MotherBoard - feat. Michelle Szaraz
We recently had a fantastic and in-depth discussion with Michelle Szaraz, Strategy Lead at dxw and Founder of (Extra)ordinary Tech Stories, an initiative with a mission to share stories of 500 people with diverse personal and professional backgrounds about their careers in tech.
The purpose of our 'MotherBoard’ content series is to highlight incredible working mums within tech & data, as well as businesses that are supportive and progressive within their approach to creating more inclusive tech & data teams for women.
Amber @ MotherBoard: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your current role?
Hi! My name is Michelle Szaraz, I’m originally from Slovakia and have been living in the UK for nearly 10 years, since I came to London to do my MA in International Peace and Security.
While my background and early career were mostly in international development, human rights and women empowerment (I’ve worked on 60+ projects with the United Nations agencies and governments in Asia and Africa), I accidentally ended up working in tech and have loved it so much I’ve never looked back.
Just like in my personal life, professionally, I also wear many hats, some of which include:
● Founder of (Extra)ordinary Tech Stories - an initiative with a mission to share stories of 500 people with diverse personal and professional backgrounds about their careers in tech - aspiring to bust the 'career in tech' myths, inspire others to work in tech, and make the tech industry more inclusive
● Strategy Lead at dxw (UK’s leading digital agency that researches, designs, builds and hosts digital public services that improve people’s lives)
● Ambassador, Writer and Speaker focused on:
○ Women in tech
○ Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
○ Careers in tech
● Business & Career Mentor
Amber @ MotherBoard: When did you realise that the tech industry is not currently set up to support working mums?
I think as soon as I started to work, I realised that most, if not all, industries and workplaces are not exactly designed around the needs of women, and more specifically, women that are pregnant, in need of fertility or other hormonal treatments, or parents in general. It was all very much clashing with my expectations and assumptions.
I was lucky to have grown up with a mum who was a successful events business woman in the 1990s Slovakia. This meant that other than occasionally when she was delivering events, she had total freedom and flexibility to arrange her workload and hours around having two teenagers and a child under 10. I basically had a mum that was earning more than most male execs, while being around almost all the time - it was very revolutionary for that time!
It probably sounds like a utopian dream to most women nowadays and to be honest, it was an exception, but that’s what I grew up around. This combined with knowing from an early age that I wanted to be a mum, I kind of assumed it was going to be easy to manage motherhood with a career. And then I started to work and realised what the situation was like in reality for my friends and colleagues (I almost want to laugh at how naive my view was based on a very unique experience I had when growing up).
Tech industry wise, I have to say that while the situation for mums is similar to other industries, it is possible and perhaps more likely to find great and innovative companies in tech that offer women (and employees in general) flexible working arrangements and maternity/parental leave options that are better than average.
Amber @ MotherBoard: Why is being an advocate for mums in tech so important to you?
A full disclaimer - I’m not a mum yet (I want to be one day soon), but I have been through many pregnancies with my siblings, friends and colleagues so far. Plus I grew up around a (sadly still!) rather unusual model that could allow women to combine a successful career with motherhood, so I know it’s possible! And I have also been promoting women empowerment and advocating for their rights throughout my career so it’s a combination of personal and professional reasons.
Since I have known I wanted to be a mum for a while, I have spent most of my career to date thinking and worrying about how I can manage to have children and a career. My main concern has been around having to leave children at a certain number of months with unaffordable childcare when my leave runs out and finding a way to not have to significantly reduce my career progression, salary, and pension to remain financially secure. I haven’t figured out a solution to this yet …
Having a chance to advocate for working mothers in tech, and beyond, is really important to me. And it should be to us all, not just because it’s a good, nice or popular cause to support, but because without women giving birth we’ll literally become extinct like dinosaurs! 🙂
Amber @ MotherBoard: What do you think are the core benefits of having more mothers in tech & data teams?
We’re designing, building and using tech to make our lives easier and make the world a better place. Well, not always, but I believe we should focus our attention on making tech for good. As we design and build for wider society, it’s crucial that the needs of different people and groups are represented.
Since a lot of tech is used by women and mothers, it’s key to have women and mothers in the teams that work on tech solutions because they can offer unique perspectives based on their lived experiences that other people may not even know exist. It’s always much better to listen to people’s needs than assume them.
Working mothers also have a lot of skills to bring into their teams. The fact that they are equally (if not better) qualified professionals as other team members should be a given (yes, I know it often isn’t!). But in addition to that, working mothers, even if returning to work after a long break, are more likely to be very good at planning, organising and managing since they have to balance work and child care. It shouldn’t have to be the case, but it is.
We should seek ways to support mothers (and parents in general) with balancing work and childcare, not creating additional obstacles for them. If you stop assuming something is impossible, and instead focus on how to make it work, innovation is born!
Amber @ MotherBoard: What challenges do you see mums facing day to day in the workplace, and what can be done to support them better?
