{"id":20836,"date":"2017-11-03T12:38:58","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T12:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digileaders.com\/?p=20836"},"modified":"2019-05-08T14:47:59","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T13:47:59","slug":"changing-perceptions-women-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digileaders.com\/changing-perceptions-women-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing perceptions of Women in Leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last month Sue Griffin, Head of User Support Services at DWP and myself delivered a breakout session at the Women into Leadership conference in Leeds.<\/p>\n<p>The conference is\u00a0about managing\u00a0the\u00a0challenges of modern leadership,\u00a0recognising and rewarding female leaders, and enhancing leadership\u00a0opportunities for women\u00a0so they can build\u00a0skills to become the leader they aspire to be.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Redressing the gender balance<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In DWP Digital we\u2019re changing lives by transforming the services we deliver, using new technologies and modern approaches to improve things for our users.\u00a0DWP is huge \u2013 we\u2019re the biggest government department \u2013 we support 22 million customers and release over \u00a3168 billion in payments each year.\u00a0 We\u2019re working to solve important issues, supporting people when they are at their most vulnerable; in order to transform our services we currently work on 50 million lines of code and have around ten\u00a0thousand IT system changes per year.<\/p>\n<p>However, there is gender imbalance in DWP Digital as we have a shortage of female specialists and leaders \u2013 a challenge we share with many large digital organisations where less than 25% of digital roles are filled by women.<\/p>\n<p>We want to change\u00a0this and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/digileaders.com\/why-we-should-worry-about-attracting-women-to-digital-and-leadership-roles\/\">improve the gender balance<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The size and scale of our work offers up a lot of scope for a career in digital technology \u2013 so how can we change\u00a0perceptions to help women develop in a digital career?<\/p>\n<p>Well, in DWP Digital, we\u2019re making progress.<\/p>\n<p>We have our Women in Technology group,\u00a0with\u00a0a pretty active core membership of people who are keen to maximise the value of\u00a0being part of this community. People who\u00a0want to improve gender equality and help members reach their full potential by encouraging personal and professional development. We&#8217;re working hard to avoid having all male panels at events, and we&#8217;ve developed a list of more than 350 women who work within digital and are able to speak at events.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re also developing a \u2018Digital Voices\u2019 programme initiative to build confidence and engagement skills in women in DWP Digital.<\/p>\n<p>And in June we ran a Women in Digital event, which was open to delegates from across the sector, including cross-government and external private sector representatives.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Normalising, not diversifying<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In DWP Digital we\u2019re\u00a0driving\u00a0an ethos\u00a0where\u00a0a <a href=\"http:\/\/digileaders.com\/normalising-gender-diversity\/\">diverse organisation\u00a0is\u00a0seen as the norm<\/a>; where\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0possible for women to be leaders and have our skills valued.\u00a0One of the biggest hurdles isn\u2019t the technology\u00a0&#8211; its\u00a0culture.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re aspiring to be an inclusive organisation where the outcome is the focus, and to get there we collaborate and develop together regardless of gender, race, sexuality or disability.<\/p>\n<p>Being open and talking about the changes we need to make and why, is the first\u00a0step,\u00a0so\u00a0we\u2019re vocal on social media and through our blogposts. Taking action is the next step, so we\u2019ve set up\u00a0diversity\u00a0groups and we have a\u00a0diversity charter. We\u2019re making sure our recruitment process is fair and that we have mixed panels at interview. We\u2019re engaging\u00a0our communities by telling our story.<\/p>\n<p>But we know there is still work to do on breaking down the perceptions of digital and technology. We know the words themselves sometimes put women off from considering careers or roles within this area, and now we need to consider what we can do and how we help break down those perceptions. We need to talk more about the non-technology specialist roles, about the skills and characteristics we need within digital. We need to look hard at the language we use and consider how we be more inclusive with the words we use.<\/p>\n<p>Why not check out Digital Leaders&#8217;\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/digileaders.com\/2017-attitudes-women-tech\/\">2017 Attitudes Survey Results<\/a> to see the key takeaways about view on Women in Tech.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>This article was originally published <a href=\"https:\/\/dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk\/2017\/11\/03\/changing-perceptions-at-the-women-into-leadership-conference\/\">here<\/a>, and was reposted with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last month Sue Griffin, Head of User Support Services at DWP and myself delivered a breakout session at the Women into Leadership conference in Leeds. The conference is\u00a0about managing\u00a0the\u00a0challenges of modern leadership,\u00a0recognising and rewarding female leaders, and enhancing leadership\u00a0opportunities for women\u00a0so they can build\u00a0skills to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":20842,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-20836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","region-leeds","region-yorkshire","region-digital-leaders-north","topic-digital-inclusion","topic-diversity","topic-government","topic-transformation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Changing perceptions of Women in Leadership | Digital Leaders<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/digileaders.com\/changing-perceptions-women-leadership\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Changing perceptions of Women in Leadership | Digital Leaders\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Last month Sue Griffin, Head of User Support Services at DWP and myself delivered a breakout session at the Women into Leadership conference in Leeds. The conference is\u00a0about managing\u00a0the\u00a0challenges of modern leadership,\u00a0recognising and rewarding female leaders, and enhancing leadership\u00a0opportunities for women\u00a0so they can build\u00a0skills to [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/digileaders.com\/changing-perceptions-women-leadership\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Digital Leaders\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/digitalleadersprogramme\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-11-03T12:38:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-05-08T13:47:59+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/digileaders.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/A68A1702-1-1-e1509717538560-1024x491.jpeg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1024\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"491\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" 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