Why is there a lack of women in tech? It’s a question that has been asked countless times, with numerous initiatives and thought works on how to increase gender representation.
Yet, the dial has still not moved much above 19% of women in the UK tech industry.
So why are there still too few women in the industry? What barriers are stopping them entering? And how do we overcome them?
Anais Urlichs, a Developer Advocate from Aqua Security, sits down with us to discuss female representation in tech, the barriers she’s faced, and what companies can do to create an inclusive culture.
As part of her role, Anaïs contributes to Aqua’s cloud native open source projects. When she is not advocating DevOps best practices, she runs her own YouTube Channel centered around cloud native technologies. Before joining Aqua, Anais worked as SRE at Civo, a cloud native service provider, where she helped enhance the infrastructure for hundreds of tenant clusters. As CNCF ambassador of the year 2021, her passion lies in making tools and platforms more accessible to developers and community members.
hello everyone and thank you for tuning in as always I am Katie Bateman the content director at chican code and I
have the fabulous Anna ease lick with me today who is a developer Advocate from Aqua security and we will be discussing
reasons for the lack of women in Tech and the barriers they faced welcome our news hi thank you so much for having me
thank you for joining us we’re really excited to have you with us this morning and um now obviously reasons why there
are a lack of women in Tech this has been us countless times but the dial has
still not moved much from 19 of women in the UK tech industry so before we get
into the discussion for today though um can we hear a little bit about yourself and your background please sure so I
work as open source developer Advocate at Aqua security Aqua security is a
cloud native security company focused on providing supply chain security so basically securing all of the assets
that go go into your software development process now I work
specifically with the open source tools at the company so all my work is focused on promoting those those tools and
sharing content on the tools providing developer education and collaborating with the community as a whole before I
joined Aqua security I was working inside reliability engineer for the past
year in 2021 and before that I was also working as for several years as
developer advocate for various startups and industries when you joined Tech did
did you know that you wanted a career in technology or is it something that you fell into yeah so the process or like
the I guess the decision happened quite gradually so my first degree was in
information systems and information systems is a mixture between management and computer science however I dropped
out of that degree halfway through because I wanted to pursue a computer science degree and work at the same time
so I’m studying for the past five years and online computer science degree at a
UK University and working um so yeah yeah it’s an ongoing thing
it’s quite lengthy to do a part-time degree online however you get the work experience and
you get to focus on on different parts of like again industry experience and
um yeah as part of that throughout those past five years my career moved into Tech has happened
quite gradually my first job was as technical writer as technical analyst for startup and then from there I went
into software engineering and then into developer advocacy wow and so so during that time then you
decided to embark on a computer science degree was that something did somebody
encourage you in that area or you know is it something that you just thought that that would really help me in the
direction that I want to take my career so it’s pretty much the the second and
um along the second line of thoughts um so I at the University where I was
studying my information systems degree we had the option to work with various startups from the Masters program and
throughout working collaborating with those startups and um helping them with different projects
I realized that my interest was very much in working with technological
startups of a startups that have focus on SAS businesses
um or really on the infrastructure and providing Technical Solutions out of
things so that’s where that in initial interest came from and then the desire
to actually Focus my degree solely on computer science and move my career
further in that direction yeah yeah and in your opinion and what makes a career in Tech so interesting
I think because it’s a very versatile area right Korean Tech does not just
mean one thing if you’re uh I would if you compare it for instance per medicine
to medicine medicine is medicine and you have quite a same kind of career path
usually into medicine and then you specialize in different fields and overall it’s medicine however in Tech
it’s everybody’s coming from a different background there’s no one standard path there is no run rule on how to do things
there’s no even when you create a project when you’re working on an on an
algorithm there’s not one way of doing things it’s always the ends always it
depends right um to every question it depends what is your environment what is your setup what
are your goals what do you try to achieve what solution do you want to provide and based on that the process on
how do you get the end result and the end result will be completely different as well well and I think that’s what
makes Tech so interesting and having a career in Tech so interesting because everybody can can excel in different
