Thank you for joining me today at the Women uh Tech Global Conference. My name is TME Turden and um you're welcome to introduce yourself on the chat. Let me know where you're from. I can totally follow the chat.See that if you have questions, um I'll try my best to keep up and um answer your questions. I hope that we could do a little bit of interaction. And yeah, I'm super excited, super honored. Um I was previously last year, a participant this year. I'm uh blessed uh by, you know, they selecting me to speak today and I have the pleasure to talk to you about a very, very important topic that is very, very close to my heart. And this is what I've been doing in the past one year, right? So I got fired one year ago and I decided, you know what, let's just try to use my technical skills for something bigger for a bigger purpose for something that is dear to my heart. And that's the topic of women in tech. So, uh what I concretely meant is a ton of research, a ton of speaking to a lot of people uh trying to figure out what is the problem um related to gender equality and women in stem, right? In technical engineering um uh science and mathematics, right? So that's that, that, that's what I was doing. Uh basically the last year and our research um in our research, we found out that actually 50% of the women that are in tech right now are at risk of moving out of the industry.

So for me, that was a tremendous shock to find that out. So immediately I wanted to know why, why does this happen? And we started our research under the brand of what we call ourselves, belonging. So a few words about myself, uh my name is Tmao Dan. I'm at the moment on an entrepreneurship path trying to use my tech skills for something good, which particularly means that we are just uh trying to build a social start up. And uh my background is in tech, I do focused on um a very exotic sub field in A I which is called semantic web. Uh Fell in love with the topic. So I was like, what if I can do something with my uh semantic web knowledge, which is also related to data and knowledge management in general and put it together with diversity and inclusion, right? So this is what um emerged into what we call ourselves, belong in dot work. And that's also our website. If you wanna check it out later. In the last year, we've been asking ourselves why, what are the problems in gender equality in general? And then specifically why are there so few women in tech and in general in technical domains?

So today I wanna talk about the problem, what we found out and I'm gonna aim towards the solution because what would be a problem without at least trying to tackle it as well. So, uh again, uh my passion and my heart beat for gender equality. I represent women in tech. This is what I know best. This is my experience. I've been working for about 10 years in the industry. So that's why I wanted to look at the um sustainable development goal number five, which is about gender equality or uh I'm based in Vienna, Austria and Austria has a very well uh not the best uh reputation when it comes to women in tech and women in technical fields in general.

So um this is also partly why I wanted to do something about it. And also I have to admit about uh eight years ago, I founded my own NGO here locally called women tech Makers, Vienna. And this is a global um you know, it's a global community like the women tech network. Um And the sole purpose of it was of course to try to attract more women and to empower them to network them to, you know, get into tech and get into technical um industry. However, the last year, I found out that as I was saying, 50% of the women are at risk of leaving this industry. So for me, this was a shock because for the past what eight years, I was trying to channel girls to channel young professionals into tech, into science, educate uh science and engineering, mathematics. And then you find out that your hard work is actually very at risk um that you lose people uh in, you know, mid career. Actually, this is what we found out of the 1015 years. They, they are at risk of leaving.

So this is what it's called a leaky pipeline, right? So there is a problem at the beginning that because we are not so many. Uh and even though we managed to channel through NGO S and amazing communities like this one, a lot of women into tech, there are, they are actually at risk of falling out later uh in their career. OK. So what's so special about Austria? What is the problem here locally? Uh Well, at the moment, Austria has from the European Union, one of the leading um unfortunately, uh leading gender pay gaps 19%. So this is the difference between how much men work for the same job and women uh earn for the same job. So it's about the salary income. And yes, Europe is on the almost, well on the third to last place in the European Union. That's well, not expected of a high developed country, you might say, oh, well, look what it look how it is. Then also, um, they started to take a close look at the numbers of women in leadership position. So this year and every year they bring out a survey statistics about it. And at the moment in Austria, there are only 9% of management positions represented by women in the top 200 companies here.

And if you look at the overall situation of all companies, it's probably even less than 9%. So, I mean, like proof. Yeah. Right. And uh also um women in tech in general, right. Uh I found actually some statistics that say that only 17% of the it workforce in Austria is represented by women at the moment and looking at the overall numbers, this means about 30,700 women work only in tech in Austria. From my point of view, this is unexplainable. Like why is this? So this is a shocker for me? OK. So when we try to tackle these issues, like why are there so little women, why are there a risk of dropping out uh mid career? A hint, a very good hint to answer this is to look at what do women particularly want out of their job environment? What are the most important job factors in the tech workforce? Right. Uh And this is targeted for women. You can follow my links later. I hope I can share the slides because on this survey which stack overflow uh brings out every year, they have actually uh gender desegregated data, which is amazing because these numbers that you see here are for particularly collected from women developers. So what the what's the most important jobs factor is the work environment, the company culture that I'm part of. Yeah, so 40/48 percent, then a very close um job factor is flexibility. We want to work flexible, right? For over 45%.

