Women In Tech

Sheryl Sandberg (COO at Meta & Founder of LeanIn) once said, “The word ‘female,’ when inserted in front of something, is always with a note of surprise. Female COO, female pilot, female surgeon — as if the gender implies surprise … One day there won’t be female leaders. There will just be leaders.” This quote perfectly sums up what we are doing within Version 1 – developing, supporting and empowering our next batch of leaders, many of whom just happen to be women.  

But let’s go back to the start. Our Women in Tech group began with a pilot in our Northern Ireland team back in 2019 with the aim to promote Version 1 as a great place to work for women and provide an environment where women can collaborate, empower, encourage, and support each other. Despite a pandemic and the world losing a sense of in-person connection, this group bloomed into a roaring force that is driving systemic change to overcome gender inequality in our sector.  

With the success of the pilot group in Northern Ireland, in March 2022 we launched our Women in Tech Core Group which represents all of our locations with the aim to get us up and running on a global scale. This group has been working together for the past couple of months to ensure that we have set up each location with members who can help support and drive local initiatives and events and will be a port of call for each location.  

We may only be a couple of months old, but that hasn’t stopped us from getting to work. We have created our 2022 objectives and plan, launched them across all our locations, and celebrated Internal Women’s Day with company-wide and regional initiatives. We have helped with various policies and procedures including our Gender Pay Gap Report, the launch of our new Reproductive Health policy, and collaborated with our Diversity Inclusion and Belonging Manager and Team on wider initiatives beyond just gender. But this is just the beginning… 

We are just at the beginning of our journey, but we have big plans. This quarter alone will see us launch our Women in Tech group to the entire organisation, inviting all our females to join our WIT movement, with this we will host our first group-wide event introducing the group, its’ goals, and the importance of this group – not only for Version 1 but within our sector. We are also aiming to launch a mentoring pilot to offer the best support and guidance for all our women – Afterall, empowered women empower women! We will also be continuing to support our Women TechStart programme which is aimed at helping women break into the tech sector, supporting our wider Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Team on all things gender equity and equality, and working with external accreditation bodies to ensure we are doing the utmost to support and celebrate our women.