Tech start-ups and women – a perfect working fit?

Alana Pearson is Chief Product Officer at developer marketplace platform Deazy.

She heads up Deazy’s Delivery Community across two departments and has two children – balancing swimming lessons and gymnastics classes with a four-day working week.

I started my career working for a large global tech consultancy.

It had a great focus on women in tech and was good at highlighting how working mothers could ‘have it all’. Although this was well-intentioned, the reality is that the mothers in the most senior positions I knew, worked full time, with lots of travel, and had nannies for support.

As attitudes towards working mothers are improving constantly, this situation may well have changed by now. However, for me, moving to a start-up—developer marketplace Deazy—more than three years ago while I was a mother has been highly beneficial.

My working environment is much less rigid than what I remember from being at a large corporation, and I am becoming a role model myself, having been promoted to the Leadership Team. Start-ups can be hugely supportive workplaces for women and working mums specifically – this is how women can flourish.

Be selective when choosing your start-up

This sounds obvious, but women need to be mindful of it when embarking on their tech careers. Choosing a start-up with the right boss is essential. Some people are very entrenched in behaviours and attitudes, and if your employer is one of them, it will be difficult for a woman to perform.

Deazy is an outlier, in that two key departments – our own internal Platform Team and Client Product Management Team – are all female. Furthermore, 50% of the company is female. We’ve all fallen into tech in some way or another. None of us left school and thought, ‘I want to work in tech’, but we were lucky enough to find an organisation and boss that is supportive of women. Gender has never been a factor at Deazy, and there has always been a decent balance between men and women.

That’s not to suggest that a woman shouldn’t work at a start-up that lacks that balance, but it is something to keep front of mind—is there a reason behind it?

Focus on flexibility and trust

Many parents now spend at least some of their working week at home. When childcare plans don’t go to plan, this can mean that day-to-day life for a working mother can involve conference calls with a baby glued to you, toddler interruptions, your attention being directed elsewhere, and having to work late in the day to catch up.

When children are young, sometimes, even doing any work at all can feel impossible. For example, if a child is sick, the priority will always be caring for them. That’s why flexibility and trust are paramount. My team understands my situation and trusts me to deliver, and I was given a say in how I can make both roles work. There may be some days when I am less productive, but my boss knows I will make up for that on other days.

That’s the message I say to younger women in my organisation and the tech industry as a whole: Don’t feel like you must succeed at everything all the time. It’s okay sometimes to feel less effective at work or as a mum. Bosses and employers must demonstrate trust to empower and enable women in tech to thrive.

The role of positive mentors

Even in start-ups, which are more realistically progressive, there are fewer women. This means strong female role models are also thin on the ground. That’s a shame because role models and mentors can be a vital influence on anyone’s career, providing guidance, support, advice, and much more.

This is especially true for women in technology, where it can be hard to establish yourself. Having someone who has already worked through some of the struggles you may be facing to offer advice and an empathetic ear is invaluable.

As a mentor and a mentee, I know how important it is for women in tech to support other women in the industry. Call it sisterhood, call it being a good person, call it paying it forward—just try to remember the struggles you had establishing yourself in a male-dominated environment and help others who might be going through the same.

The perception that women can smash their careers and motherhood all the time can be damaging to women in tech and creates unrealistic expectations. If you aren’t doing this, then you feel like a failure.

It’s hard enough to juggle careers and motherhood without this false expectation of perfection, so I believe that for many, a start-up is a tech working environment that lets women flourish.