Women in Technology: 4 Tips to Advance in your career in tech

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Guest contributed by Avery Phillips

Interestingly, despite the noise, the number of women in computer science jobs is actually lower than it was in 1995 — by 37 percent.

Research from Ohio University shows that organizations with greater levels of gender diversity can see sales revenue up to 1325 percent higher than those with the least amount of gender diversity. Still, the stereotypical Silicon Valley crowd remains predominantly male, despite the gains being documented on several levels.

Set Yourself Up for Success

It’s still an uphill climb, unfortunately — women are granted less than 2 percent of venture capital funding, despite accounting for 38 percent of small business ownership. Networking is incredibly valuable before you take the plunge and head to Silicon Valley. Arm yourself with great people, good ideas, and a lot of perseverance.

Here are 4 tips for setting yourself up for success:

  • Cultivate real-life positivity. According to Fortune 500, companies with three or more female executives see an incredible 66 percent increase in their return on investment. What you bring to the table is invaluable, and you shouldn’t let potential investors forget it.
  • Diversity breeds innovation, and innovation in tech means money — something an investor is happy to hear about. Build a team that you can count on and trust them. Pushing the tech sector outside of its current homogeny will benefit companies and consumers alike.
  • Embrace your strengths. Society will tell you that to be successful in tech and business, you must eschew traditionally female traits and conduct yourself as a man. Throw that idea out the window. Society sees men as the standard for business conduct because that’s what it’s always looked like. Interrupt that idea, embrace your differences, and use them to your advantage.
  • Believe in your work. Being a woman in tech is hard, and it will continue to be hard for quite some time. Change does not happen overnight, but the implicit biases that individuals bring to the table do not diminish your work. Have faith in your cause and hustle until it happens. The next generation of workers will thank you.
Taking Advantage of Current Opportunities

Advances in augmented reality, device connectivity, and remote monitoring are changing the way we look at education and personal health. Historically, these fields (sans technology) have been dominated by women, which makes a female tech-takeover more widely palatable although not a given.

Though it may unfairly gendered, investors perceive women as having more authority in these fields based on previous career trends, making investment in female-founded startups more likely in the health and education sector.

Classrooms are quickly becoming highly digital, requiring students to use laptops and tablets proficiently for many activities. Education requires applications designed to be understood by a variety of learning styles, applicable across subjects, and available at a cost reasonable to educational institutes. Unfortunately, the lack of a consumer market makes it less appealing to existing tech companies; there simply isn’t as much money to be made, despite the long-term benefits of a more educated population.

Healthcare is becoming increasingly digitized, with individual health data being collected and used to make treatment decisions from afar or to monitor patient adherence to treatment plans. While this presents an incredible advancement in the accessibility of care, it places patient data at high risk. The tech sector is charged with responding to the risk and protecting patient information — whatever that may look like.

Currently, solutions in both markets lack efficacy and practicality, creating huge opportunity for innovative thinkers to disrupt the industry. With women being more welcome in these sectors, it’s the perfect bridge to a Silicon Valley C-Suite.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

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5 Tips For Avoiding Miscommunication in the Workplace

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miscommunication, emails

By Guest Contributor

New research into communication in the workplace has revealed that 56% of all workers have committed some kind of miscommunication in the office (defined in the study as unintentionally sending a communication to the wrong person at work).

Communication is a key aspect of your everyday working life but, clearly, there is work to be done when trying to get your point across. Follow these five tips and minimize the likelihood of a misunderstanding in your office.

1. Use the best methods available

Alongside investigating how often miscommunication occurs in the workplace, TollFreeForwarding’s recent research uncovered the mediums with which it takes places.

Email was the chief culprit, with just over a third (34%) saying they’d sent an email to the wrong person when at work. Other platforms where regular miscommunication occurs include texts or instant messages (such as Whatsapp) at 22%.

Despite it probably being your go-to method for communicating in the office (269 billion are sent worldwide every day), email isn’t actually the most efficient way of communicating at work.

This is particularly true when communicating internally, so take a look at which platforms you predominantly use and look to give new ones a try. Try collaboration tools like Skype (which had a much lower 16% miscommunication rate in the survey) or Slack, which are designed for inter-team comms. You could even go a little old-fashioned and encourage more face-to-face communication. Some companies have incorporated tech-free office hours in a bid to encourage more verbal communication.

2. Know your data restrictions

Data compliance is everyone’s responsibility in business, but the research revealed how often information is leaked by employees. Almost a quarter (23%) of the workforce said they had sent some form of confidential information to the wrong person at work. Most of this was personal information about another colleague (13%), but that still leaves 10% of workers who have admitted to miscommunicating confidential business information. This can often be down to not applying the correct level of protection for your data, or simply using the wrong platform. Again, emails aren’t terribly secure, so communicating across them with confidential information can lead to disaster. Be extra vigilant with what you’re saying, who you’re saying it to and what medium you’re using to say it.

3. Separate work and personal communication

Methods for work and personal communication are often blurred. If using instant messaging to chat with others becomes the norm at home, chances are you’ll begin to adopt it in working life.

