When I reflect on what it means to be a woman in tech, I am both inspired by how far things have come, and at the same time, energised and compelled to do so much more. There is no question that we continue to grapple with a narrow talent pool in technology.

While progress has been made at improving diversity in tech, certain sectors like cybersecurity and identity still reveal a significant gender gap that has persisted for decades and will continue until we radically and aggressively change and solve for the biases that exist across education, recruitment and workforce inequity.

Moreover, the future problems that will exist will be very different to what we have right now. I have been fortunate to build a successful career in tech for nearly two decades, and I believe there are a number of critical success factors for an individual in tech to make a personal, yet meaningful impact towards getting diversity right.

Find Your Mentors – And Sharpen Your Reverse Mentoring

Mentorship has had a transformative impact on my career. I’ve been fortunate to have mentors, both men and women, who have offered guidance that goes beyond advice, helping me navigate difficult situations and complex challenges.
Women are conditioned to make space for others, and when done consciously or unconsciously, we hold ourselves back, whether that be using minimising language or softening a sharp point of view. My mentors have literally sat with me and called me out in a safe space, pointing out examples of when I had apologised for someone else’s mistake or minimised myself and I didn’t even know I was doing it. I feel a huge responsibility and a privilege to do the same.

Recently, I had a team member raise a question in a group discussion. She started off by saying, “This might be a really silly question.” It wasn’t, and she’s also an incredibly thoughtful human who doesn’t ask questions without putting in significant thought and effort to solve something on her own. Now It might sound like an innocuous throwaway line, but the fact is, those little micro moments do add up. The language you use adds impact and serves as a multiplier effect to the net outcome of the perception of your value and your own feelings of self-worth, which in turn drive how you show up every day. When I spoke to her after the fact, I made sure she knew, first and foremost, that she was a badass, and second of all, to not diminish herself – she knows her stuff and she should back herself.

I feel deeply accountable to pay forward the privilege that I have had in having phenomenal cheerleaders sitting in my blind spots helping me course-correct, deeply reflect and charge forward with perspective and support.

On the flip side, for me it’s not just about mentoring and cheering for the incredible women around me, it’s equally important to support, coach and educate the men around me on how they can do more, how they can help, be stronger allies, how their words and actions shape the experiences of women at work. I’m super heartened by the number of men I have coming to me each day wanting to help, who don’t know where to start, are afraid to speak up and don’t know the right words to use, the right forum or the right approach. It inspires me every single day when these men ask for help, ask for my perspective – things are absolutely going in the right direction.

Just as mentoring has had a significant impact on my career – reverse mentoring has even more so, especially in the earlier phases of my career. Reverse mentoring provided me with the platform and the safe space to challenge preconceived notions of executive leadership and help them understand the two next generations of talent coming through – and provided them with the safe space to ask questions that they would be worried about asking in a broader setting.

Champion All Diversity, Not Just Gender

The reality is when you look around, there are still very few women in leadership in technology, and in security and identity there are even fewer. So when you’re trying to build out a diverse team when you lead in security and identity, your “perfect profile” talent pool is ridiculously small and a big part of cultivating the right leaders is to champion diversity in all shape and form to broaden that pool and hire incredible people who bring a richness to your team’s culture and overall experience at work.

For example, we need to think about talent who comes from a security background but don’t know the identity space. They might come from a developer background, but they understand customer experience. When we begin from a broader base of what’s ideal, we open ourselves up to bringing into our team cognitive diversity, diversity of experience, gender diversity, among others.

One of my most transformative career moments was when I was moving from Salesforce to Cloudflare – moving from Saas/CRM/Service/Marketing into full stack cybersecurity across Application, Network, Zero Trust and Developer security. I didn’t have the “perfect profile” at all, no computer science background, no cyber background, but I was honest and upfront about my strengths in building high performance cultures, a passion for presales that balances a deep empathy for sales and what it is like to be seller, and a passion for the power of presales and how we can absolutely drive transformation for our customers. When I was in the final rounds of interviews with the hiring director at the time, I was personally convinced I wouldn’t get the job. To my surprise, the second sentence he said on the call was – “You’re a really smart woman, you’ll definitely figure out the tech” and the rest was history. Small moments, built on years and years of the hard work of others educating the people around us to think differently, can have a transformative impact on someone’s career and I’ll always be forever grateful.

It’s also critical to make sure your leaders have the skillsets and tools needed to manage those diverse profiles and set them up for success. They also need your support – broadening the target profiles can potentially slow down your hiring process. It is important to coach your leaders on the benefits, acknowledging the challenges, but guiding them on the potential rewards, they are empowered to build extremely diverse, successful teams within an environment that let people thrive in.

Leading cross-cultural teams has also shown me the importance of continuously educating myself around cultural nuances, inequities and biases that I don’t nascently or naturally understand. Continuous learning helps me put the right structures in place to help and have empathy for challenges those individuals face, remove barriers that hinder people from reaching their full potential, whether that’s by improving access to education, overcoming language barriers, or embracing cultural differences.

Fostering diversity in an organisation is not just a checkbox activity that requires work and focus, but also the genuine, personal commitment from leaders. The leader who takes accountability of diversity may be in for an uncomfortable journey but stay the course knowing that the long-term view will significantly accelerate revenue and positive business results.

Stephanie Barnett is Vice President of Presales for the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) at Okta