ways right um yeah and yourself you’re you’re always learning in technology which is
is something that you’re still doing yourself and you can always progress and always learn it’s you know it’s very
fast paced um but it seems like you don’t seem to just get in the industry and and stay in one job there are so
many opportunities to learn and grow in Tech yeah exactly that’s what we what we
see especially in newer Industries and newer sectors um whether that’s machine learning or
Cloud native Technologies anything that’s working with a technology that’s
only a few years old it doesn’t matter how much how many years of experience you’ve gathered beforehand uh because
ultimately that technology is so new that you can own that you can start at any time at any point in time and and
become a professional in that area right yeah it’s really about continuous
learning and yeah and key interests it keep moving forward yeah and allowing
you I suppose as well being at the right company that allows you to keep moving forward and and keep growing
um not just within your role but into the future ones that you would like to move into
um it sounds like you know you had a lot of training and you had a lot of great you know background and experience but
have you faced any obstacles on your career journey and and how did you overcome them lots I would say lots it’s
um I I remember when I decided to change to
a computer science degree um my mother told asked me whether I
really want to do that to myself that was how my initial thought it was basically like
um her seeing she was working at a a tech company and
um doing kind of book keeping related task managerial related tasks there but
she saw obviously how male driven male dominant industry is and how also some
men were behaving in in that field and that’s that’s what triggered her
question obviously of um do you want to do that to yourself and I was fortunate to work at
um startups that uh that were quite advanced in terms of providing diversity
and encouraging um women to get involved and providing opportunities
however the industry itself has still has uh struggling with lots of different
stereotypes right um when you usually when you hear engineer develop a software engineer
lots of people will think about just by default they will think about a man not a woman right and that
um but if that translates into lots of um into different kind of treatment I
would say for for women versus men in the space so uh that’s I guess the the
most I struggled with uh with that stereotype of demonstrating that I was
as capable as my as my male colleagues um yeah and the language that that goes
with it that oftentimes is not people don’t realize that it is discriminating
um until you point it out so you it turns you I think you have two options
either constantly advocating for yourself um and advocating for uh for the change
for that language to change and pointing out that there has to a change to happen and so on
um or you you avoid it and avoiding goes down with you have to get a peace of
mind that you’re okay with that you’re okay with being talked on a certain way and I think I’ve seen both both ways
work out for people I I choose the former of constantly speaking up for myself even if I can retiring yes yes
I can imagine you imagine that your mum and when she worked in a in an office
she she could actually see you know that type of environment and and what it
looked like going into a male dominated Tech environment I’m curious to know in
terms of what’s happened with uh kovid and you know working from home and hybrid working have you seen a change
there has that kind of leveled the playing field a little bit for ladies or or has it got worse do you think yeah I
think if it’s gotten a lot better so for most of my career I’ve worked remotely
I’ve worked uh for different companies uh from different countries and had to
travel to the office or similar but I was used to working remotely however my most of my colleagues weren’t used to it
they were working in the office so what I would say throughout the pandemic is that
um my male colleagues had to get involved more in tasks at home that are
usually associated a stereotyped towards uh the woman in the house having to take
care of that right so um I think that the past Year’s cost meant to have to get more involved and
actually experience that um getting that balance at work life balance of managing
um both both responsibilities type of responsibilities
um so that’s something that’s one thing I realized changed that I think men are more understanding now of the things
that women have to take care of and that life sometimes gets in the way so now at
Aqua I have a lot a lot of times it happens that a colleague of mine can’t uh can’t be fully present at work
because they have their sick kid at home and they’re working from home and I think that makes it more so much more
inclusive because it doesn’t just dribble down to the women in the team and then them
might feeling that they left that they are left out or that they can’t give as much as their male colleagues and
um because of that because of those additional responsibilities right yes and you mentioned there when when uh you
know somebody that you know has a sick child at home for instance instead of them having to run around and trying to
fit that in and then by the time you see them again a couple of days later they they look incredibly tired themselves
you know they’ve just managed to to um to get through their week by working
from home and having that sick child at home and they just they seem a lot happier in themselves they’re not
mentally burnt out by the end of the week and you get more out of them as a colleague and working on whatever
