Marking International Women’s Day 2024 by spotlighting female team members
The official UN theme for IWD 2024 is “Count Her In: Invest in Women. Accelerate Progress”. Ideally this will prompt organisations to examine how they are investing in women, and to consider the resulting benefits to their business, their offering, and their service to stakeholders.
As a female, and particularly as a female who has always worked in male-dominated industries (engineering & data), I have been conscious of bias, barriers to promotion and wage gaps impacting women for a long time. During my career, I’ve had experiences that ranged from blatant sexism and machismo in the workplace, to having my desire for promotion and career progress called into question, to being told I wasn’t cut out to manage a team.
Fortunately, alongside those encounters, I’ve also benefited from positive experiences and support systems. For example, I read Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s Ask For It at an early stage in my career, which informed and encouraged my ability to negotiate on my own behalf. I participated in Women on Boards’ Next Generation of Female Leaders Program to support my growth and evolution as a leader. I have a partner who both recognises and has supported me in articulating the value I can and do bring.
Working in my own data engineering firm for the past 7 years, I have been able to directly address and mitigate for bias in hiring, development and promotion practices. This started with a redesign of our hiring process to build in intentional bias-reduction elements. These include clear-cut application criteria that have nothing to do with names, gender, cultural background or resumes, multiple interview rounds with different interviewers, and ensuring we use the same questions and evaluation criteria for all candidates. This has led, in a natural way, to an incredible team that is richly diverse and well-aligned with our business culture.
This hiring process is at the heart of how we invest in women and in diversity. At BizCubed we also have intentional salary and professional development approaches, including hiring at equal starting salaries. Increases have clear guidelines related to professional development and demonstration of company values, and we have a defined and well-supported progression path to guide promotions.
A bit about BizCubed’s female credentials:
- Woman-owned and managed at the CEO level
- 40% female management team
- 32% of staff (26% of the engineering team) are women – greater than the percentage of female engineering & IT graduates in Australia*
This week we will be shining a spotlight on our female team members.
This celebration is not a one-off. We regularly celebrate our team members in different ways, from our “Positive First” daily shout-outs to our “Openness” celebration of team diversity, to our annual BizCubed Ways & Values awards.
Rebecca Zeus
Rebecca Zeus is Co-CEO and Director of Enabling Services at BizCubed. A chemical engineer by training and a Lean Six Sigma Blackbelt, she has built a reputation as an expert in process design and implementation. Most recently, she led a company-wide initiative to formalise and certify BizCubed’s Information Security Management System. She is also a mother of four, an avid volunteer, a non-profit board member, and a crafting-enthusiast.