I need to start with a confession. Today is International Women’s Day, but it is a holiday that I’ve never really celebrated. In fact, I’ve never been a fan. As a journalist, IWD was always preceded with a flurry of emails from PRs proffering their female founder or CEO for interviews to tell me their ‘personal journey’.
My counterpoint was always that the story was not strong enough simply because it was about a woman (and in most cases, it was JUST about the fact that someone was a woman). I argued that if they had an interesting story to tell, I didn’t need a specific day to mark it.
And my misogyny didn’t end there. I was also not really a fan of women-only tech groups or spaces. Why segregate or label, I’d think?
Last week I was at Web Summit Qatar and stumbled across the Women in Tech lounge. I didn’t go in.
But in the last week, I’ve realised that I’ve been seriously missing the bigger picture.
Firstly, I read Starling Bank founder Anne Boden’s blog post about her own investment journey – a gruelling process, with close to 300 meetings over two years.
She talks about how she was often the only woman in the room, with a sense that none of the male investors believed that “a middle-aged Welshwoman could be a tech entrepreneur”, something she also shared when I interviewed her for the UKTN Podcast.
And she had some shocking stats to reveal – for every £1 of equity investment in the UK, only 2p goes to fully female-founded businesses.
One of her solutions was that female entrepreneurs must find a supportive ecosystem.
I’ve also been listening back to a recent UKTN Podcast episode I did with Suki Fuller, the co-lead of the Tech London Advocate’s Women in Tech group.
Given her job title, it was either brave or stupid when I told her that I didn’t particularly like these gender-specific groups, or the term female founder.
At first, she seemed to agree with me – it made her cringe too, she said.
But she added that until we get to a place where women are on par with men, these groups are needed.
And she pointed out the West does have a history of not recognising women (or people of colour) for their achievements.
That resonated with me. I remember reading Roma Agrawal’s brilliant Nuts and Bolts book about inventions that changed the world. She highlighted some of the forgotten women engineers – such as immigrant chemist Stephanie Kwolek, who invented Kevlar. Or Josephine Cochran who invented the dishwasher. History, it seems, is littered with unrecognised women.
“I look forward to the day when we just have a list of the most influential person in tech,” Fuller, who was voted Computer Weekly’s 2023 most influential woman in tech, told me. “But in order for change to happen we have to have someone highlighting that change is needed.”
For her, it is all about the three As – awareness, advocacy and action.
If I needed evidence that we should be thinking about these three As on a daily basis, I didn’t have to look far.
A recent viral tweet from data scientist Jennifer Stirrup highlighted a video of an AI hackathon in San Francisco. The room was not only made up largely of men, in a session led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, but one of them was wearing a t-shirt depicting photo-realistic exposed breasts. Stirrup said that she didn’t want to be part of a professional working environment that allowed such attire.
My friend and ex-colleague BBC tech editor Zoe Kleinman shared the tweet (as did many women) and she told me it not only made her angry but showed we still have a very long way to go.
All of this has made me realise that I need to look beyond the immediate story.
So this year I will be celebrating International Women’s Day. In fact, I’m hosting a breakfast roundtable about the issues facing female founders. It will be an all-women room. I’m now fully onboard with that and I can’t wait to hear their stories.
Jane Wakefield is the host of the UKTN Podcast and a regular UKTN columnist.
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