Today we celebrate Girls in ICT day, which aims to highlight the critical need for more women in the IT industry. We have chosen to highlight 4 of our female colleagues in the hope of inspiring other women to start a career in IT.
What do you work with at aety?
Malene: I’ve been working as a Consultant and Trainer at aety for a year and a half, helping customers who have purchased Atlassian for the first time. I also help existing Atlassian customers to improve their previous set-up.
Line: I work as an Atlassian Consultant and have been with aety for almost 3 months. I also have a small foot in the monday.com camp, so you could say that I have a hybrid profile within IT, where I handle many different cases.
Tanya: I work as a Consultant and Trainer and have been with aety for 9 months. I help customers with the startup process of Atlassian, but I also work on the bigger projects on monday.com.
Josephine: I work as an IT Support and Consultant and have been with aety for half a year. I help our existing customers solve various Atlassian issues.
Have you always wanted to work with IT?
Line: I didn’t always want to work with IT, and I especially had no interest in working as an IT consultant. I associated IT consultants with men in suits and excessive working hours. I always found the process part and everything outside of IT development very interesting, and I only realized that there were many exciting aspects to IT development from a previous job.
Josephine: I very much agree with what Line says. I haven’t always found IT particularly exciting. I first opened my eyes to IT through my education; IT and communication, which I had applied to because of the combination of communication and IT.
Tanya: I don’t think I ever saw IT as an option. I have two degrees in marketing and have subsequently worked in marketing for a number of years. It was actually my friend who introduced me to IT and it sounded like something for me. That’s why I started a master’s degree in IT and communication.
Malene: I’ve always been interested in IT. When I was younger I was always messing around with computers and jailbroke my first iPhone to redesign the app icons. I was introduced to IT university when we were on a school field trip with my high school and knew that’s what I wanted to do. My plan was to study software development, but I was a bit intimidated by it as there weren’t many girls in the program at the time. So I applied to Digital Media and Design, where there were more women.
What do you like most about working with IT?
Tanya: I think the best thing about working in IT is that some days I have a lot of customer contact where I focus on the customer’s needs. Then there are other days where I can sit and immerse myself in building on the system the customer has requested.
Line: I completely agree. One of the best things about working with IT is that you see how your work creates value for the end user.
Have you experienced your professional knowledge being questioned because of your gender?
Malene: Yes, unfortunately, that was one of the previous reasons I changed workplaces. I’ve experienced that my working hours and labor have not been as valuable as those of my former male colleagues. Unfortunately, I’ve also been talked down to a couple of times. However, I have never experienced that my professional knowledge was questioned at aety, or at any of the customers I have been a consultant for.
Tanya: Unfortunately, I’ve also experienced that my professional knowledge has been questioned. It’s been men who have wanted to help because they’ve assumed that I couldn’t figure out what I was doing. Even though they obviously meant well, it’s easy to interpret it as degrading.
Do you feel that women have something different to contribute than men?
Malene: About the technical skills, I would say no. I think men and women can contribute the same in IT. However, I still believe that women are needed when it comes to developing systems or solutions, as men and women think differently. The solutions or systems that are developed must be used by an end user consisting of both genders. Therefore, I also believe that those who design and develop the solutions must be able to see the perspective from both sides.
Line: I completely agree with that aspect exactly. I also believe that men and women can be equally good at identifying needs, but men and women think differently and can therefore look at things from different perspectives. If you create a broad portfolio of system developers, you automatically have a greater understanding of the user and can therefore develop a better product.
Why do you think there are so few women in the IT industry?
Malene: If you’re not really familiar with what IT entails, you might have the impression that it’s only about programming. Of course, we also need skilled programmers to develop the systems, but being the link between the programmer and the end user is for me the core of IT. Unfortunately, you’re often not introduced to that part.
Josephine: However, the number of women in the IT industry is increasing. As Malene said, I think people often compare working with IT as being synonymous with being a specialist in something advanced. There’s so much more to IT than the gadget part, but the most important thing is that you have the desire and the technical understanding.
What do you think makes aety a great place to work?
Tanya: Definitely, there’s a lot of trust in us as employees and there’s a lot of opportunity to take on a lot of responsibility. I get new tasks all the time and the great thing about the software systems we work with is that there are hundreds of functions and applications, which means that no two tasks are the same. At the same time, there is an incredibly flat structure in the organization, which I really appreciate.
Josephine: The partners have a good overview of the company’s many customer projects. They are incredibly supportive and have a strong focus on competence development. In addition, there is a great atmosphere among the employees where there is room for everyone.
