Ranked number 1 in the 2014 CIO list, winner of ‘CIO of the Year’ 2014 at the Women in IT Awards and named as one of the Top 15 Innovative Influencers in Retail today in 2018, Anna Barsby is a woman who knows how to lead change.
After driving significant changes in her role as CIO for Halfords, in 2016 she joined Morrisons as Chief Technology Director, where she prioritised talent recruitment. We caught up with Anna to talk about gender diversity talent and women in technology.
Identifi Global: Hi Anna, thanks for speaking with us. Can you introduce yourself and your background for our readers, please?
Anna Barsby: I’m a CIO and I’ve been a senior transformation leader. I have a degree in art history but I fell into technology, like many people do. Since then I’ve grown up as a project manager, I’ve been delivering bigger and bigger change programmes over the years. In my last two roles I’ve been a CIO, firstly at Halfords and then at Morrisons; both companies in turn-around and both going through really big change programmes. I recently left Morrisons and am currently taking a few months out to think about what I want to do next.
IG: Why do you think gender diversity is so important both to the wider working world and to STEM organisations specifically?
AB: Gender diversity – all diversity – is critical because you get a variety of backgrounds that translate into a variety of opinions. It helps you make decisions around what you do, where you go and how you do it in a much broader way. If you end up with people from the same backgrounds, the same ethnicity, the same gender, you’re going to go and do the same things all the time. By having those different perspectives, you get a
much better debate and a much broader set of outcomes and inputs into the world of work.
Gender diversity is absolutely critical for that reason, but also because it makes for a very different culture within a technology department. If it’s very male-dominated it will have a particular set of attributes. If you’ve got females in there, it changes the culture; it changes the nature of challenges by making things a bit more discussion-based, a bit less aggressive sometimes. It just helps to create a broader culture, which can make somewhere a nicer place to work.
IG: Why is building diversity so difficult with the technology workplace – if you do think it is difficult? What are the barriers?
AB: I think it’s difficult at the moment. There’s a huge amount happening in terms of the next generation, so we’re more hopeful, but I do think it will be several generations until we get there. Technology is helping because every single person in the country – particularly kids growing up – is in touch with using it. That breaks down a lot of barriers in terms of tech being seen as something that’s ‘just for the
boys’, so that definitely helps. It’s difficult because there is still the image – no matter how many times we try to remove it – that roles in technology are just development roles.
“If you don’t have the STEM subjects it doesn’t mean you can’t be brilliant in technology.”
The bit that I’m very passionate about is getting kids to learn the breadth of roles there are in a technology organisation; it isn’t just coding in a basement, and you don’t have to be brilliant at science to be great at technology. I have an art history degree and I think it’s the creativity from the arts side and the analytical skills as a historian that have stood me in good stead in technology. So, it’s getting people to understand that if you don’t have the STEM subjects it doesn’t mean you can’t be brilliant in technology.
IG: What progress has been made within the technology sector towards gender diversity and diversity more widely?
AB: I think there is progress. More women are being encouraged to consider some of the broader roles in areas like business analysis or project management. In this country, I still don’t see enough females going into those more development roles. When I was in India I was at a couple of different companies and one of them had 30,000 people on campus with a 55% female graduate population. Other countries seem to be doing a lot better in terms of that real gender balance at the grad level.
The bit that worries me more at this stage is the lack of females going into leadership and senior management roles; that’s still a major problem. They’re just not wanting to go into senior roles and they’re not pushing themselves forward. I think they’re seeing those senior technology roles as something that can’t fit in with their lifestyle, so one of the things that I’m really trying to champion – as a single mum with two kids – is that you can do this. I don’t work ridiculous hours, I don’t have to work at weekends. We need to communicate the fact that I can still go out and watch my kids’ school play or go to Sports Day and hold down a senior role. A lot of more junior women say, ‘I couldn’t possibly fit a more senior role in with my childcare and with my family commitments’, which I think is a huge shame. There needs to be more of us who are mums, who are parents across the board, helping people to understand that you really can do it.
