MentorHER: Empowering women in tech through mentorship

Despite the growing demand for diverse talent in the tech sector, women remain underrepresented, holding just under a quarter of tech roles and a mere 5% of leadership positions. There are many initiatives and employers who are encouraging career changers to take the leap into tech and many women who’ve had gaps in their career (often owing to caring responsibilities) have jumped at the opportunity of re-training and upskilling.

As someone who arrived late to the tech sector myself, I know firsthand how energising it felt to not be written off after needing a career change when 10-hour days and 6 day weeks no longer suited my family situation. It was good to know my transferable skills were valued and for everything else, they’d teach me.

But it is also too easy to feel inadequate joining an industry later in life. I felt embarrassed to be older but know less. Add to that the constant changes in technology and methodologies and it often felt like I needed to work extra hard to earn my place. Maybe this is one of the reasons a third of women who hold tech positions say they are planning on leaving the sector*. I wanted to do my bit to stop that happening.

It was my MD, Hilary Stephenson who first alerted me to ‘MentorHER’, the mentoring programme, run by Manchester Digital and supported by Autotrader which aims to support women to thrive in the tech sector in our region. I’d been lucky to have had the benefit of many patient and highly experienced people who had spotted some potential in me and taken the time to share what they had learned. Now, after a decade in the industry I felt ready to pay it forward. I was keen to sign up.

Que all sorts of inadequate feelings. While I am in the tech sector, I’m not in a technical role (my experience is on the project and product side), and on hearing I was to mentor a front-end developer, initially I felt doubtful that I’d be able to pass on anything of worth to my new mentee. But Roxy, Heather and Kirsten who run the scheme brought a fresh perspective.

On MentorHER mentors and mentees are intentionally selected to be from different practice backgrounds. Mentoring is not about teaching the mentee to do their job, it’s about helping mentees talk through their thoughts and bringing a fresh perspective. In my role as Product Manager, I am so used to solving problems and recommending solutions, I am sure that had I been allocated someone in the same role as me I would have been too tempted to instruct and solve. Instead, I was channelled into making connections with my mentee in other ways.

Instead of jumping in with suggestions of how I’d done things (this is my comfortable space, partly through feeling the need to prove myself), I needed to take more time to listen, to get to know my mentee, to understand what she was experiencing and to ask what she wanted out of the relationship. I have met with my mentee 8 times over the past 6 months. It took the first session or two to find out about each other and to start to feel at ease with the new relationship. By both of us being fully present in each session – not half listening whilst checking emails - we have quickly built trust and have been having some really good conversations.

I may have been the Mentor in the relationship, but I’ve learned just as much than my mentee. I’ve learnt to listen more. Actually taking time to listen and think about what’s been said and digesting that properly, rather than listening in order to respond. I’ve practiced exchanging ideas and perspectives and sharing resources and experiences in a non-directive style.

We’ve made use of the GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will) to work through what she wants to achieve (goal), what is her current situation (reality), what ideas she has to achieve her goal (options) and what she is willing to commit to (will). Through our conversations I hope I’ve offered my mentee a different perspective. I hope I’ve helped her see that she is more than capable in her role, and that she is in control of it and can impact it direction.

I believe she has been able to see the power that she has to hold the pen and be the writer of her own tech future. So much so she has been promoted and our last conversations have now moved onto what type of team leader and manager she wants to be. I’m not claiming any of that for myself, it was all her, 100%, but it has given a new focus to the sessions, and I hope when she runs a new team activity or her first one to one as someone’s manager, she can draw strength from the conversations we had and embrace her new role with confidence. She is a new tech leader and hopefully here to stay.

I’ve heard ‘there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women’. I may be showing my age by attributing that quote to Madeline Albright rather than Taylor Swift, but whoever you take your inspiration from, be thankful that there is a woman there in that position to look up to. I’m sure they’ve had some help along the way.

And for any woman in tech; you don’t have to join a special mentoring scheme, and you don’t have to see yourself as a role model to be one. Just be available to that person sitting next to you, or across the office, or on the other end of the Team chat. Little gestures of support every day can be the difference.

*according to the Tech Talent Charter 2023