project it is with you because they’ve they’ve had that flexibility at home I mean it’s absolutely had a positive
effect on on all of us and we’ve mentioned obviously the good things and there have been a lot of positives so
far do you think are still barriers for women in Tech we still have a long way to go don’t we
do I think um I think it got easier to break into
Tech to get started that initial step however I have a lot more and more
people reach out to me more and more friends as well who got into Tech who have a tech or engineering related
career and they ask me for advice about different situations they account along
the way along their career of encountering sexism encountering this discrimination and a lot of times
they’re they’re even uncertain if it’s discriminating or if it’s
um like if the struggle that they’re facing is actually a struggle is actually something specific to them because it’s sometimes we get we get go
a long way without facing any discrimination and then all of a sudden we might change role we might have a new
colleague or something changes and we all of a sudden experience it for the
first time and we might not understand of what’s happening and I think that’s one of the struggles and it’s one thing
that we have to keep speaking up about that sexism in the space still exists it’s
very much present day-to-day life in various forms and
if somebody’s experienced something they don’t that doesn’t feel right then they
should have a space to to talk about it and to get to maybe get help and
change change the way things are or um yeah
yeah I used to work um well I I worked for a long time writing about women in
Tech and the barriers and getting more females I’ve seen to the industry I had
a break a few years ago from from this particular area to look after a parent
that wasn’t well and I moved to a company that was um closer to to home
and and that was easier for me at the time and in terms of my personal life
and since then I moved to around to a couple of companies but I I haven’t
quite realized that that those comments and the things that you mentioned here they’re still very much alive and
because I’d moved out of the the positive bubble of talking about women
in Tech and diversity and I’d moved off to a few companies um that you know that I did different
things and I wrote about um other other topics yeah I didn’t quite realize that those those little quips and that what
we call banter is still very much alive and it did make me think I really do I
miss writing about the positive side of things because it’s it’s um a baptism of
fire sometimes that you realize that there is still so much that we need to do and as you say people don’t always
realize as well um that you’re being discriminated until you you know you really get quite far
down the line and you realize actually somebody said something to me and that’s that’s not quite right and I do want to
speak up about it and who do I go to what what can women do to to overcome
these barriers do you think I think the first thing is try to build
a strong network of like-minded people around you um it’s great to have diversity of
thought but in certain situations you need somebody who whom you can trust with those situations to get advice from
to sometimes it helps to just get it out get your frustration out um and then instruct yourself of
something else sometimes you can act upon your frustration sometimes you can’t act in a productive way upon your
frustration um that’s that’s one thing get yourself a support network there are lots of
groups online um which is great and over the past years I’ve actually I’ve realized the
value of those groups at the beginning to be honest I was I was constantly thinking that
um diversity should be included in any space right that I didn’t necessarily
want to put to participate in women-only spaces um but through my experiences I now see
the value in having a safe space so do build yourself a safe space before you
need it that’s my first setup yes yes and sharing that you’re not the only person that might feel a certain way and
just hearing it from somebody else is is nice to hear actually that’s okay
um and now you know what what can we do about it now I realize it’s not just me you know but that was I being sensitive
um but hearing lots of other people say the same thing as you that that really helps her then find a way forward
to feel validated exactly that it’s not um it’s not you in most cases who did
anything wrong it’s you have to I think that something else you have to keep in mind it’s usually when you encounter
these situations it’s about the other person it’s about their misconceptions it’s about their way of thinking it has
nothing to do with you it doesn’t um devalue you in any way
um you are as amazing of a person as you were a few minutes before it’s just about the other person who is struggling
with their own things and will have to understand that certain communication and certain treatment is not okay
um so that’s that’s the first advice second advice I would give to people is really
um use being part of a underrepresented group as a as an advantage and I have
done that in the past years there’s lots of disadvantages lots of struggle that we are facing but at the same time we
can use it um as to our advantage as well I skipped companies from company to company a lot
of times about every year throughout my career um in the past um and that was really driven by unjust
treatment that I didn’t feel I had to respond to I had to deal with and
um if you are listening to this and you find yourself in a position where you uh where you’re struggling maybe at your
