Transparency and accountability have always been critical in combating workplace inequities.
The gender gap in tech manifests in different ways. There are stereotypes that have historically led hiring managers to choose men over women, as well as a compensation gap. Some employees at bigger tech companies have alleged that gender contributes to discrepancies in promotion rates and median pay.
Syndio is a company that built around providing equitable and equal pay solutions for companies. A big part of that is an open dialogue about pay gaps in the workplace, Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio said during a Dec. 2 event hosted by the Business Journal.
It’s not just pay gaps that have divided genders in tech. Akhila Tadinada, Xemelgo’s co-founder and chief technical officer, said what she’s run into is an “alpha male” mentality in tech, a fallacious stereotype of men singlehandedly building companies from the ground up.
“It’s always like, you can only do this if you’re sleeping on the floor. But your wife is watching your kids, that’s why you’re doing that,” Tadinada said. “I always felt I had to fight this, because when I was trying to recruit women to my team, they wouldn’t even want to listen to what I had to say. They were like, ‘A startup? Sorry I can’t, I have a family, I cannot do this.’”
Diversity in leadership fixes some of these narratives, Colacurcio said, because the biases at the top will infect the systems it runs.
“Everything that we say, the way we communicate, the way we pay, the way we operate, the way we promote, all of those things, if there’s discretion in those processes — which there are — it favors the majority,” Colacurcio said. “Depending on what the majority looks like at your company, if you’ve got discretion, you’ve got issues.”
Pushpay CEO Molly Matthews said lack of diversity is an accountability problem at the corporate level. If the jobs of the future aren’t filled with people of different races and genders, then the most pressing matter is to identify solutions to that problem.
Textio CEO and founder Kieran Snyder agreed the main issue lies within systems. She said if leaders aren’t building systems that make cultural accountability, it doesn’t matter what the intentions are, the culture will fall apart. Snyder is an expert on how culture shapes language; Textio is a service that analyzes writing for companies, examining the bias behind words and phrases.
Snyder and Colacurcio both put the onus of creating positive work environments and experiences on leaders.
“As leaders the most important thing we can do is make sure we have the tools and systems in place that help everyone have a good cultural experience,” Snyder said. “Because at the end of the day when you go home and you tell your loved ones if you like your job or not, you might be thinking about your CEO, but chances are you’re thinking about the three or four people you interact with every single day.”
