Talent Management & Succession Planning

Podcast Episode 12: Talent Drain – Why women leave tech jobs

22nd July 2019

457 views

3 min read

Women are leaving tech jobs twice the rate of men. Even in this modern age, inequality in the workplace, especially tech jobs persists. The number of men employed is still bigger than the number of women. There’s still a gender pay gap. And, women tend to leave their jobs more often than men.

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This Episode: Talent Drain – Why women leave tech jobs

In this episode of The HR Uprising – why women leave tech jobs, Lucinda dives deep on the root causes of why people, composed mostly of women, are leaving their jobs. She also offers various solutions that the executives and HR can follow to make sure that they’re able to retain its employees and maintain high performance. We shouldn’t let bias affect the workplace. We must make sure that there is equality and we base all our decisions and actions on every individual’s talents, capabilities, and developments.

Valuable Resources

Join the HR Uprising LinkedIn Group
Host of The HR Uprising Podcast, Lucinda Carney, is also the founder and CEO of Actus Software, where you can find additional free HR Resources: https://actus.co.uk/free-performance-management-resources/
Actus Software resources particularly relevant to this podcast: Talent Drain: Why Women Leave Tech Jobs
A blog by Georgina Varley covering this topic: https://www.europeanwomenintech.com/blog/why-are-women-leaving-technology-jobs
Research by The Center For Talent Innovation: https://www.talentinnovation.org/_private/assets/Athena-2-ExecSummFINAL-CTI.pdf

Key Takeaways

4 Reasons Why Women Leave Tech Jobs:

Career Prospects – Sometimes, during a team project, executives choose by seniority or familiarity of who will lead. Instead, why don’t we judge based on the talent and capability of the prospect?
Subordinate Bias – We automatically give women subordinate roles even though they can take the lead roles. And in some cases, the roles aren’t even related to their specialities.
Lack of Role Models and Mentors – There is a lack of female mentors in the workplace, and not every woman can connect with a certain mentor. Mentorship will end at a certain point so as much as possible there should be a change of mentors every time.
Personal feedback – We should aim to be more constructive on our feedback and criticisms no matter what gender we’re giving it to. We should base on how to solve certain issues and not be biased about it.

Solutions

Training
Mentoring one-to-one
Setting rules of conduct
Having a workplace pal

Best Moments

“It’s our role as HR professionals to get the best out of people and keep talents in the workplace performing.”
“There should be a beginning and an end to a formalised mentoring process.”

About The Host

Lucinda Carney is a Business Psychologist with 15 years in Senior Corporate L&D roles and a further 10 as CEO of Actus Software where she worked closely with HR colleagues helping them to solve the same challenges across a huge range of industries. It was this breadth of experience that inspired Lucinda to set up the HR Uprising community to facilitate greater collaboration across HR professionals in different sectors, helping them to ‘rise up’ together.

“When we look up we rise up”