There comes a moment in every organisation's journey, Dr Rebecca Parsons says, when the decision to fight gender bias – even if it means losing a lucrative client – is a make or break one.
For Dr Parsons, the chief technology officer of software development company ThoughtWorks which this year beat Google and Facebook as the United States' top company for women in tech, that moment presented itself in the worst possible way.
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It didn't happen to her directly, although Dr Parsons is no stranger to gender-based discrimination, having in the late 1970s been told by Bradley University's then male computer science professor that girls can never excel at maths and science.
(Boy, did she prove him wrong, later working as assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida, and then at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of just two US organisations in which classified work towards the design of nuclear weapons has been undertaken).
The unfortunate incident happened to one of the company's staff members: a young female ThoughtWorks consultant was told by a male client that she was simply in the job due to her looks, not her smarts.
"He effectively told her her role on the project was just to be an ornament," Dr Parsons says in an interview with Fairfax Media during a visit this week to Australia.
"But the men on the [ThoughtWorks] team stood up for her – they brought it to the attention of the person who managed the client ... And ultimately when it was clear it [the client's behaviour] was not going to get better, we pulled out.
"We don't want our consultants to work in a hostile environment ... There's a time when the customer's not always right."
Getting to a point where your company ranks ahead of Silicon Valley's tech darlings Facebook and Google on gender "does take leadership at all levels within the company".
On Thursday, ThoughtWorks will also be named a 2016 Employer of Choice for Gender Equality by the Australian government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA). It is one of 106 organisations (see the full list here) that have received the coveted citation for policies and training aiming to improve gender diversity.
To this end the company provides its staff with unconscious bias training. "I am not an evil person because of unconscious bias," Dr Parsons says. "It's only wrong when I don't try to mitigate and overcome it."
She says, in her experience, "men and women are both harder on women than on men", and much more needs to be done to change that, especially in the traditionally male-dominated fields of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).
We don't want our consultants to work in a hostile environment.
Dr Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks' chief technology officer
In Australia, only one in four IT graduates and fewer than one in 10 engineering graduates are women. And women occupy fewer than one in five senior researcher positions in Australian universities and research institutes, and comprise less than half the overall STEM workforce.
That's why on Tuesday Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced $3.9 million in funding to 24 organisations to roll out projects that will encourage girls and women to study and pursue careers in STEM.
All up the federal government, as part of its innovation strategy, is providing $8 million to support women in STEM and entrepreneurship.
Dr Parsons says women drop out of tech-based careers at a much faster rate than men – double the rate in many US industries – not simply because they leave for caretaking roles, but mainly because they do not feel they have opportunities to progress.
"Even if we fix the pipeline problem and get more women in, if more women are dropping out you just don't have senior women relative to senior men in the field," she says.
"We have created an environment that means that unless you are really passionate and really stubborn, you'll say, 'This isn't worth it' [and quit]."
She says gender equality and inclusion can help Australia better compete with Silicon Valley.
"It opens up a pool of talent and creativity that frankly other companies deny themselves," Dr Parsons says. "Diverse teams have a broader range of problem-solving capabilities."
An OECD study of over 70 countries released on Wednesday found that since 2003, Australian 15-year-olds' maths literacy has fallen by the equivalent of one year of schooling; that since 2000 reading literacy has fallen by the equivalent of 10 months of schooling; and since 2006 scientific literacy has fallen by the equivalent of seven months of schooling.
Dr Parsons would not go as far as advocating compulsory maths and science subjects throughout high school, but said "problem-solving skills, logical-reasoning skills and the ability to do critical analysis" was important in any career.
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