Accelerating HER

Most of us would agree that the lack of women in tech is a serious issue. After all, just a quarter of tech jobs are done by women and a mere 17% of firms have women among their founders.

Likewise, we are all aware how much could be gained by increasing the number of women in the workforce. As a reminder, consultancy McKinsey & Co. believes $28tr could be added to the global economy by 2025 if there were true gender parity in the workplace.

However, when it comes to how we change things, there is less certainty.

We know that a two-hour unconscious bias training isn’t a magic bullet because a lot of companies already do this and things aren’t changing fast enough, if at all.

That’s why two years ago, Poppy Gaye and I launched AccelerateHER to make a real difference to the number of women employed in technology and founding tech companies.

We were joined nine months later by Laura Stebbing who now helps run the organisation. We started off with what we knew – building events that were powerful places for female founders to network, learn and create connections with the Founders Forum ecosystem.

These events, and support for female founders remain crucial, but with 5,000 tech leaders in our Founders Forum network, we felt that we were in an ideal position to lead change. And so we started to look at what more we could do.

Since then, Gamergate has highlighted a perhaps worsening environment for women in tech. Hurricane Weinstein, #metoo and #timesup have drawn (male) attention to the types of issues that women throughout the work world face - with a hope of some radical change - and reckoning - underway.  

This has been going on as AccelerateHER has been busy auditing what was already available for women. We knew there were thousands upon thousands of worthy services, all supporting women in tech at various stages of their experience, and we wanted to create genuine new value, not be repetitive.

We wondered about creating a user-base mapping all these initiatives and asked the LinkedIn community if such a thing existed. 25,000 views and scores of comments told us limited data mapping had been done - but that more work was needed in particular areas.

The first sees us collaborating with some fantastic partners on a project that will point females aged from 1-100 to the many ways they can access tech - wherever they happen to be in the world. And, critically, we’re working to make sure that the organisations that are supporting these initiatives have ways to identify each other, share best practice and collaborate. 

The second strand of our work is an attempt to find out what *really* works when tech organisations are implementing gender parity measures. By that, we recognise a lot of effort is being made by firms in this area. However, few companies are doing an initial internal audit then testing and measuring what has changed as a result. On a large scale, including up to 1000 firms, this is what we are looking to put into place, working with organisations in our Founders Forum ecosystem to support them on this journey.  

We are well aware that it is men who need to lead this change; women are (of course) rarely in the positions of power they need to be to drive the seismic shifts. This is why we will be calling upon senior male global tech leaders to lead the programme in their organisations.

We will be working with them to make diversity a key part of their brand identity and commit to taking action and working as a collective. We’ll be sharing more on this very soon. 

In summary, AccelerateHER is right at the beginning of its journey and we are delighted to be creating partnerships with so many amazing organisations that are also committed to #pressforprogress.

We are thrilled to have Founding Partners supporting us: Intel Capital, Microsoft, and most recently Henkelx (a new operating unit of Henkel that focuses on innovation and disruptive new business models), alongside key partnerships with McKinsey & Co, Tripping.com and Google.  

We will be announcing initiatives to follow, so if you are interested, please contact [email protected].

Happy International Women's Day! We are really excited about the opportunities we have to drive change in tech, together.