This does come with its own complications, particularly if you’re using the same device in both instances. Almost one in five (19%) said they’d left a voicemail on a colleague’s mobile phone that it wasn’t intended for, and just over one in five (21%) said they have accidentally sent a photo or video to a colleague.Depending on the content, this can be embarrassing for both the sender and receiver of these communications.

17% of workers said they had sent insulting comments to the wrong person by accident. The majority of these instances (10%) were comments about someone who wasn’t the receiver of the communication, but the remaining 7% admitted to accidentally sending insulting comments about the person who received it.

There are vastly different communicative expectations between work life and home life. Get it wrong, and this can lead to inappropriate content being sent to a colleague at work. To avoid the potential pitfalls, look to separate work and personal communication wherever possible. As an easy starter, pick up a cheap work mobile phone and don’t use your personal email address for any work-based communications.

4. Don’t be afraid to speak up

That last point should be applied as a general rule in your communicative habits. Bad communication at work happens – it’s a skill to get it right and sometimes we fail to hit the mark. This can lead to unwarranted stress, confusion, unclear strategies and missed deadlines.Sometimes, it can be daunting to approach your boss if you didn’t understand their instruction, but it’s a key part of avoiding miscommunication in the office. If in doubt, just ask.

5. Try something new

Like an earlier suggestion, you could choose to switch up your daily communication methods and attempt to loosen your reliance on technology. Frank, face-to-face conversation is always going to be the most efficient way to discuss workplace problems and bring about solutions. So, how can you incorporate more of it into your working day?
An alternative to the tech-free hour mentioned above is the “Scrum” or “Daily Standup”. This is essentially a brief, daily team meeting that gives everyone an opportunity to mention blockages and barriers to success. Issues can be addressed early at the start of the day and you can avoid a back-and-forth email exchange that can so easily be misinterpreted or ignored.

Where miscommunication occurs in the office

Alarmingly, throughout the research conducted, men were found to miscommunicate at work with much more regularity. In every aspect of miscommunication investigated in the survey, men were found to do it more.

Earlier, we said that 56% of workers had miscommunicated in the office – but break it down by gender and the story is different. 70% of men say they have miscommunicated in the office, compared to just 49% of women. The same is true of the method of communication. For example, 43% of men have accidentally sent an email to the wrong person at work – 12 percentage points higher than women.

As for the content of the communication, the trend continues. Over a third of men have accidentally sent some confidential information (35%), almost double that of women (18%). Similarly, more than a quarter of men (26%) have sent insulting comments to the wrong person at work – the same category is just 15% for women.

In summary, women are much better at avoiding miscommunication in the office than their male counterparts – but that too comes with its own risks. To boost productivity and avoid the embarrassing pitfalls of poor office communication, we’ll need to give and take instructions from both men and women. Following the tips above, and encouraging others to do the same, could lead to a decrease in the level of miscommunication we see today.

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Voice of Experience: Vilaiporn Taweelappontong | PwC Thailand

Speak up; share your aspirational goals; and pursue your ambitions, advises PwC Thailand’s Vilaiporn Taweelappontong.

“In our culture, many young women still shy away from sharing their dreams, as they do not want to be seen as aggressive. But my message is that it’s ok to speak up. It’s your career, and you are the one responsible for it,” she says.

She notes that in Asian cultures, employees are taught to look to supervisors for approval before proceeding with any tasks or making big decisions and that if you work hard enough and do a really good job, you will be noticed and considered for promotion. But while in the United States office, she realized she was missing opportunities by not speaking up, and soon decided that being more vocal and visible and sharing career aspirations and then aggressively pursuing them would lead to success. That, combined with a strong network and supportive mentors, have propelled her career.

From Consulting to Leading

Taweelappontong has spent more than 20 years in IT consulting, with the past five as a country leader. She started her career in Thailand with a different global consulting firm, with the intent to just stay for a few years before moving to the corporate environment. But after a few projects, she fell in love with the speed of the consulting business and the opportunity to meet people and learn from the best, along with working with different technologies. She had the opportunity to work in many countries, including three years in the United States, where she learned a great deal about leadership, practice building and people management.

One of the professional achievements she’s most proud of is building the Thailand practice, achieving more than 75 percent growth in the past five years and growing the team substantially.

Earlier in her career, she preferred working with technology, rather than dealing with people. “Technologies are much easier to handle, since you don’t need to address emotional people or tough characters,” says Taweelappontong.

So when offered opportunities to step up and lead, she was hesitant at first, but having good coaches and mentors supported her confidence by allowing her to make mistakes and share her worst fears in order to learn and grow. Although she has conquered that reticence and has proven to be an effective leader, technology remains her area of most interest. She is currently working on several projects where the team is assessing how emerging technologies can help improve clients’ back office operations by automating tasks that are currently done by humans and using analytics to help inform better decisions. The goal is not necessarily to reduce costs but to improve efficiency, reduce human error and redeploy employees to more interesting and strategic roles, such as customer service and analytics.

