Women in Tech: How a Digital Ecosystem Can Come Full Circle

Lucia Falkenberg

Chief People Officer

eco – Association of the Internet Industry &
DE-CIX Management GmbH

If you are working in the rapidly accelerating field of digitalization, hardly a day will go by without your picking up on some new knowledge. But for every person in the tech field, here’s one fact that we have already known for many years: While the industry is increasingly creating excellent career opportunities for women, women nevertheless are seriously underrepresented at every level in the tech workforce – and that is presenting a challenge for each and every digital ecosystem.

How is the low level of women in tech affecting digital ecosystems overall?

There’s no question about it: having fewer than 1 out of every 5 tech specialists being a woman gives short shrift not just to women, but also to digital ecosystems, especially when it comes to the needs of customers. Consider the insight that Doina Popa, Head of Sales Technology at UiPath, shared at the #ChooseToChallenge webinar, where she noted that “technology is so deeply embedded in our lives that we need to make sure that it resembles and serves all of us.”

With this being the case, Doina went on to observe how “women’s involvement is key, bringing with it a particularly empathetic and compassionate side.” As Fulya Arman of Salesforce also emphasized, “women love being the bridge between technology and people”. It therefore goes without saying that having so few women involved in the sector – in spite of the fact that the majority of consumer purchasing is driven by women – deprives ecosystems of the ability to get an all-round firm grip on essential needs.

A further serious factor affecting digital ecosystems is the urgent need for specialists: By 2025, for example, the labor shortage of tech workers in Germany has been forecast by Empirica research to reach 625,000, and 520,000 in France. And, as pointed out by Valerie Holsboer, Member of the Board of the German Federal Employment Agency and panel member at the #ChooseToChallenge webinar: “There are now fewer rather than more women working in the industry”.

So while, on the one hand, women are falling behind in what is a highly exciting – and lucrative – domain, the fact is, on the other hand, that their absence is set to take a massive toll on companies. Promoting women in tech is therefore no longer a task which can be put on hold: At the end of the day, as I’ve commented in a previous dotmagazine article, equality is not just an important matter of justice; it’s also one of economics.

A prime case of women’s importance for a digital ecosystem

To gain a specific insight into the importance of women for a digital ecosystem, let’s take a step back to 2019: At this time, at an international level, Salesforce [NYSE: CRM] presented research which forecast that the company and its ecosystem of partners would create 4.2 million new jobs and $1.2 trillion in new business revenues worldwide between 2019 and 2024. The research also found that Salesforce was driving massive gains for its partner ecosystem. Cloud computing was identified as propelling this growth and giving rise to the use of a host of new technologies, including mobile, social, IoT, and AI, that were creating new revenue streams and jobs. Because organizations that spend on cloud computing subscriptions also spend on ancillary products and services, the Salesforce ecosystem in 2019 was more than four times larger than Salesforce itself and was predicted to grow to almost six times larger by 2024.

Nonetheless, in presenting the research, Salesforce themselves identified a clear catch to this growth: “The tech skills gap will become a major roadblock for economic growth if we don’t empower everyone – regardless of class, race or gender – to skill up for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” stated Sarah Franklin, EVP and GM of Platform, Developers and Trailhead at Salesforce.

As with all of us in the Internet industry, Salesforce was thus confronted with the challenge of leveraging diversity and the potent questions of: What can make a difference in upping the numbers of women working in the digital ecosystem? And how can the ecosystem itself be tapped into to support this change? An enlightening answer to these questions emerged from a woman working at Salesforce Switzerland – Vanessa Gentile, Saleforce’s Alliance & Channel Lead. She recognized that those who are often overlooked are women returning to work after career breaks, with this recognition giving rise to the new Salesforce initiative: “Bring Women Back to Work”.

Helping women on extended career breaks back into business

The #ChooseToChallenge panel on 8 March not only celebrated International Women’s Day, but also marked the first anniversary of Salesforce’s “Bring Women Back to Work” (BWBW) initiative. During the webinar, Vanessa Gentile, founder of the initiative, explained that BWBW “is a space where we create opportunities for women who want to come back to their career and want to come back to a new industry – which is the tech industry.”

