An “entirely solvable” problem

Here, Cabot Credit Management’s chief information officer Amanda Fraser shares ways the credit industry can make tech spaces more welcoming to women.

In a 24/7/365 digital age when “every company is now a technology company,” the demand for highly skilled leaders who can help businesses execute digitally is higher than ever - creating opportunities for more women to enter the field.

That’s not just a win for female tech workers and companies committed to increasing diversity; it’s also a way for businesses to improve their performance.

A 2020 report by McKinsey found that companies with more than 30% female executives were “more likely to outperform companies where this percentage ranged from 10 to 30.” The most gender-diverse companies were 48% more likely to outperform the least gender-diverse companies. That’s no surprise.

I’ve been fortunate to always work for employers that have women in senior IT roles or in other functions, and I believe it’s contributed greatly to my personal and professional growth. I’m comfortable on technology teams, and I enjoy the camaraderie, the problem-solving challenges, and the buzz of delivering a project on-time for my colleagues. I have always focused on operating to the best of my abilities and felt welcomed by many male colleagues. It should be that way at every company.

Unfortunately, however, inflexible work patterns still bar many women from achieving the career growth they desire in tech. Deloitte predicts that female representation in global technology firms will reach 33% in 2022 — up more than two percentage points from 2019 but still far from reflective of the global population.

At Cabot Credit Management (CCM), I’m privileged to work with some of the industry’s most outstanding female talent. Their technical expertise contributed to CCM’s strong growth in 2021. While tech is our day-to-day responsibility, our combined efforts help consumers in need.

Yet even as companies like CCM create more space for women to thrive in the tech world, still the “male-dominated industry” narrative lives on and my female colleagues and I at CCM have some thoughts on how the credit industry can make tech spaces more welcoming to women.

How to be more welcoming

For one, we need to break our working pattern models to help women enter and stay in our workforce. In IT, this is entirely solvable. It means removing the barriers that keep women from taking on tech roles in the first place, as well as the ones that keep women from re-entering the field after pausing to raise families, take care of loved ones, or take on any of the other social and family roles that often fall to women. For example, organisations could create well-defined training and development schemes and flexible progression paths that empower women to keep learning and growing, even as the demands of life and family require them to scale up or scale down their time at work.

As a mum of three, I’ve previously had the career without the flexibility, which has been a tough gig at times. The flexibility had to come after I changed roles. But it shouldn’t be that way. We need to help young women and girls at university and in school understand that good, interesting, flexible careers can be in IT. That’s why companies need to build female mentor schemes that pair rising tech talent with industry veterans who can share what they learned on their own career paths.

We also need to be better listeners and talk “less tech.” That means recognising the value of non-technical roles and building progression paths from those roles to technical ones. Senior technology roles in the past tended to favour technical backgrounds, which were often male. But that failed to consider the key skills that make a good chief information officer — business alignment and IT delivery performance.

The projects I’m most proud are all around fixed-time, critical-deadline scenarios where I led cross-functional teams. With every project I led, I saw individuals open up and excel way beyond expectations. There are lessons for all in these scenarios about collaboration, well-defined common goals, respect for skills, empowerment of the team, active sponsorship and ultimately morale.

These are areas where women can thrive and excel beyond expectations, and I encourage us all to help open the pathways for them to succeed.

To read the magazine click here.
This year’s Women in Credit Conference takes place on 6 October, followed by the Women in Credit Awards that evening. To book click here. To nominate click here.