“As a business technologist, I’m always passionate about learning the new technologies, like how robotics can perform a surgery, how AI can help with screening candidates and how analytics can help predict customers’ and employees’ behavior and needs,” Taweelappontong says.

Helping Create Balance

IT consulting is a demanding job and that can lead many women to resign once they reach the manager level in order to gain more time for their families. Taweelappontong says that as exit interviews continued to show the parallel path of promotions coinciding with family, they worked with HR to introduce flexible work arrangements.

For example, one single mom who needed to come in later in the morning after school drop-off or leave early some days to help with homework, received a 60 percent work arrangement that allowed her to coordinate with colleagues to meet those needs. Another manager whose husband asked her to resign for more family time was given a three-day-a-week schedule. “These flexible work arrangement programs help retain many of our talents in the workplace, and when we expanded the program to all genders, many men also applied.”

Taweelappontong helps maintain her own balance as a serious yoga practitioner, finding that the mind-body practice releases stress and relaxes her mind. She has blocked three hours every Saturday morning to go to the studio and practice yoga, and over the years has developed a network with a group of people who enjoy full-body stretching.

“Typically people who practice yoga also have an overall healthy life style — eating well and living well,” she notes, adding that she has picked up many health tips from the class.

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Voice of Experience: Emma Maconick, Partner, Shearman & Sterling

Emma MaconickWhile you can’t choose your circumstances, you can choose how you react to them, says Shearman & Sterling’s Emma Maconick.

“If I could, I would tell the junior version of myself to focus on relationships because they will all matter in some way,” she says. “Giving without expecting anything in return will do more to enhance your career than anything else. The act of being a helpful, useful person in your network is an incredibly valuable skill.”

Seizing Opportunities Provides A Strong Foundation

“Meandering.” That’s how Maconick describes her career, which began in England in the mid- 90s. Back then, she was doing computer and tech work for corporate entities and capital markets. And the more she heard about private equity investing in the then-new “internet,” the more interested she became in the sector.

Thanks to a contact she made at a casual party, she ended up working for an Australian law firm’s Auckland, New Zealand office, which in retrospect she believes was an excellent career move. She found herself traveling up the career ladder, becoming a big fish in a little pond with tremendous exposure to a host of smaller tech companies.

Later on, thanks to a former colleague in the San Francisco Bay Area who knew she was interested in transactional law, she came back to the United States to work at Davis Polk. She worked there for several years before moving to Shearman in June.

While Maconick has spearheaded a variety of impressive technology projects, product launches and fascinating deals over the years, she is most proud of the teams she’s built throughout her career. “My legacy isn’t as much what I personally will do, but what the people I have managed will do,” she says. “I tend to give them a lot of rope to venture out on their own, but I am also there to catch them before they fall. My job is to make them not need me, but always want me,” she says.

Her current work is focused on data, sitting at the intersection of intellectual property, cybersecurity and governance. While an Economist article had famously stated that “data is the new oil,” Maconick goes a step further. “I think it’s even more elemental; it’s the new carbon,” she says, adding that everything will be data-driven, which is why issues around artificial intelligence and ethics and how we build the upcoming digital world are so crucial.

Standing Out To Get Ahead

Maconick recommends that professional women develop an indispensable set of skills, and put their own spin on it.

She says it’s imperative to find out what’s valued in a particular organization — whether it’s culture, sales, creativity or something else — and focus on that. “Nothing magnifies your voice more than being able to generate work for your team.”

As women move up in the corporate world, Maconick believes women can take advantage of their inherent disposition for being relationship and empathy-focused. As computers take over manual tasks, interconnectedness, an area where women excel, will be a real value driver, allowing them to understand clients and their business challenges.

“These skills can shift the balance of power in your favor,” she says.

Professional women can help uplift others through tiny, incremental changes. For instance, if there is a spot open on a key project, suggest it be staffed with a woman capable of doing the job.

Shearman places a lot of importance on diversity. The firm provides skill-building sessions such as “practice your pitch,” and encourages associates to take the time to participate in conferences. It also holds monthly meetings featuring new opportunities or support with professional growth.

Finding Balance With Varied Interests

Maconick is active with the national group Ellevate, as well as Shearman’s WISER (Women’s Initiative for Success, Excellence and Retention) group. She also sits on the board of Upward Women, which focuses on elevating senior-level women. “The key is to find or form your own stiletto network or book club or whatever works for you, as a way to connect with other professionals.”

Most of her time outside work is devoted to her two sons, ages three and seven. Although her schedule is limited, she also enjoys ceramic arts and pottery, which provide both a mental and creative boost.

A travel junkie, Maconick is proud of her 6 x 8 foot map covered in pins marking all the places she’s been. “My life is oriented toward the next cool trip,” she says, adding that her kids are becoming highly adept travelers as well. She continues, “I traveled a lot as a kid and love other cultures, food and languages; whether we seek them in the next state or on the other side of the world, I find it enormously enriching.”

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