The aim of BWBW is to provide partners in Salesforce’s ecosystem with a program enabling them to recruit new talent by supporting women who have taken long career breaks – for example, due to parental leave – in their journeys back into business.

The initiative includes a 12-month training program to reskill and empower women to rejoin the workplace. To achieve this, as Vanessa explained, Salesforce offers “specific trainings, mentorship, coaching, workshops and a huge networking opportunity”. Vanessa also pointed out that the initiative supports all of these participating women to find a more gender-balanced team within Salesforce’s ecosystem, adding that: “Without these partners, this program would never be possible, as they are those who give these job opportunities to these great women.”

And how should this come full circle for Salesforce’s ecosystem? As Vanessa conveyed: “My biggest wish is to see a more gender-balanced team in IT, to see more diverse and inclusive teams. Because as you know, the more diverse, the more gender-balanced we are, the more ideas we create, and ideas are the thing that creates innovation. And innovation brings us to the new normal.”

Petra Jenner was extremely motivated to become an executive sponsor for the initiative. At the #ChooseToChallenge webinar, she noted that the “biggest career setbacks usually happen when women have kids.” Petra’s viewpoint on this is echoed by sources such as the Harvard Business Review, which reports that mothers who leave the workforce when their children are young, but later want to re-enter, are regarded as one of the global economy’s greatest untapped resources.

Confronting challenges presented by COVID-19

But the BWBW initiative has not been without challenges, particularly due to COVID-19. During Corona times, women and people from diverse backgrounds are those who have borne the greater brunt when it comes to job losses and key areas such as childcare. Women’s career progression has experienced a further setback in these times, with a 2020 study by Trust Radius showing that almost three-quarters of women in tech have been struggling with childcare in the past year.

In recognition of this fact, Salesforce Switzerland boldly chose to go even a step further than originally planned: It consulted with its partners, asking for additional commitments. These included hiring a minimum of one woman within one year, reconsidering their hiring requirements to look for women not only from the tech industry, and reconsidering their roles and offering them as flexible and/or part-time. In addition, Salesforce rallied its ecosystem by asking its partners to take a chance on these candidates and to finance 2/3 of the training for each candidate, irrespective of whether or not she was to be hired by them. The end effect has been that of allowing Salesforce to create additional added value for every candidate.

As a result, Petra Jenner was glad to report in the eco Association interview that: “Despite the pandemic, Salesforce’s partners are still investing in new talent, which is helping to sustain the program and to train more women. In November 2020, 18 women started the year-long program and 18 more will join every quarter, so that in one year alone, we’ll be able to train a total of 72 women.”

A key lesson that we can already derive from Salesforce’s Back to Work initiative is that – as pointed out by Tijen Onaran, Founder & CEO of Global Digital Women at the #ChooseToChallenge webinar – women in tech actions should not be about fixing women; they basically require fixing structures. This calls for role models and allies within digital ecosystems who are prepared to stand up and take resolute steps such as those taken by Salesforce Switzerland. We need to cut through the chase and, as Tijen succinctly put it, not to see diversity as a charity project. To paraphrase Valerie Holsboer: We need to walk the talk, and not just have some women sprinkled onto the digital ecosystem like spice on a dish. Or to quote Valerie directly: “A woman is part of the solution, not someone who needs to be cared for”.

Lucia Falkenberg is Chief People Officer with eco – Association of the Internet Industry and DE-CIX Management GmbH. Having joined eco in 2012, Lucia became Head of the eco Competence Group New Work in 2014. Prior to her role at eco, the Business Studies graduate managed her own human resources firm, where she successfully supported numerous clients in finding and retaining talented personnel. Lucia also previously worked as an international HR representative for an American IT company. Her extensive experience and know-how across the entire human resources spectrum is of particular benefit when it comes to advising executives and developing and implementing targeted personnel marketing and recruitment strategies. As a professional mother and woman working in the digital sector, Lucia benefits directly from the opportunities offered by the digital world of work.