CRN Deep Dive: How advocacy can bring more women into the IT channel

“Because mentorship is great, advocacy is what you need to be able to help you get to the next level.”

The Australian IT channel has become more diverse in recent years, with several prominent companies having women at the helm, it better reflects the society we live in, but we still have ways to go.

Women in Australia make up more than 50 percent of the population, but in the IT sector, they only make up 30 percent of the workforce, according to RMIT.

The old saying goes, “it’s not what you know, but who you know” and this is equally as important when it comes to having a diverse workplace.

Advocacy in the IT channel is an important role that both men and women need to play their part in. Advocacy plays a powerful role in ensuring more women have a seat at the table and get their voices heard.

In this month’s CRN Australia deep dive, four Australian IT channel leaders discuss the power of advocacy to increase diversity within their workplaces.

Advocacy as a weapon

Organisations have put the onus on mentorship programs, but Hope McGarry, managing director at Ingram Micro Australia said the real weapon is advocacy.

“We have a lot of mentoring programs for women in industry, and it's not to discount them. They do amazing work, but we also need to educate women coming through around the importance of advocacy,” McGarry explained.

“Because mentorship is great, advocacy is what you need to be able to help you get to the next level.”

To be advocated for McGarry said it is about being purposeful about what you want.

"You have to be really purposeful about what you want, finding out what that thing is, or those couple of things are, and then taking the steps required to build that advocacy around that so that you can progress in those areas,” she explained.

“But, no one's going to care more about your career than you. If you put it in the hands of someone else, it's probably not going to go the way you want it to.”

McGarry highlighted the importance of using your voice.

“We sometimes are a little bit hesitant to speak up to say, ‘this is what I want, this is the role I want. Here's my two to three year plan, and I need advocacy to help me get there’,” she said.

“Get that advocacy, really work through your plan and be really deliberate, I think is really important.”

Advocacy needs to be active

Advocacy is about being active and isn’t something that happens passively, according to Julie Kirk, chief people and culture officer at Centorrino Technologies.

"You have to actively sponsor it and look for opportunities to do it because it's using your influence, your networks, your voice, your forums, in order to put women or anyone of diverse backgrounds forward for opportunities that they may not have access to themselves,” she said.

Kirk said there is focus on teaching women on how to adapt, when we need to focus on how to change some of the systemic structures that have caused this adaptation.

“A lot of it is systemic. It's not about fixing the fact that Julie Kirk might be different at the table. It's fixing the system around the fact that Julie Kirk is the only female at the table,” she explained.

“And how do you do that? That's systemic. That's fixing the systems that build those types of environments.”

For Kirk, Advocacy is someone speaking your name in decision making conversations or recommending you for assignments that you don't even know about. She said advocacy is about opening doors that “never existed”.

“Backing you publicly so that others take notice of your value or your contributions. Women we're not notoriously great at celebrating how good we are,” she said.

“It's not in our DNA, and certain words have created that. It's the assertive for a man versus being a bitch for a woman.”

To see advocacy flourish in an organisation, there needs to be diversity, Kirk explained.

"Advocacy thrives when diverse voices can be amplified. If you're in a room that's full of just men of one background, one age profile, one way of doing things, you get one approach,” she said.

“Having been a single female at the table at most of my career, at times, you're viewed as different because your thoughts aren't aligned to that one approach, that one way, advocacy for me in that situation is listening.”

The importance of being in the room

For Xara Tran, founder and CEO at Champions of Change, advocacy is about having a seat at the table.

"Advocacy is making sure that I'm in the room, I'm being respected in the room, even if I confuse them, which I love,” she said.

"You should watch out, because there's something about [me] that is beyond that first snap judgment that you can make.”

She noted that doing the good work, is also a part of the advocacy, because if she can show up as a young, female founder making strides, it opens the doors for other young female founders.

“Every time someone is interacting with Champions of Change and they have a great experience, whether it's sales related and or partnerships and the clients. That's where advocacy comes,” she said.

“It's like this contagious event, if I win a $10 million deal then that creates ripples and then it allows me to do my additional tasks of giving women a bigger platform.”

To improve advocacy within the industry, Tran would love to see a spotlight on all women, not just female executives.

"I feel like you have to have a name and credibility be seen, you have to be an executive leader,” she said.

“But there needs to be a place where there's a spotlight for up and coming women that have shown some significant potential of some sort.”

She said she feels lucky because her work has been publicised before in various outlets, but others don’t have that opportunity due to their job title.

“Things like that would allow them, would allow their career to be strengthened a little bit more,” she said.

“I find that women in the industry that when they're in these types of jobs, they're much more vulnerable to just leave, because just the dominance of male to women is so high. You need that balance.”

The industry has progressed

Reflecting on the industry’s progression when it comes to advocating for women, Jacquie Young, managing director – cloud APAC at Westcon Comstor said the industry has progressed and it is different to what it was 20 years ago.

Young has worked for various companies over the years, some have been very inclusive, and others not so much.

“In the mid 2010s I worked for an organisation where it was 16 percent women, and I saw some very dysfunctional behaviour,” she explained.

“I put down to the cultural mismatch that happens when you have such as a low percentage of women in the company.”

Young said that unacceptable behaviour began her advocacy journey.

“When that [abusive behaviour] happens, and every now and then, when you see something dysfunctional, to speak out about it,” she said.

“When I have worked for a company where there is that sort of behaviour, I will leave, if that's part of the culture I will leave.”

She said it is up to leaders to influence a company’s culture.

“For those in leadership positions that can influence an organisation's culture and who we hire and the sort of policies we have, it's on us to make sure that we are the ones that make those changes,” she added.

At Westcon Comstor, 42 percent of their employees are female, according to Young. At the distributor, they use several tools and dashboards to track their diversity efforts.

"When we survey employees, we're asking the respondents, was is your gender? So we can know, do we have issues in minorities? It's not just gender, it's other minorities,” she explained.

“I feel like all the systems are in place in this industry for us to know and to make those changes. I don't think anything needs us a course correction this year, it's just continuous.”

Young noted the importance of not trying to over course correct when it comes to advocacy and hiring more women.

“There are some industries where they've put quotas on the number of women in leadership positions and so on. I don't personally feel like that should be necessary. You've only got broader cultural problems if you've had to do that,” she said.

Young explained a better way of ensuring an organisation has enough women in their organisations.

“Having policies and visibility of when you're doing surveys and understanding who's out there in your workforce, and have we got the right HR policies when we're hiring people to make sure that we're ensuring that there's a balance of the two,” she said.

“I feel like that's the thing that we need to keep doing. I don't want quotas set because that's when people start going, ‘that person got the role because they're filling a diversity token’.”