Hayley Mooney, UK General Manager, Crayon
How would you summarise your role?
My role is about taking care of people and creating a psychologically safe environment where people feel empowered to lead and make decisions that are good for our business. I’m responsible for ensuring the business runs efficiently and profitably, and I need my team to help me achieve that. If they are happy and successful, we succeed as a business.
Do you feel the industry’s gender-diversity deficit something that needs to be highlighted and addressed?
“I can still walk into a room full of men, and they most likely assume I have a lower grade than my male colleague, even though, quite the opposite is true,”
Hayley Mooney, Crayon
Sometimes I feel like we make great strides, like female leadership and mentoring programmes, yet I can still walk into a room full of men, and they most likely assume I have a lower grade than my male colleague, even though, quite the opposite is true. What I do know is that we are still heavily outnumbered in leadership positions and to achieve balanced views in business, this must change.
What’s it like being a female leader in what remains a male-dominated industry?
To my previous point, once people realise that I know what I’m doing and that I have something valuable to say, it’s great! The fact that I even have to justify myself in the first place is the problem, and that won’t change until we have a better balance. Right now, we don’t even have enough females coming into the industry. To fix this we need more female leaders now! It’s up to business leaders to make this happen.
Is the industry as welcoming and accessible to women as it could be?
No it isn’t. I talk about this often, but in my role as a STEM Ambassador, and more recently, a Tech Channel Ambassador (TCA), I go into schools and talk to young females, and they think you have to get a degree in computer science or become a coder to be in the tech industry. They have no idea about all the other types of roles that we need – sales, finance, marketing, HR, operations.
All these business departments are critical to the success of a tech business. We need to raise far more awareness. That’s why we started the TCA – our aim is to encourage and support more individuals (particularly females) to choose the tech channel for their careers. We have to drive change here and we must come together as a strong and successful tech channel we are, and work together to achieve more awareness, so more females choose tech for their careers.
Do you think the industry has made any headway on recruiting, retaining and promoting women over the last five years?
Not recruiting as per the above, but retaining and promoting is definitely improving. Mainly because once women are here, they can see how great the industry is, and the businesses thrive on diverse leadership!
“Some of the comments have been hard to take.” See PCL Group’s Jeanette Forbes’ views on following page…
