Every fight for equality and fair representation benefits from the support and solidarity of allies. While some people who are part of a dominant group will happily and enthusiastically back movements that make society in general and workplaces, in particular, more equitable, others might feel threatened.
Roisin McCarthy, co-founder of the Women in Data initiative faced a particularly irate man who confronted her at an exhibition stand demanding to know why the initiative needed to exist in the first place. This hostility is likely to have originated from him feeling threatened; seeing a microphone being passed to others unlike themselves could cause a person to fear being silenced.
However, there are men who hold the polar opposite view of that irate individual. They are not shy about championing the ‘women in tech’ ethos and are part of events and programmes that promote gender equality. Jim Bichard is the UK insurance lead at PwC and winner of the everywoman in tech ‘male agent for change’ award.
I asked him why discussions around gender equality can make some men feel uneasy. He said: “The whole discussion is very uncomfortable to men because you feel like you are doing something wrong. We’ve got bad diversity stats, whether it is gender or ethnicity and so if you’re not in those groups, you feel like you are doing something wrong.” He also said it can lead to a feeling of helplessness and lack of agency from not knowing to do to help improve the situation, apart from apologising.
Data and analytics specialist James Morgan was far more blunt and said that perhaps they don’t like the competition. However, he gave a great many reasons why it is an important cause to get behind.
For Morgan, it is crucial that the teams he works with and the teams he works in are reflective of the makeup of the country. “Given that 50% of the country are women, our industry should reflect that position,” he said.
For him, the benefit of having a diverse team is that the members bring a different set of approaches, opinions, viewpoints and skillsets. He went on: “That helps you think about things from a different angle and brings a real variety of personality types to the mix and certainly makes whatever you are doing more rounded.”
In Bichard’s view, there is a moral as well as a business imperative for having diverse teams. He said: “It’s the right thing to do, but I guarantee we are going to be more successful as a business if we’ve got a more diverse workforce that reflects wider society and hopefully reflects our clients.”
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