It's International Women's Day. What did you do yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that...

The requests to speak at Women and Tech events began almost immediately upon my appointment last September as Managing Director of OneEleven Toronto, an innovation hub for scaling technology companies.

Qualification to speak to the issues of women’s representation in technology required, it seemed, little more than having been recently hired as a woman in tech.

But when it comes to taking a public position, I am almost physically incapable of saying things I don’t believe or bemoaning a problem without being able to point to any solutions or actions I have offered in response.

I have tried to build a career and a reputation based on credibility, and credibility to me means the ability to deliver.

And so I opted to turn down the majority of those requests and focus instead on doing the work.

Six months later, on International Women’s Day, I’m ready to speak about some of the work we have been doing at OneEleven when it comes to advancing the representation and leadership of women in the tech sector, and the myriad challenges that remain.

Like much of tech, women are underrepresented in our community, both at the founder level and within the 800+ employee base of our member companies.

This is a problem for a lot of reasons, including the fact that companies with higher numbers of female executives have been shown to outperform financially. But I think the impact was most succinctly summed up recently in Forbes by Joy Boulamwini, of the Algorithmic Justice League at MIT:

“Monocultures die. A healthy tech ecosystem cannot thrive if only a narrow subset of the population is involved in shaping the products and services that shape our lives. Any company with global aspirations must think about full spectrum inclusion.”

But full spectrum inclusion is, of course, easier said than done. You cannot just say you want diversity and expect it to materialize. To make real process you must reshape systems and approaches. You have to understand systemic barriers and bias in current practices and work to deconstruct them. You need to send immediate short term signals and introduce things that will have a meaningful long term positive impact.

This week, we launched a benchmarking survey with our member company, Diversio, founded by Anna Klimbovskaia and Laura McGee, who was recently named as co-chair of the federal government's Women Entrepreneurship Strategy Expert Panel.

Diversio is an enterprise CRM tool for diversity and inclusion in the workplace and applies the same approach of measurement, analysis and intervention that most businesses take for granted when they, say, lag behind in sales. With Diversio, we are benchmarking the demographic makeup of our community in aggregate, as well as gaining insights into how experiences of inclusion differ in the workplace, so we can identify issues and offer programming and resources in response.

But even without this data, I know as a starting point that we don’t have enough female led companies.

Like many, it would be easy for us to fall back on the pipeline excuse. We could simply say that no female led companies apply to OneEleven or meet our criteria, which requires a seed round of funding, product market fit with a technology platform or product and monthly recurring revenue.

But saying women are not there is not true and it’s not good enough. It’s displacing blame. And so we are actively scouting and researching and communicating with early stage female led companies to build our own pipeline and to offer support and resources for those who are in the early stages of their company’s growth. And we are also working to understand what’s getting in their way when it comes to the lack of investment or traction or support.

Some of this, I believe, is the tendency for like to gravitate towards like.

And so we have intentionally changed our own internal structures to prevent this from happening.

When new companies apply to join OneEleven, it is no longer the decision of one person or a homogenous group.

Our regular Community Review Panels are now curated with participants from our member companies, and include founders and non founders across a diverse spectrum of identities, skills, roles and perspectives.

They are asked to assess applicant companies on three elements: whether they believe in the product, the team, and the company’s fit with the community.

It has proved to be a very effective asshole screen, while also ensuring we are supporting companies with products our community believes in and wants to see succeed.

It allows us to introduce female members of our community to other founders and company leaders, and spotlight their abilities and their perspectives.

The topic of diversity in hiring is almost always raised (and not by me), and companies who do not indicate an awareness of why this matters and and a desire or ability to address it are rarely made an offer of space.

At the same time, we are actively working to develop a culture where we think diverse founders will want to build their companies, and where women at all levels will want to work.

Internally, we have hosted an advisory table on how female identifying employees experience OneEleven, from our facilities and programming to access to mentorship and professional development.

We have started a Women’s Peer Group, the first of our peer groups that’s not centred around a specific role like CTO or Product. Many of our member companies are small, and employ only one woman on the team, and so this monthly conversation is there to provide peer-to-peer support drawn from our wider community of women on gender-related workplace issues.

In our programming and events, we are also introducing topics and expertise that spotlight female leadership and help facilitate inclusion.

We brought in the creators of the Parenting Playbook to discuss parental leave and parent friendly workplace structures as impactful recruitment and retention strategies. During the Q&A, one male founder mentioned that he was hiring a fractional CFO, and inquired about the idea of hiring a woman transitioning back into the workforce. Since then another of our member companies, one that works directly with CPAs, has published just such a job posting on his behalf.

We convened a panel on salary negotiations at the request of numerous female community members, and brought in founders of two companies, DotHealth and NorthOne, who have made real strides in changing how compensation is structured and approached - and who have achieved great diversity and inclusion in their own teams.

We’ve also introduced an Association Health Plan, through our member companies Humi, Maple and our alumni Wealthsimple.

Benefits cut across gender when it comes to making jobs attractive to prospective hires, but manh tech companies are too small to offer them directly. Our Association Health Plan is available to all our member companies and alum, and is part of our efforts to help build a sustainable tech ecosystem, led by teams who care about their employees and are invested in maintaining their wellbeing.

On their own, these changes are not groundbreaking or even particularly exciting. But they are about resetting the foundation and continuing to push open some doors.

I recently ran into Sonia Sennik, Executive Director of the Creative Destruction Lab, and we talked briefly about these efforts. She mentioned the High School Girls Program they have introduced, which opens CDL sessions to 1,500 female high school students.

I attended a CDL session recently and some of the students were in the room as a group of investors, corporate leaders and CEOs assessed the prospects of a presenting tech startup, Dragon’s Den style. Half way through the discussion, a CDL employee turned to one of the girls and asked for her opinion, the whole room listening as she spoke. These students do not just attend CDL, they are treated as full participants, their perspectives valued and sought out and spotlighted.

It is that kind of work that sends signals. It is that kind of work that will enable change for generations. It’s about actions you take when you’re not on stage, when you’re not making a speech, when you’re behind closed doors and everyone is just going about their business.

Advancing the representation of women in tech and beyond is about more than introducing a program, it’s about implementing real change. It’s unpeeling the layers until you expose something new.

That is real work. That is credible impact. And that is something I would talk about publicly all day.