Empowering Women In The Digital Industry
Women working in the digital industry discuss the issues surrounding them from equality to female only awards.
A couple of months ago I published the first edition to our “Women in Digital” campaign.
The campaign has grown from strength to strength, attracting the interest of females from various organisations including some well-known agencies such as Rufus Leonard and Blue Hive, to meet with us and discuss the issues surrounding women in the digital industry.
They offered suggestion on how best we could improve the representation and population of women in the industry. What I would say first of all is that we have seen an influx of applications for the roles we are recruiting for from a female audience which is fantastic. We will continue to run this project and no doubt will we place more and more women in the digital sector throughout the year.
We thought it would also be important to gather the opinion of Generation Y who felt disheartened by the fact there are more men called John in the FTSE 100 than there are women. Fereniki from E-Consultancy feels the more successful a woman gets the less liked she is by her peers.
Is that the real issue here? There has been significant improvements in the roles women play in the industry, however there has been a slump in the number or women registering for technical courses at universities. The general consensus was that ‘doing things like this’ will help to once again boost those numbers.
What tactics if any are in place to retain women in the industry? Periscopix do put a lot of focus on a good company culture but retention strategies based solely around females are definitely not the way to go. Why do we even focus on gender?
Shouldn’t it simply be about ability? The industry allows you to do great work with great people, why then when it comes to recognising these great people should we put them in separate categories?
Rebekah Schelfhou came 30th in The Drum search 50 last year, which can be entered by both males and females. ‘Awards are Awards’ and while it is nice to be recognised, the majority of women would rather compete against males as well and feel it is a shame that women still need to be recognised as a separate category.
The Digital sector is a very exciting industry continuously on the rise, anyone should be happy they are making a contribution but would better recognition retain and attract more women to the industry? I think so. Discrimination is decreasing, but we should stop ourselves from thinking that it is gone forever.
Women were also asked what would be the biggest trend in 2015, answers varied from wearables to programmatic and video. The answer that came head and shoulders above the rest was mobile. With the world undergoing a digital transformation, mobile will transform how we market to people. Real time marketing will be the standard and if you are not there it will be damaging to customer satisfaction. Advice I would also give would be to not jump on every digital media platform just because your competitors are on their also, if it is poorly managed that could also damaging to your brand.
To sum up my opinion of the outcome of our Women in Digital campaign, I feel to progress forward in filling the already vacant opportunities for women within the Digital sector, it’s down to the employers to encourage young talent into their organisation. I appreciate it will take time, money and effort to train young employees to the level in which they need them to preform but yet it is so important in an industry so vibrant and diverse as the Digital Industry that we keep creating and developing opportunities for women at all levels.
Watch More Videos By Digital Recruitment Company Here.
FREE EVENT: Join Digital Doughnut in London on March 31st, 2015 for an evening of networking with speakers reviewing Digital Transformation
Read More on Digital Doughnut