current company there are lots of companies who are looking for talented individuals who want to join their team
and um who want to provide diversity because it’s ultimately it’s an advantage to our
company to have a diverse team there’s research that shows that there were teams there was leadership does a lot
better than having just uh homogeneous parts and and work patterns right so
um yeah that’s that’s definitely the second second advice I would give like really use being part of this group
being part of women in Tech as an advantage to you and you don’t have to sit things out if you are struggling
there’s really no need to do that and um yeah yeah that and that’s great
advice as well and a lot of that as well is you know things that you can do yourself and and you can you know feel
empowered and make change um in uh in your role what do you think
companies can do more you know to create an inclusive culture we we had a lady on
here the other day that was discussing uh we we had a quick discussion about the fact it’s more than just a slack
Channel about you know just sort of sharing our views about um diversity and inclusion and it’s
actually more about how it makes that employee feel in their day-to-day but do
you think there’s anything else that companies can do I think definitely having a zero
tolerance policy that’s that’s the first thing that um it should not happen in the first
place if it happens if somebody is discriminated in any shape form
um it should not be tolerated they should have a way to bring it up to
their managers and um have maybe if the manager is not
necessarily to trusted person have um somebody assigned within the company
ideally some a woman somebody who is part of
um women in Tech similar um who can understand you more easily who can like
relate to you in a better way um so when you have that contact person it becomes easier to to know that it’s
their job to listen to you right like a lot of times we don’t want to um bring something up that’s yet another
thing coming from us right like um it’s usually women who like to to
talk about interpersonal relationships and how things um are not necessarily working out the way we want it to work out and Men
usually just stay quiet about things when they are not and just maybe ignore it if things are not going well
um so having an assigned person is I guess one thing to encourage conversation
um the other thing is something that I um would love more companies to do is
having diversity goals so make it as part of every team that there have to be
certain goals within the team to Foster diversity that’s mentorship between more
senior employees with more Junior employees but encouraging that that it’s
part of your performance of how well you help others and how you well you help underrepresented members within the team
um that that would make it easier to to get I guess to to access knowledge to access
opportunities right because we have we have lots of women who start in junior roles right to start
um who start getting into Tech then lots of them drop out once they start having a family right and because things become
more more difficult uh they can’t keep up with the job requirements with the
demand um and then ultimately they can’t access the same kind of opportunities
um so making it as part of the company’s goal I think that’s first it’s a way of
to manifest it and to hold yourself accountable because like My Philosophy is if nobody takes ownership and
nobody’s held accountable things don’t happen um yeah yes absolutely I completely
agree with you know making sure that people are accountable and that you have somebody that you say not to somebody
that you can go to and and Report something to but somebody that actually relate to you as well you know there’s
no point having somebody in that role that really doesn’t um understand or even empathize with you
um about what it is that you’re going to them to to you know even confiding them not necessarily report but just to
confide in somebody um One Challenge that women face in the industry is a lack of Role Models do you
have any role models in Tech so to be honest I don’t have somebody
specific whom I would consider um who who fits to me like The Stereotype
of what a role model is a lot of times I think we associate role models of somebody who’s um who’s maybe more advanced who has
more uh who has worked in a space for longer who is acquired skills that we
would like to to gain in similar so in that sense I don’t have a role model
um but I have different people in my network whom I look up to for different things right and those are both those
are both men and women in in the space um so I guess I go to different people
for different um for different kind of advice and that’s really supporting me and that’s
fulfilling the um I guess the part of a role model for me
um now it would be nice to have a more mentorship kind of relationship and I
guess if you have the option to um to build that with somebody to build a member mentorship kind of relationship
then definitely you go for it and invest into that I have mentored however other
women in this space and women breaking into Tech so I’ve been on the other line
of the other the other part of the of the conversation I guess more
um but yeah there were lots of um I was fortunate to meet lots of men who have really helped me throughout my
career and taken an active part in helping me advance and access
opportunities so I think um definitely build yourself a support network of like-minded people and women
in this space but don’t exclude the possibility of meeting also others who can give you access to
