The herCAREER is just around the corner: on October 12 and 13, 2017, the career fair for women will take place and, as usual, will feature many excellent speakers. One of them is Amali de Alwis. She is CEO of Code First: Girls, a multi-award-winning social enterprise dedicated to increasing the number of women in tech and startups. Over the past three years, Code First: Girls has provided more than £2.5 million in free tech education, making it the largest provider of coding courses for women in the UK.
Interview by herCAREER
You once said in an interview: “One of the biggest challenges for women is having the confidence to take on leadership positions or start a company.” Do we need more female role models?
Absolutely. It would be great if we had more female role models in the industry! After all, we all look up to the icons of the industry. However, when we think of the big names in the tech industry, women rarely come to mind. I think it's very important to have more female role models, because there are women who have achieved great things in the industry—but unfortunately, hardly anyone knows about them.
I also think it's not always just about high-caliber people in the industry. It's also about identifying exciting people within your own company that you can look up to. When I was still working at larger companies, I would look at my company to see whose job I would like to do, who I would like to be in the future. And when I looked up and there was no one I could identify with, it really discouraged me from continuing to work for that company.
I'm someone who has a healthy level of self-confidence, but I also need someone to look up to. I need to see what the people at the top are doing and how they got there. Because if I see ten people doing something I like, then I've identified ten different options that could work for me at different stages of my career. And then I work toward that.
Who are your role models?
When it comes to personal idols, I think of Stephanie Shirley. She's such a great role model for women! She founded a software company in the 1960s, at a time when no one was really talking about software, let alone women and software. Another role model for me is Grace Hopper, who wrote the first compiler. And there are so many other exciting people who have done inspiring things. We need to make these women more well-known!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wyj-RE81U0
The number of female founders in the tech industry is very low. What do you think is preventing women from starting a company?
There are many different reasons for this. It's not as if there aren't enough women doing amazing things, but most of them aren't in the spotlight as successful tech entrepreneurs. When we think of successful entrepreneurs in this industry, we think of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn, for example. This brings us back to role models: women desperately need them!
But it's also about another issue: women and risk. Are we encouraging our girls to take risks in their careers? And are we encouraging our girls to do something that would be risky and could potentially lead to losses? For entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship is a roller coaster ride; success and failure can be so close together. Can we imagine that for our girls? Or do we expect them to be more risk-averse in order to be able to provide for their children and families? These are questions that, in my opinion, need to be addressed from a societal perspective.
Women as investors
Various studies have shown that women have greater difficulty obtaining financing for their businesses. How do you think we can solve this problem?
That's a very difficult question. There's been a lot of discussion in recent years surrounding women and investing, VCs, and business angels. Generally speaking, I'd say investors are always looking for a good match. And if investors have a certain background, the companies they invest in will most likely have a similar background. In other words, they're looking for someone who seems familiar. And since there aren't many female investors, we see fewer women receiving funding.
But we should also ask ourselves why more women aren't acting as investors. In the UK, for example, there are business angel associations that work with angel investors and try to encourage women who are already in their mid-career and have a few thousand pounds in bonuses at their disposal each year to become investors. I think that we women need to learn, over the course of our professional careers, what it means to become investors ourselves. We should invest in other women and their projects and companies—so that they too can become successful and financially powerful.
If you want a female co-founder, you have to look properly
Many founding teams say they would have liked to have a female co-founder, but haven't found anyone. Are mixed teams really more successful?
Yes, I would definitely say that diverse teams are more successful. And I would also tell all founders who claim they've tried in vain to find a female co-founder that they should look harder. If founders continue to do things the way they always have, they won't change. If they want to be different, they have to adopt a different way of working. And if they're looking for people for a tech position, I can tell you: finding people with tech skills is really difficult. Finding women with technical skills is even more difficult. So they have to search more creatively, they have to look outside their usual circle, and above all, they can't just look for IT profiles.
Essentially, it's like setting company targets for the coming fiscal year. Anyone who wants to increase their revenue in the coming year should carefully consider what they can do to achieve it. They need to consider new ideas for increasing their revenue: What are new products or new markets? The same applies to recruiting: Look for exciting profiles in other industries, do things differently than before. Set goals you want to achieve and develop a strategy for how you will achieve them. Be more involved in your recruitment process. Start doing things differently, and you'll also find suitable co-founders.
At herCAREER on October 12 and 13, Amali de Alwis will give a keynote speech entitled “Managing a left brain right brain argument – or my personal journey through science, tech and creativity.”
+++ Ticket raffle+++
Munich Startup is giving away 5 x 2 day tickets for herCAREER. Simply send an email with the subject "herCAREER: I want to be there!" to redaktion@munich-startup.de And with a little luck, grab the cards! Good luck!