IG: Beyond this misconception about family duties or responsibilities, is there anything else that’s preventing younger women in particular from reaching for those leadership positions?
AB: Confidence is a factor. As a gender we still have an issue with it, and I spend quite a lot of time on that when I’m mentoring females. There are a lot of us doing mentoring, and talks, and all sorts of things, but we need to do more and more of it. I don’t see it as people being stopped; I think there were some examples years ago where I would see men being chosen over women, but I just don’t see that anymore. I think a lot of it comes down to women getting rid of the barriers in their own heads, and finding that confidence. That’s the biggie that we need the senior leaders to get on board with. We need the guys to be encouraging, because most women need to be tapped on the shoulder and told: ‘You can do this’. A lot of guys already have that in their heads – they know they want to take a chance – with women you have to proactively go and encourage them, and then they’ll be great.
IG: Can you tell us a little bit about the mentoring work you do?
AB: It’s mainly been internal to the organisations that I’ve worked for, but I still mentor people that I worked with in the past. I’ve been mentoring women across the business at Morrisons and in technology. I do a lot of work on what their values are, how they perceive the world, how they perceive their position, what they want to do next, and making sure they know that once they’ve cracked the role by 80%, that’s the time to be moving on, rather than staying in the role for another 2-4 years. A lot of women – I don’t know why – some kind of loyalty maybe – feel they need to be in a role for a lot longer than they actually need to.
IG: When you have those conversations, what’s the penny-drop moment? What’s the thing that you say to the women that you mentor that makes them realise that they can move on or move up?
AB: It’s two things. Firstly, it’s getting them to have better self-awareness. We do this by going through their values. The other thing is asking: ‘Where do you want to be?’ I don’t mean specific roles, rather, ‘What do you love doing? What do you want to be doing?’ Then we say: ‘Well, okay, how do you get from here to there?’ They generally know it all, they know where they want to be and how to get there. So then we put some timelines on it. You say: ‘Okay, you’ve done this role for two years, right, another six months then we’re going to start working on the stakeholders to see how you go and get X’s job over there’. It’s just about breaking it all down, putting specific timelines on to drive them, and reminding them that they’re bloody good at what they do.
IG: Do you think some of that affirmation comes from actually having the conversation about their careers? So, just the act of talking about it is partly enough to get the gears working and build the momentum?
AB: Yes, it is. It’s all giving themselves permission to be selfish – and I don’t think enough women do that because they’re so busy looking after everybody else, whether that’s grandparents, or kids, or other halves or whatever. We often don’t spend enough time thinking about ourselves – it’s a gross generalisation – but I do think that can be associated with women in general more than men. It’s just that need to go, ‘Do you know what? I’m going to do something for myself’.
IG: You’ve referred to the organisations that you worked with in India; are there any tech organisations and schemes that are currently doing great things in terms of promoting gender diversity and helping women up the ladder within technology?
AB: Yes, there are so many things going on at the moment. There are a good few organisations that are introducing young girls into coding, and I think that’s brilliant. We’ve done things like that at Morrisons as well. We’ve been helping an all-girls school coding club to learn Java, and there’s also some national work with Code First: Girls. There are vast amounts of courses now either for very young girls or people getting back into work. There are mothers who’ve been off on maternity, reskilling into IT and I think all of those are brilliant. I’ve been a judge on the Everywoman in IT Awards the last couple of years, and I did the Women in IT Awards this year again, and there’s a huge number of schemes that I see in all of the nominations and the write-ups.
“There’s a real business reason for getting women into technology roles.”
Where it really matters though – and what’s changing the dial – is businesses waking up to it and realising that, as part of the skills gap, we have got to do something. There’s a business imperative now; it’s not just ‘Oh, it feels like it’s the right moral thing to do’. There’s a real business reason for getting women into technology roles, because we have a real skills gap. Now that corporates are waking up to that fact and getting their own schemes, I think that will be the biggest game changer, and I’m starting to see that momentum growing. It’s survival as much as anything because people just can’t find the skills. We, as a whole industry, need women to come into technology. It’s imperative we have more people and there’s a massive untapped workforce.
