The case against diversity quotas in tech leadership

Is positive action the only way to increase the proportion of women tech leaders? In this article, several tech leaders and entrepreneurs explain why they think such an approach is not the right one.

At the Women in Tech Festival in October, one of the sessions on the packed agenda is a panel discussion on the subject of leadership quotas for women in technology. It's a question guaranteed to generate controversy. Quotas are innately political, and discussion of them often becomes mired in culture war fall out. This article is part one of a detailed examination of the arguments for and against diversity quotas, particularly those which aim to improve the representation of women in tech leadership.

Before the opinions, some facts. Women remain significantly under represented at all levels of the tech workforce, and the higher up the ladder you look, the fewer women you'll see. Women account for 27% of CIO positions within FTSE 100 businesses and hold a mere 14% of digital leadership positions. There may be disagreement about quotas but most people working in technology can agree on the fact that these statistics have barely changed in the last five years. By some measures, women have gone backwards.

On the whole, tech is well aware it has a woman problem. The most commonly heard response from employers is that the pool of available female tech talent is simply too small. Companies genuinely want to employ more women in technical roles but so few women apply.

Many employers are undertaking all sorts of positive initiatives to try and fix the leaky pipeline of female talent. These include partnerships with social enterprises like Tech She Can and Next Tech Girls to increase the interest in technology careers in schoolchildren and provide places for young women to undertake work placements when they are making all important career decisions. Many women working in tech and across the STEM industries give up significant amounts of their time acting as role models for the next generation.

Chasing targets makes for poorer outcomes

Working with schools, colleges and young adults directly will almost certainly increase the numbers of women seeking tech careers in the long term. The idea is that as the pipeline of diverse talent increases, the gender balance of leadership equalises and that leadership teams become more diverse in every other respect. This is the hope of women tech leaders like Joanna Drake, CIO of The Hut Group.

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Joanna Drake, THG

"C-level quotas feel fake and short term. It sounds like ticking boxes. I certainly don't think about any of that when I'm hiring. I'm not aware of quotas at a senior level. What we do have is targets around female representation in graduates and apprenticeships. That's how you fix this, at the beginning, which is why we do a lot of early career stuff and visit schools."

Tony Lysak, CEO of digital consultancy and training provider The Software Institute acknowledges the seemingly intractable nature of homogenous tech workforces, but also thinks that chasing better diversity statistics in the short term is a mistake. He explains how his approach of building a sustainable workforce naturally leads to a more diverse one:

"Diversity could be a target or it could be a byproduct of what you're doing. I think the healthier way to do it is to have the right systems and policies in place to attract and create diversity, then measure it rather than forcing it and chasing it and not necessarily having the right metrics in place. You need the right attraction campaigns, assessment campaigns, recruitment, training, onboarding and continuous professional development campaigns all in place.

"My whole ethos around workforce strategy is to build a sustainable workforce that's capable and that will evolve over time. If you have that strategy in place, you maintain a pyramid of workforce where the high performers naturally gravitate upwards. The medium performers do a great job and go up and the lower performers go on to other things, leave for better pay etc. And I think you should continuously refresh that workforce from the bottom because the younger generation are naturally more diverse.

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Tony Lysak, The Software Institute

"I think the thing we have to be careful of is not to chase statistics. You've got to think about business objectives within an organisation of delivering value to citizens, value to shareholders and having a sustainable workforce at the right cost and avoiding that bloated middle. By having that strategy in place, over time diversity will naturally make its way into the workforce. I think by trying to fix it in a year by having a target and diverse hires, people will chase the target and will behave in a subjective manner and hire people for the wrong reasons."

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The case against diversity quotas in tech leadership

Is positive action the only way to increase the proportion of women tech leaders? In this article, several tech leaders and entrepreneurs explain why they think such an approach is not the right one.

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Who wants to be the diversity hire?

Lysak has a point when he expresses his reservations about chasing diversity targets because whilst setting quotas or targets is not unlawful, the Equality Act 2010 states that positive discrimination taken to achieve them is. A recent and well publicised case of this came to light earlier this year, when the Royal Air Force was found to have unlawfully discriminated against white men when recruiting for cyber roles within the RAF which carried a "golden handshake" financial premium. An official inquiry found that fast tracking female and ethnic minority recruits into these roles amounted to positive discrimination and was therefore unlawful.

In addition to questions of legality, perhaps the most frequently aired objection to the imposition of boardroom quotas is that no person wants to feel - or be made to feel - as if they got a job opportunity purely on the basis of a protected characteristic. Robin Sutara, Databricks Field CTO voiced these concerns.

"I always feel quotas are a little bit of a slippery slope. When I look at the reaction to things like affirmative action, whilst we are trying to drive the right behaviours and create the right structures and organisations and diversity across teams, I often wonder if we are doing the right thing for not only the organisation but also the people going into those roles.

"Early in my career I recall getting a leadership role where someone looked at me and said, ‘well, it's because you're a woman that you got that role.' As opposed to my qualifications or my capabilities or what I have delivered as a demonstration of my ability to perform that function. If we introduce quotas do we introduce that that conflict in the ecosystem where people start to say certain people are getting roles because a quota needs fulfilling, as opposed to them being the best qualified for the job?"

Nobody wants to be the diversity hire. In order to achieve more diverse leadership, Sutara favours different means - the abandonment of traditional recruiting practices.

"I am in favour of some level of anonymity that allows candidates for these leadership roles to be selected not based on name or gender, but on qualifications. Because then it's less about trying to fulfil a quota and it's less about gender, or racial, social or other attributes that get introduced into a CV. We should think about how to create an anonymized way to do that type of hiring into leadership so that you we get the best qualified people."

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Robin Sutara, Databricks

Of course this only works if women apply for these roles in the first place, and Sutara also thinks more work needs to go into encouraging women not to opt themselves out of certain roles and also on encouraging others to opt them in.

"Are we really taking an opt-in approach on candidates that come into the ecosystem? Because what you can't teach is the softer skills. Can they troubleshoot? Can they tell a story? Can they articulate a business value outcome? Can they negotiate a difficult situation with conflicting stakeholders? I can teach them how to code in Python or SQL. I can't necessarily teach them how to get two VPs of two different businesses to agree on a common course of action. If we opt in more around the non-teachable skills, I think we would open up the ecosystem more."

In the ill-tempered debate about the importance of DEI, it's easy to mischaracterise the more reasoned arguments against quotas as being part of the wider "war on woke," and as an attempt to stall the process of progressive change with the goal of maintaining existing patriarchal power structures. That would be a mistake because they aren't.

There are good reasons to have reservations about taking a quota or target-based approach to increasing the diversity of tech workforces. Technology is a more meritocratic profession than some of those it competes for talent with. There are fewer socio economic barriers to entry and progress in a tech career than in a traditional law firm or city bank for example. The cultural barriers are more debatable, but positive action to create more diversity risks being seen to undermine that meritocracy.

In the second part of this discussion Computing will examine some of these arguments in greater depth, and air contributions from other tech leaders who believe that attempts to fix this problem from the ground up are unlikely to work on their own, and that more drastic action is necessary to make tech leadership more diverse.

Join us at this year's Women in Tech Festival on Tuesday 31 October in London; the meeting place for women working in tech, those who aspire to and for any tech organisation wanting to enhance diversity, make unrivalled connections, and empower and cultivate women leaders.

Individual delegates will have opportunities to connect with mentors and access practical advice on how to progress their careers.

Find out more here