I see it this way … we expect women to be 100% job focused employees until they give birth. Then we ‘let’ them go spend a bit of time being mums full-time (100% away from work). And soon after, they need to come back and do both without additional support. And to top it off, we don’t even give them access to affordable child care like many other countries do. Working within the area of public services, to me this seems like a poorly designed system that was put in place based on a lot of assumptions and mostly without listening to women/parents and their needs.
I’ll use an example of someone I know who recently had a baby. She may be an exception with a relatively easy birth and a super calm baby that sleeps most of the time. As she told me, if she had a choice, she would have preferred to work soon after birth while the baby was mostly sleeping and take maternity leave a bit later when the baby started to become more active instead of coming back to work after 3 months. But she didn’t. Personally, I imagine when I have kids I would prefer to have a flexible balance between work and motherhood instead of the “you can’t work now, it’s your maternity leave time”. I like to mix between different activities. The point is, we are all different, with different personalities, needs and working preferences, so this inflexible ‘fit for businesses, but not people’ approach has a lot of room for improvement. And the businesses would benefit from it too!
Even more difficult to digest for me is the exclusion of pregnant women from pregnancy ‘benefits’ if they don’t work for a company for a certain amount of time. A combination of how benefits are set up by law and businesses. Since getting pregnant isn’t scheduling a meeting, chances are this doesn’t happen according to a predicted timeline which puts women in very difficult (and frankly discriminatory) situations. It also happens more often than you’d think, so how about it’s the continuous employment that is considered instead?
I really don’t want this blog to sound overly negative… I think we are making progress but more needs to be done and by listening to the needs of those this affects the most. I speak to women and mothers working in tech very often and I am yet to meet one that says it’s working great. Usually the most positive it gets is by acknowledging it could be way worse.
So what can companies do to offer better support?
Be flexible! Treat employees like adults who know what works for them to do good work and they will exceed your expectations. Offer flexible working arrangements to your employees, not just mothers, and find ways to make it work within your business model. And yes, it’s possible! It may not be perfect, but all companies can do better.
Amber @ MotherBoard: What do you think needs to be done by companies to improve the amount of mums working into tech teams? And how can we get more women into senior leadership roles?
There are many steps we can all take at different levels from individual, through business, to the government. The list below includes several examples that businesses can focus on:
● Hire more women, especially at the mid management and senior leadership level - even if it takes longer and more effort to find the right candidate, but don’t make this a tick box exercise.
● Encourage, support and empower women and parents to speak about their experiences, hopes, fears, concerns - within the business and externally.
● Listen to them!
● Instead of assuming something is impossible, focus on what can be done to get closer to “the perfect” scenario. It’s not perfect or nothing, any improvement is good!
● Offer flexible working arrangements to all - we all needed them at different times for a variety of reasons to deal with personal circumstances.
● Review and (re)design your business policies and operations to make them more inclusive.
● Offer affordable childcare if you can, or help subsidise it. At least for when you sent women / parents to events and conferences!
● Provide flexible benefits employees can choose from.
● Engage men in the discussions - they live with and around women (or at least were born from one), so they either already understand the situation or we can help them to.
Amber @ MotherBoard: Where does the onus lie to creating tangible change? Eg. Government/ individuals/ hiring managers/ HR
I think it lies with all of us - we can all create change in different ways:
● from individuals (sharing stories and campaigning),
● through HR and senior leadership (leading inclusive recruitment and helping to change policies and operations considering staff needs), and
● organisations (leading by example and sharing lessons learnt),
● to the government (engaging more women in creating laws that better support and protect women and parents).
Amber @ MotherBoard: What is the biggest hurdle leaders in the industry are facing in hiring more mums?
I would say:
being (often unconsciously) influenced by stereotypical and archaic views about women, careers and motherhood that are usually not true
(One of my “favourite” statements I’ve heard many times is companies being worried about offering, or already providing, what they call a ‘great maternity package’ which they assume will make most women decide to have many children just to take advantage of it. Spoiler alert - being pregnant and having kids is hard and very expensive so I don’t think having an extra couple of months of fully paid mat leave will persuade women to have 10 children). 🙂
understanding and seeing the benefits of hiring working mothers
knowing how to reach them, encourage them to apply (with good job descriptions) and interview them (how about including a woman / mother on the interview panel?)
listening to their experiences and needs instead of making assumptions
and being able to support and empower them to do great work.
Amber @ MotherBoard: Do you have any final thoughts or words of wisdom to anyone who doesn’t think the inclusion of mums is important to diversify teams?
Re-read this long blog post, haha!
In all seriousness, I would suggest reading a bit more about the topic and speaking to several women about it - they are all likely to have different opinions and that’s okay, it just shows that we all have different preferences, views, experiences, and needs to consider.
And if this triggers you anyhow in a negative way, that’s also okay. Spend a bit of time reflecting on why that’s the case and what bothers / worries / concerns you about diversifying teams.
It’s important we don’t ignore people’s reluctance to change. We need to listen to it and talk about it respectfully to learn from one another in order to get a buy-in and to make a change that works in the long run.