The UK president of a worldwide tech giant says it鈥檚 time to reset the gender balance across the IT sector.
Tara McGeehan took over the role聽at CGI聽last year after聽more than聽25 years聽with the company and has been a vociferous聽advocate for diversity in the workplace.
She has聽implemented strategies such as ‘bring your daughter to work’ day as聽she聽aims聽to help聽more women聽begin tech careers.
CGI is an IT solutions company headquartered in Canada with over 77,000 employees worldwide. Beginning her career as one of only聽two women聽studying for聽an engineering degree at Nottingham University, she went on to work as an analyst at the Post Office before joining the National Grid.
That company became Logica which was then acquired by CGI. McGeehan went on to hold聽a vice president role聽at the company,聽overseeing the UK energy sector, for 18 years before聽she was聽made president.
鈥淚’ve never personally experienced any disadvantage for being female in the tech sector, but I do feel quite strongly that it’s an intellectual industry and therefore there’s no reason why it鈥檚 not 50-50,鈥� she told 老九品茶Cloud.
鈥淭here’s as many clever women as there are clever men; it’s an industry based on using your mind so it never made any sense to me why women weren’t in it other than we turn them off too early on in their career at school or university.
鈥淢y drive for equality is two-fold: one, because it makes obvious sense, and two, because we’ve got an awful lot of vacancies in CGI and if we only fish in the pond where there’s a few blokes on a degree course, we’re not going to fill them.
鈥淚t’s the perfect time to try and reset gender balance: whilst you鈥檙e growing you can put a bit of concentration and effort into bringing in more diversity as part of the growth strategy, whereas if you plateau, they have less opportunity to influence their make-up.鈥�
At the beginning of the year, McGeehan had around 1,000 vacancies to fill聽at CGI and wanted to fill them as diversely as possible whilst recruiting the best people.
She decided to implement 鈥榖lind CVs鈥� which meant removing names from the applications and only judging them by their talent.
This then led to 鈥榰nconscious bias training鈥�, which gives insight to CGI staff on how to address their biases against certain types of people and how to not let that affect their decision-making.
鈥淲orking in a balanced team is always better, you get a better rapport, you get better perspectives, you get a better balance in terms of ethnicity, gender, social economic background, and balance across the board; you always get better results,鈥� explained McGeehan.
鈥淚 push bringing your whole self to work in CGI and making people want to come to work and talk about themselves, because you get happier people and better projects.鈥�
She wants to end the stigma that IT is something that 鈥榞eeky guys do in their bedrooms鈥�, and that it is open to women equally to create a lifelong career.
The company operates a 鈥榖ring your daughter to work day鈥� and apprenticeships to encourage anyone to choose technology as a career choice.
鈥淎pprentices don鈥檛 just have to be kids, they could be people having a career change and we’re actively promoting women who maybe had families and want to return to work, that’s a good cohort for us to go after because we can bring them in and train them up.鈥�
The company currently has 265 offices globally with 20 based in the UK.