IG: Can we talk about attracting and retaining top female talent within the workplace… How can technology employers attract more talented women into their teams?
AB: I think flexible working is the first and main thing – a lot of companies do it nowadays. There has to be a grown-up level of trust, knowing that someone will get the job done wherever they happen to be. And role models are important. There have to be enough role models around and we, as the role models, need to be out there speaking and showing ourselves. It’s tricky when you’ve got a family and you’ve got a full-time job to try to get out there and speak as well. I am seeing fewer all-male panels and all-male speaking events, but it still happens too much, and it’s up to people like me to be getting out there and speaking more.
It’s also about those bigger companies making sure that they’re investing in their middle tier of female leaders – and investing in a way that we feel we’re getting jobs because we’re brilliant not because they need to meet a quota. They need investment internally in developing their people as well as finding the right junior talent. You need to make sure you’ve got enough role models within your organisation who can say, ‘Look, I’m a senior female, brilliant at what I do, but I also have a family and flexible working through this organisation, and this is the way I manage my life, this is how it works’.
IG: What do you think employers need to do when it comes to retaining top female talent?
AB: Not having meetings at ridiculous times of the morning or late at night is important. It’s just about understanding where that person is. It can be anyone – it might be a parent, or it might be somebody that’s caring for the elderly, it doesn’t really matter about gender. It’s just about understanding when people can work and what works for them. I’ve seen lots of examples of quite extreme timings of meetings and it just doesn’t work for senior females. A lot of senior females I talk to will do it but they know that they’re compromising and they’re not happy, and therefore they won’t stay very long. They’ll be there a couple of years and then they’ll be off. There needs to be a conversation happening with senior females so they don’t feel guilty about saying: ‘Three days a week I’m having to leave at five, but these two days a week, I can work whatever’. It’s about not penalising people when they can’t put in those ‘extreme working hours’, because they can just do it at home. You shouldn’t have to be in the office for massive lengths of time and then feel guilty. I still think there is a culture amongst senior men that is, you know, ‘Oh well, the longer I work the better I am and the more important I am’. I think that culture is still around, which is a shame, because it doesn’t suit senior females.
IG: How can teams avoid unconscious bias against women in the workplace? Can you think of any practical ways that workplaces can be more aware of their biases?
AB: Talking about the fact that it exists is important. There are many examples in the press about men viewing something as banter that women find makes for a very uncomfortable workplace, and I think it’s about just tackling that head on and talking to people. Often when you do talk to people, they have no idea that they’ve caused offence, and everyone is pretty happy and moves on. So, I think there is something in being open and honest, and listening. We do that quite a lot, Women in Tech. We do listening sessions where we try to understand what’s making women thrive and what’s making them pull back and feel uncomfortable in situations.
My job as a leader is creating the right environment to allow everyone to flourish. If I can create an environment where people are able to talk openly about things, to talk about what makes them thrive and flourish or what makes them uncomfortable, then that’s the right thing to be doing. Interestingly, we had one guy in my last role who took his full paternity leave rights, and he found it quite uncomfortable because he was the only one, but we really helped him through it. When I left, he sent me the best note I’ve ever had from someone saying how inspired he’d been working with me, but more importantly he said, ‘You made me feel like I belong’. and that will stay with me forever, because that’s me cracking it. That really made me choke up, because that’s just what it’s all about isn’t it? That’s irrelevant to gender, that’s just doing the right thing for that person in that particular situation. That could easily be applied to females on maternity too. The overall message should be about empowering people. There’s an awful lot of great work going on but we’ve got to keep going and doing more.
Thanks to Anna Barsby for taking the time to share her insights with us.
If you want further advice on how to attract more a more diverse range of candidates to your business, get in touch with our team.