And also I wanna say, and mention um professional uh development. Um So this is also a very important factor which also affected me in my career. And it's the reason why I went into entrepreneurship because I reached a glass ceiling in the companies that I was part of 41% right? So that says a lot. However, um we researched further, we actually interviewed women and people in general who left the tech industry to try to understand what is happening at the core, what is going on. And you have to understand that it's very important to uh empathize with these people uh to try to understand how they feel, right? You are working 1015 years in the tech industry and suddenly because of the work environment, because of lack of flexible opportunity, because of lack of uh the professional development. And also because you're the only woman in the team so many times. Yeah, you start to doubt yourself.

Uh So your self esteem, if you and your confidence might well drop. And this is also what happened to me, then you build up anger and frustration and you're like, I don't fit here. I don't feel happy anymore. I do not know what's the problem, but I think I have to change something, right? So it's like, damn it, I was trying to pour my heart into this job and it doesn't work either. People don't acknowledge me, they speak over me either. Uh You know, you're not valued. You find out that you earn less salary than your colleague that does probably even less than you do. And you know, suddenly your, your spirit and your motivation is broken and, and what do you do then? Right. Hmm What can I do? What can I do? And that's when most of the tech uh people they start searching for a new opportunity and a new job. Yes, the salary is important and that's one reason why you would jump shift basically to a new company. But it's also not just the only reason, right? It's also the environment and being valued. And um yeah, being accepted in my own, full authentic way in the workplace that I am at the moment. So then you either consider jo jumping to another organization or as we found out you are at risk of actually moving outside of the industry.

So a lot of the women who exit the tech industry, go into entrepreneurship like me or at least I tried it uh going to education, which I also it's something that I flirted with because you know, by teaching others and inspiring others, I felt like my value and also my development is, is growing, right?

And my heart is growing for this industry. Um or you stay in the same company, for example, hr or marketing because you feel that there as a woman, you might have actually a better chance to become a manager, uh sea level position and so on. So this is what we found um to be the situation, at least particularly to Austria. But I think it could actually, we could extrapolate it for the whole of Europe. And if you give me some feedback about this, then maybe who knows, even in India, in Slovenia, in Armenia and wherever you are from. So I'm really curious to see if this actually is a global pandemic that we're having at our hands. OK. So the problem is, you know, it is what it is, let's try to solve it. So yes, part of the research and all the interviews that we had with companies with tech professionals, um We also tried to create a dialogue to see if there's any space for a solution. Uh how can we come together and you know, collaborate, find a sustainable solution that is not just an easy fix. And then uh you know, you make it go away. But in five years, it pops up again.

For example, at the moment, like I, I wanna say that we tried several things and Austria is a very, very tough market when it comes to diversity and inclusion. This is my personal opinion. I personally feel that the market is not ready for these conversations. There's still a lot of raising awareness that needs to occur, raising awareness about what is diversity. Um What is the difference that there is between tech, women and tech, men and tech intersex and techs, whatever uh sexual orientation there is, right? So there is a difference but people are very, very scared of talking about this, acknowledging it, right? Because different reasons, but mostly because of fear and then this creeps in into the whole hr process from attracting tech talent to uh interviewing them and to keeping them, right?

So this unconscious bias is what I'm aiming at creeps in. And as long as you don't talk about it, it's like the pink elephant in the room uh which never goes away, right? So we were trying lately a solution um through a different kind of job search application. To be honest, I personally find that the job search application that you have out there at the moment are not quite what I personally want and also what our job seekers need. So this is a screenshot of a demo application. Obviously, we're not a company yet. But it's our first attempt of um well, our 10th attempt of a solution and what I want you to think about and maybe you can give me some feedback and or ask some question is, is you basically can search for a workplace, not uh based on your technical skills, but based on your values.

And these values, we group them into different job factors, for example, flexible work, right? Flexible work is a very important and we found this and we we really um validated, this is a very important point. So flexible work, let's see, you could choose, for example, flexible working hours, you could choose home office, you could choose uh flexibility in general, maybe the company has that as a value. Um You can choose flexible work models. So they, you know, you can choose what, how, how much you want to work and how you wanna work and where you can choose part time, you can choose telework and work from home possibilities, right? So I think this is pretty cool. This is something that Austria does not have. It really doesn't exist yet. Um Yeah. OK. So if you, for example, select home office, then you find at the moment in our demo application, which yes, unfortunately is only for a few technical Austrian companies, but still you could try it out and see how you feel about it. You know, if it actually works out, we might actually build a global search application for it. You find seven companies at the moment. Amazing. Right. How, where, where else can I find this? Yeah.

And I created a particular um link for the conference on our, for our website where you can go and try this out right now. The demo is live. Uh It's actually functional. It's working. Yes, we only have 200 Austrian companies in there. But I would love, love, love, love your feedback. Is this something that we women need? You know, should we continue on this path? Should I develop this further or is this total bullshit? And I should move on to the next solution? Like feedback is tremendously important for a social start up. And what we are trying to do here obviously is in line with the gender equality. Uh SDG goal of the United Nations. Yes. And we are at the end of the talk, I hope you took away some interesting points. Don't give up women, men, intersex, whatever sexual orientation you have or gender don't give up on the tech industry. I love it. And I want to find a place where I can pour my full heart and be valued and excel and find my full professional potential because I think every single one of us deserves it at the end of the day. Thank you very much.