Breaking the unconscious gender bias: Womens day Reflection

• March 11, 2023March 16, 2023
• sangini jha

Womens day act as a Messenger for soul awakening! 

In this ubiquitous technology transformation, “Soul Awakening” is one of the critical elements. Here, the discussion is more about the occasion of Womens day and awakening comes as a signal and soul reflection for all the women who are sleeping in ignorance, they need to get awakened, reflect upon themselves and step ahead to break the unconscious gender bias on this womens day. International womens day is a medium to amplify the voice of women for their rights.

International Womens day acts as a wake-up call to drive the positive waves of change and to empower Women, Vulnerable & Marginalised groups so that they can step up the ladder of leadership. There is an important saying by Sarah Wood, Non-Executive director at Signal AI, “Women shouldn’t be afraid to put themselves forward”.

Our Wonder Women at FiftyFive Technologies!

Based on this truly inspiring quote, women should put themselves first in terms of enrichment and professional development. This should be celebrated by Women, and they should be more confident not only on Women’s day but every single day!

We are living in the 21st century where the technological developments and modernization of the world economy are in full swing. However, the mindset is still sailing in the conventional era. The change makers talk about innovation, leadership, Women empowerment and other changes in the world. If we talk about leadership roles, most of the functions are occupied by Male leaders. According to the latest LinkedIn data Women’s occupancy in leadership roles is a meagre 19%. In this world, where there are principles of “Equity”, “Diversity”, and “Gender Equality” floating around as trending keywords and are being enchanted by many leaders, are just mere keywords because actions speak louder than those handsome-sounding words. Women are equally efficient as men. Data is different, according to IBM, the percentage of Women in managerial positions is even less, a mere 10% (approx) of employees at the managerial level are women (Source: IBM-Reshape Tomorrow Summit-Women in Tech).

So what factors are playing as the stumbling block for women who want to become great leaders, and what is the reason behind the low percentage of women leaders, especially in the technology sector?

Let’s divide it into five categories:

1. Stereotypical mindset: It involves the culture of family, the gender bias of perceiving only men as the breadwinners, inequality, and lack of education.
2. Lack of internal education: The habit of suppressing women at the workplace by men, harassment, lack of morality, and egoist nature of men. These factors play a crucial role in blocking Women’s professional growth.
3. Intrinsic hurdles: Lack of proper education, lack of motivation, lack of confidence and courage, family responsibilities, fear of work-life imbalance. These factors reside within Women.
4. Personal hurdles: This includes- improper work-life balance, lack of financial support, Early marriage, Family responsibilities, difficulty managing household chores along with the job, lack of support from Husband, not getting enough time for learning new technologies or tech stack acts as a barrier for Women.
5. Professional hurdles: Improper training, given by companies, sometimes proper facilities are not available for women who returned from work after maternity leave or long career breaks acts as a hurdle in the professional development of Women who want to become great leaders.

These challenges are prevalent and they prevent Women to achieve their leadership goals. The changing mindset and having a broad horizon are the need of the hour! Although many companies are working on it and continuously mulling over how women can become great pioneers and innovators. Achieving Women’s empowerment & Gender equality is one of the critical sustainable development goals which needs to be solved and it is not just on women’s day but it should be important that every day brings fresh rays of change with respect to the upliftment of women. These are some of the aspects, however, the impactful women’s day can be zeroed down to the following points:

1. Women’s day as a harbinger of protection
2. Women’s day as a basket of leadership opportunities
3. Women’s day as a stimulus for perfect gender equality
4. Women’s day as an impetus for more women entrepreneurs
5. Women’s day as a charioteer who runs the chariot of strategic initiatives which help in uplifting the women’s community
6. Women’s day as a change agent to fill the brains of males so that they have a sense of gratitude towards women
7. Women’s day as a catalyst for more women’s social activists
8. Women’s day as a medium to uplift the women living in underprivileged regions
9. Women’s day as an inspiration to educate more girls in tech roles
10. Women’s day is a vehicle to transport happiness, compassion, encouragement and respect so that women’s held their heads high and paddle forward in the journey of success.

All corporates, Governments, Tech companies and other sectors need to understand the importance of women and contribute to making women’s day even more special, transformative and impact-driven.

FiftyFive Technologies is also addressing various issues and are enabling our Women members- “The Wonder Women of FiftyFive Family” to excel & thrive well as future leaders in their career trajectory. We have come up with the following solutions and are also strategizing on other activities for strengthening workplace diversity starting this Women’s day 2023:

1. Aggressive female hiring for different roles to increase the female headcount.
2. The most important aspect which all the top voices speak and even FiftyFive Technologies patronize is the “relentlessly rethinking of the strategies to solve hurdles faced by Women at Workplace, reshaping the mindset and redesigning the workplace culture to produce more women leaders who will lead the FiftyFive Technologies in their most authentic way.
3. Learning & development avenues, leadership mentoring programmes, reimbursement of the amount related to the course completion in the respective domain and adequate time to read and learn new technologies.
4. Continuous motivation & food for thought so that Women trust their instincts to become great leaders. We cherish and believe that each day is as special as Womens day so we ask our women about their well-being every day. Because we care more!
5. Propagating workplace diversity and an enterprising culture for Women.
6. Return to work programme for females who wish to restart their career after a long break.
7. Maternity & paternity leave benefits and other perks.
   On every Womens day, we write and send heartfelt gestures to each and every Woman at FiftyFive Technologies.
8. Womens day is like a special festival for us to express our gratitude towards the mighty brains of our female fraternity. We celebrate by presenting a beautiful bouquet of flowers to every female at our workplace
9. Womens profound contribution helps us accomplish our bottom lines and we list their contributions in our monthly newsletters
10. Our objective on this womens day to is to empower our female employees to take up more learning sessions. We have a policy where people present their knowledge and this instils the value of peer learning. We will increase the number of women initiators to augment gender equality in the segment of peer learning as well
11. Brain rewiring sessions like meditation, tuning into happiness, compassion and cultivating a sense of appreciation towards womens performance are values we are imbibing and we are also introducing process improvements to make these sessions more beneficial for robust diversity & inclusiveness.
12. On womens day, we had a call with all our wonderful women at FiftyFive Technologies so that they can vent out their feelings, about how they are celebrating womens day, what they want to achieve and what their families are doing for them on the womens day. At last, there was also a cake-cutting session to celebrate womens day with our wonderful women.

We at FiftyFive Technologies are constantly sculpting a culture which is beyond tech and coming up with a slew of important initiatives on this women’s day for our Wonder Women at FiftyFive.

The solutions need to be implemented in a full-fledged manner.  There is one thing which is missing, called “The Unimind”. The question is what is it?
It means that there are some people who procrastinate in taking up initiatives for Women’s empowerment, here we are talking about togetherness. For example, there are people who had watched the Marvel movie- Eternals in that each member’s mind combines with other members to form a strong power unit referred to as the Uni mind in the same way, we can learn from the movie that we all can come forward and collaborate as a strong force to propel the change.

On the occasion of International Women’s day, there is a need to break the stereotypical glass ceiling and let us all pledge to crack the gender bias code by bringing actions that empower Women in tech to prosper as tech leaders abode. This should not be done in silos we all need to have Unimind and cohesiveness to welcome women at all levels.