As a mark of celebration for International Women’s Day we interviewed 6 of Box UK’s outstanding women, who themselves are ‘Breaking The Bias’ towards women in technology. Here we talk to Allie Brock our Head of Ecommerce.
Q. Why do you think it’s important for more women to join the tech industry?
Good teams form when there is a good balance of personalities and perspectives. I’ve been lucky to have worked with some great teams (and some not so great teams!) and what strikes me about the empowered, high performing teams is the stronger diversity balance.
Q. What advice would you give yourself just starting out?
My advice would be to surround yourself with people that lift you up and support you. I have a relationship with Imposter Syndrome that spans over 20 years and is as a result of an encounter with a bigoted colleague back in the 90s as I was starting out my career.
Q. Do you think enough is done to help women get into the tech industry? If not, what would you recommend?
I think there is more and more being done to help women get into the tech industry (and there are strong female role models out there), but media and organisations can still do more to promote positive representation.
Q. What first sparked your interest in working in the tech industry?
To be honest I initially didn’t have a real interest in working in the tech industry. Desperate to leave a somewhat ‘traditional’ all girls catholic school at 16 I stumbled into a job as a runner for a software engineering company (seriously – my job was to take strange piles of punch cards from one place to another). I found out the cards actually held code!! Fast forward a little and I started learning (mainly teaching myself), until I eventually got the Java gig.
Even though that throwaway comment effectively ended my software development calling, by now my eyes were open to the wealth of career opportunities in tech, and since then my curiosity has led me along a varied career path, to where I am today!
(another bit of advice for me would be not to drop those boxes of punch cards – apparently they all have to stay in the same order!)
