Female tech leaders this week swapped tips on how to attract more women into the MSP sector as they agreed that female representation isn’t improving.
“It’s getting worse,” Tracy Pound, MD of Tamworth-based Microsoft Dynamics partner Maximity said during a table-top session at ChannelCon EMEA, which is run by the Global Technology Industry Association (GTIA).
“It’d be cool if I could say it was getting better, but it’s not,” agreed Brook Lee, a top exec at US-based MSP software company Liongard, who has worked in the MSP space since 2007.
“I don’t see any girls coming up through the channel”
Both women are volunteers for the GTIA, a channel trade association representing over 2,500 IT firms globally that recently rebranded from CompTIA.
They were speaking during a ChannelCon EMEA workshop session led by members of GTIA’s Advancing Women in Technology Interest Group.
According to the UK government, women comprise 21% of tech teams in the UK.
But the female deficit is more pronounced in technical and leadership roles at the MSPs that make up a good chunk of GTIA’s members, those sat around the tables acknowledged.
Despite working in IT since 1996, Lee said she’d rubbed shoulders with just one other technical woman during her career.
“I had an IT team in the 90s, and all six of us were women. I haven’t seen another [technical woman] since,” added Amanda Stewart, who founded Edinburgh-based MSP Illuminate in 2007.
Stewart, who chairs the GTIA’s Advancing Women in Tech Group, concurred with both Lee and Pound on the direction of travel for women in tech, and the MSP space more specifically.
“I do agree with Tracy and Brook that it has got worse,” she told IT Channel Oxygen after the session.
“I don’t see any girls coming up through the channel at all.
“I genuinely think, hand on heart, that the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] acronym we use in the UK is what’s put girls off. I would love to see it scrapped and something else put in its place.
“When they’re primary-school age, girls think they can do absolutely everything the same as boys. They’re really into their tech and will take laptops apart just as much as boys do.
“But when they get to secondary school they’re taught, whether it’s explicitly or not, that it’s not a space for them.”
“We’re right in your back yard”
So, what is to be done?
Boosting access to mentorship is an easy win those around the tables were quick to seize on, an area where the GTIA has recently stepped up with the launch of its Mentorship Program.
“If you’re the first woman there, then there’s no woman to mentor you – this happens a lot in MSPs because generally they’re small,” said Lee, who alongside Liongard chairs the GTIA’s NA Women in Tech Council.
“You have to think differently about where you can get mentorship if there are no females [in your organisation]. Women have a different perspective, because the things we have to face are different from what the men are going to face.
“Every single region globally for the GTIA has a women-in-tech division. We do monthly calls, meet-ups and monthly newsletters.
“We’re right in your back yard in every single region in the world.”
Stewart is determined to tackle the root cause by speaking at events to encourage girls and women into the sector, meanwhile.
“[I want to get] them to see the career opportunities there are – because there are a lot of jobs in technical sectors that aren’t necessarily technical,” she said.
Three-page job ads
Those in the session also called for MSP and IT company owners to use more inclusive language in their job adverts.
A recently published GTIA handbook on attracting, retaining and advancing women in technology warns of this very issue.
Many job postings “still use male-coded language, like ‘rockstar’, ‘ninja’ and ‘aggressive’, that discourage women from applying”, it noted (see here for more).
“MSPs have a really bad habit of putting out job ads that are three pages long for a tier-one role,” Lee added.
“That’s too much, because when you do that, you’re reducing your pipeline down even more.”
Stewart advised hiring for culture rather than technical skills.
“We’ve had people through the door here who are maybe doing events, HR or admin, and you suddenly see something in them where you think, ‘actually, they would be really good at customer service or brilliant at troubleshooting’,” she said.
“Everybody expects women to have lower profiles”
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen after the session, Pound – who is Immediate Past Chair of the GTIA – argued that the IT industry has become more male-dominated since she started her career in programming in 1984.
“The IT industry was quite young then, and you could forge your own career path,” she said.
“But we’ve gone back to a traditional model, which is that everybody expects men to run businesses and women to have lower profiles and not necessarily technical roles.
“You don’t come across women who are technical anymore, and it’s such a shame.”
Pound encouraged MSP and IT company owners to examine how they look to the outside world.
“If you’ve got a website where all you see is men, there’s no point of connection for women,” she said.
“The senior leaders need to understand that to be truly diverse, they have to start that journey, they have to show the way, they have to change the website, the language, the expectation.”
“I know it’s a bad thing to say”
In the keynote speeches she gives, Lee often leads on how female-owned and run ITSPs and MSPs on average make more money than their male-run counterparts.
“A gentleman I met [Don Barden] wrote his thesis on women-run, owned and led MSPs and ITSPs. His research found that if a woman runs an MSP or IT firm it is three times more profitable,” she said.
“People will also stay at an MSP that is led by a woman twice as long.
“For me to say, ‘you’re going to make more money if you do this’, I know it’s a bad thing to say, but if it accomplishes what we need to accomplish then I’m happy to sing that song.”
As illustrated by the opening keynote (see above), ChannelCon EMEA featured a good proportion of female speakers and panellists.
But Stewart urged the GTIA to go even further.
“I think we need to be pushing that a bit more. As chair I will be putting my tuppence worth in on how we can improve that,” she concluded.
This article was produced in association with the GTIA and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
