MotherBoard – feat. Our Media
We spent some time getting to know Hannah King, Head of People at Our Media to chat about why they felt compelled to sign up to the MotherBoard Charter and get their thoughts on working mums within the tech industry.
MotherBoard is a community, meetup series & charter that has been created to drive positive change throughout the UK Technology and Data sectors, all about creating environments that support the inclusion of working mothers.
Why did you become a signatory of the MotherBoard Charter?
For us it’s as simple as, we recognise the importance of supporting working mums. At Our Media, 63% of our employees are female and 33% of them have shared that they have caring responsibilities, whether that’s for children or other relatives. That’s a significant proportion of our workforce, so we want to do as much as we can to support these women, and to also engage, motivate and challenge them.
We’ve taken a lot of positive steps to support working mums and women in the workplace. We’ve improved our parental leave offerings for maternity and paternity leave; we offer up to 10 days paid dependency leave; we work flexibly; and we’ve introduced support and policies around infertility and the menopause. We’ve made good progress, but we’re committed to doing more. We work with several other ED&I organisations and were looking for a female focused organisation to partner with, and after hearing about MotherBoard, we knew we’d found the perfect match.
As a business, what challenges have you faced when hiring women into your tech team?
Our tech team is quite small, but we have much broader digital roles across our business that require digital skills, and focus on areas such as SEO, Ad Ops and affiliates. A level of technical knowledge and a strong digital skill set is important for us, and that’s only going to increase as our brands develop their digital offerings.
One of the challenges that we’ve faced so far is trying to put forward balanced shortlists to our hiring managers. It’s something that we’ve been focusing on from an ED&I perspective, but it’s not always easy. We are fortunate to have a lot of brilliant women already in some of these positions but for the more technical roles we tend to find that we have to work harder, or we’re not always able to create a balanced shortlist.
What would you like to see change in the tech industry for mums in the next few years?
It feels like there is so much more that we can do to support working mums, things are progressing but hopefully we’ll continue to see things moving in the right direction.
I think access to equal parental leave is an important one as it starts to change the conversation around care giving and enables families to make a choice that is right for them, their values and financial circumstances. It’s somewhere we’d like to get to eventually, as it’s puts parents on an equal footing in the workplace.
Supporting women as they return from maternity leave is another area that I’d like to see some change in. I’ve recently returned for maternity leave myself and I had great support from the business and my team, but the juggle is still hard and it’s difficult to prepare for that. It’s natural to feel insecure and to have a wobble in your confidence so we need to make sure that women have the guidance, flexibility, and reassurance to help them through this change and to find their new rhythm. I think organisations could do much more to help with this transition, whether it’s a phased return, having a buddy, or doing a mini-induction to reintroduce them to the business. When you work in a fast moving, technical industry with so much change I imagine that return can be even harder – giving women time and support to get themselves back up to speed means they’ll be able to add more value quicker and offer a fresh perspective.