more opportunities so that’s yeah that keeping that
um keeping your options open and making sure that you have a range of um people in your network and resources
and talking about resources there do you um do you have any other resources that you
that you tap into do you have any um you know favorite podcasts or books
women in Tech groups yeah you’re a part of yeah definitely so I I love
psychology books and um books related and behaviorism and
um and it just that sort of genre um and it really helps me to to
understand situations that might have been confusing or irritating
um or I might didn’t really understand what was going on or how I could have behaved differently more effectively or
um also for me personally right A lot of times we might encounter situation and we could really mine up and don’t really
understand what’s going on and it’s sometimes more hurtful to us than to anybody else so I love uh reading those
listening to those audio books and uh one book that I’m listening to right now
is 13 things mentally strong women do by Amy Morin and she’s a psychologist
psychiatrist and she’s referencing different advice on different types of
behavior and situations and ways to deal with situations with stories from her
own patients and um the the things that she has experienced and she has seen other women
struggle both and experience and yeah that’s that’s really helping me personally to make sense of things of
different situations yes yeah no besides that
um there’s again there are lots of resources it’s really about identifying those resources there are lots of
different um groups women who code girls code who
provide also a social network and sometimes it just helps to go there and have a have a rant about things and
people are just going to be like yeah we get you and and that’s it right sometimes that’s
all you need um sometimes you’re not looking for advice right sometimes you just need somebody to talk to
um so yeah or sometimes I just I love reading blog posts on on the experience
of others right and um that’s that’s really helpful just because it’s validating right it’s validating your
own experiences um and uh providing you a different perspective or maybe providing you a bit
of a perspective if you didn’t quite know how to make sense of a situation um so those are some reasons I like to
use blog posts um also podcasts I listen to lots of different podcasts also by women in
different Industries because a lot of times they struggle with the same thing in different formats right uh like it’s
accelerated in a text space but also in different Industries women face
discrimination right and the represented groups face discrimination and um for for much longer than in Tech as
well so they have built out of a strategies other ways of good to go about it and
sometimes it really just helps to listen to um to the perspective of them of
somebody also who’s outside your industry who’s um maybe thinking about everything a bit differently right um
just being outside of that Circle yeah you’re right it’s interesting to hear
I’m not to hear from people that are not just in Tech or those that have come into Tech and their their roots in and
you’re right reading about people’s careers you know their career experience it’s everybody has a very different
career path and it’s nice sometimes to to pick up on you know tips that um that
other ladies can offer and for us that you know move around the industry for it for um instance
um we are running out of time and I have one last question to ask you um do you have any advice for women looking to get
into the industry yes I would say Don’t Wait A lot of
times yeah don’t wait don’t don’t wait until you have the skills because you will never have the skills right A lot
of times and there’s also research backing that that right women apply for a role when they have 100 of the skills
versus men apply for a role when they have 60 of the skills or less right and they feel very confident about getting
that role and um one thing that helped me I guess uh
throughout my my career so far is just going for things just asking for opportunities and clearly stating the
things that you don’t know yet or that you’re not too sure about that’s
completely okay and a lot of times people will appreciate your honesty um and at the same time they appreciate
you standing up for what you do now and what you do want to get and what you do want to try out and Achieve so if you’re
studying in Tech if you want to get started just start applying for junior
positions and the the worst thing is that can happen is that you get the
interview experience that you get feedback on your interview experience um and you don’t get the role but
nothing worse will happen it might take some time to to apply and to interview
but ultimately you will walk away with an enriching experience either one or
even rub a job which which so don’t wait experience is invaluable as you say either why would
you get the job or not and also if you’re new to Tech and you want to look into different careers and whether or
not a certain role is for you then interviewing is a great way to do that to hear more about you know whether or
not the role is for you and which company you would actually like to join so yeah that’s great advice
uh well we are out of time um thank you so much for for joining us today
um and easy has been um it’s it’s been a pleasure so thank you so much for coming along and sharing
your insights with us thank you for having me this was great thank you and to everybody as always
um listening in we uh thank you for joining us as always and we hope to see you again next time
