applicants applying for the senior role.
Top tip. When women do apply for more senior roles, LinkedIn’s research indicates that they are 18% more likely to get the more senior job than male counterparts. It’s another reason why it’s worth taking the plunge and seeing what happens.
