![Diverse City Careers co-founders Gemma Lloyd and Valeria Ignatieva, who started the DCC Jobs Board after experiencing ...](/content/dam/images/g/v/2/r/u/z/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gv1r5a.png/1490161689968.jpg)
NBN Co IT design and delivery executive general manager Debbie Taylor considers herself a tough negotiator when it comes to her salary, but she's had to learn to be this way.
While working at a previous organisation, she recalls being handed an envelope by her boss, containing the welcome news that she was going to get an out-of-cycle pay rise.
Naturally, Ms Taylor was thrilled, but this feeling soon gave way to something else - disbelief.
"A pay rise is always very welcome news, so I told my boss I really appreciated it. His response was 'don't thank me - I had nothing to do with it. HR told me I had to give you a raise because you are significantly underpaid in comparison to your peers and you are outperforming them'," she says.
"It took me a while to really understand why I got to that point. I believe that I took the role on and didn't negotiate very well in the first instance so they were correcting that. It was a sizeable raise (close to 30 per cent)."
Ms Taylor is one of 21 female tech leaders who will be speaking at the Women in Tech and Telco Leadership Summit in Sydney on Wednesday and Thursday.
She will be joined by other women in the industry such as Dell's Angela Fox, Telstra executive director of strategy and operations Vicki CarterĀ and Twitter Asia Pacific vice president Aliza Knox.
Ms Taylor says the shock of discovering how much lower her salary was compared to her male colleagues, was a life-changer in several ways.
"Today, I am very conscious of the differential in negotiating skills. When I am hiring someone new I always look to ensure we are paying their fair market value for the role, regardless of the person's current salary or their negotiating skills," she says.
"And I now have the self-belief to negotiate harder for myself from the start."
Diversity still a problem
Despite years of talk from the industry, diversity in tech is still an issue, and many companies are only just beginning to realise that they have a problem.
Women make up 46.2 per cent of all employees in Australia, according to statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, but in technology roles the percentage of women drops to between 28-31 per cent.
Like most sectors in Australia, there is a clear gender pay gap.
The Office of the Chief Scientist put out the country first comprehensive report into STEM careers in Australia in November and reported that the percentage of graduates earning in the top income bracket of $104,000 or above was 32 per cent for male, but only 12 per cent for females.
There are likely to be various factors that would make up for some of this difference, but studies have shown time and time again that level of education and experience only accounts for a limited portion of the discrepancy.
In US tech companies the problem is also ingrained.
A study by jobs website Glassdoor of 534,000 salary reports last year took into account these variable such as education, experience and hours worked and in like-for-like roles of similarly qualified workers, female computer scientists were paid 28.3 per cent less, game designers were 15.8 per cent lower and information security professionals were paid 14.7 per cent less.
Motorola Solutions vice president and Australia and New Zealand managing director Steve Crutchfield readily admits that Motorola still has a major problem with diversity, with only 20 per cent of the employees in the company women.
When Mr Crutchfield took on the top job in Australia in 2013, he realised there was a problem when he called a strategy meeting with the top leaders in the ANZ operation and discovered that of the 14 or so people in the room most of them were "Anglo men... on the wrong side of 45" and there was only one woman.
He also feels guilty that he didn't do more to try and address this problem before he took on the managing director role, and believes he has been responsible for unconscious bias in the past.
"It was a failing on my part. I had been in the business for seven years and I think I was aware of the challenge, but was I doing anything about it? I don't think so," Mr Crutchfield tells The Australian Financial Review.
Corporate changes
Four years on, he says despite trying to make people more aware of the problem in the business by creating a diversity and inclusion council, the dial has barely shifted, so he's taking more concrete actions to produce tangible results and increase the diversity in the workforce.
Mr Crutchfield, who is also talking at the summit this week, wants Motorola Solutions to be a gender quality employer of choice by 2019.
It has introduced a number of initiatives in an attempt to achieve this, including making sure job descriptions that are applicable to all genders and anonymising CVs in the initial screening progress, so the company only sees work experience and qualifications, but no names.
"We're also making sure our recruiters include a good selection of female candidates for roles," he said.
"Then in terms of flexibility in the workforce we're creating more part time roles. We're on a journey here, we haven't solved the challenge yet and I wouldn't even describe us as best practice, but the goal is to make a big impact... it's taken us a while to get here."
Promoting good organisations
After spending 10 years in the tech industry and experiencing both ends of the spectrum - companies that were like "archaic boys' clubs" and businesses with supportive policies - Diverse City Careers (DCC) co-founder Gemma Lloyd was inspired to create the DCC Jobs Board, which advertises positions from workplaces that are dedicated to supporting women's careers.
Ms Lloyd has worked for two businesses she considers to be boys clubs, the first early on in her career and the second just before she started DCC.
"In the first one, I progressed quickly, I was on the same level as 40-year-old men, and yet they would still ask me to get coffee, get them stationary and take their notes, and I often had sexual comments made towards me in front of everyone. I had to stick up for myself, but not even the manager did," she says.
"The latest company I worked in, I would often be in the office on my own while all the boys would be out having coffee together. I was never invited to anything.
"Then there were the sexual comments made by a client and I asked my manager what I should do, and they said don't do anything, it was a client and not to lose the relationship... It sucked the life out of me, I was so unhappy."