Verity Harding, chief policy advisor at Google, said there are still “huge barriers” to overcome
With less than one in five of FTSE 100 board directors women, and the pay gap between males and females at a discouraging 10%, it’s no wonder gender inequality in the workplace was a hotly discussed topic during the female-led Grazia panel at Ad Week Europe.
While Mary Portas, ‘queen of shops’, reflected on her time at Harvey Nichols just 10 years ago, where she described a time where women were often seen as “emotional” and where she said she had to “play the right role” in front of her male colleagues, Google’s UK public policy manager, Verity Harding, painted a more positive picture for women in the workplace in 2015 – particularly in the technology sector.
However, while Harding seemed optimistic about a “female friendly” tech world when compared with other industries, the former special advisor to Nick Clegg said that there is still a huge amount to be done.
“I can only speak from my experience of coming from politics to technology and I have found it to be a much more welcoming environment for women,” she said.
“However, it still has huge barriers to overcome.”
While Harding said that there are some “amazing female leaders”, citing Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, she reluctantly admitted that the majority of big tech players have been founded by men – and there remains a notable gender disparity between computer scientists. In fact, the number of female computer science graduates has decreased significantly over the last 30 years, when in 1984 37% of computer science degrees went to women.
Despite this, Harding said that the tech sector is on the “right path” to creating better equality and diversity in the workplace, with Google leading the charge with its release of workplace statistics revealing how many female engineers it employs compared with men, alongside its $50 million investment last year to launch an initiative to teach young girls how to code in a bid to close the gender gap.
Harding said that as transparency in the workplace increases and companies are forced to be more honest about employment statistics, it creates pressure to “fix” gender inequality.
When asked by an audience member whether quotas should be put on boards to ensure a fair balance between men and women, Grazia editor-at-large and author of upcoming book Hot Feminist, Polly Vernon, eagerly agreed, saying that the current environment needs to change so that women feel more “comfortable” and want to be on boards.
Currently, women make up just 17% of board directors of FTSE 100 companies, according to UK Feminista, while a study by the Fawcett Society found that 51% of women and men from middle management to director level say that “stereotyping” is the biggest problem women face at work.
“We need to get the first women through the ranks [and onto boards] and then it becomes easier,” Vernon said, while Harding, despite gunning for a more even split, said she was indifferent about whether regulations should be put on businesses.
