TradeMe’s bold new plan to boost number of women in technical leadership roles

New Zealand online marketplace TradeMe, has unveiled an ambitious plan to double the number of women in technical leadership roles, to address the persistent gender imbalance in the tech industry, where women remain underrepresented, especially in senior positions.

The latest research from NZ Tech highlights the diversity challenge in the digital technologies workforce. Women make up just 29 per cent of tech teams – an improvement of only two per cent since 2020. The numbers are even more concerning in leadership, with just 23 per cent of senior executives, 18 per cent of board members, and five per cent of startup founders being women.

TradeMe’s head of engineering, Tracy Morris, says that getting women into senior technical  roles has remained a challenge despite a number of diversity programs at the organisation.

“A couple of years ago, we looked at women in tech at Trade Me and listened to their experiences and started delving into the data to see where the problems to solve were. And as a result of that, we kicked off a program. Over a couple of years, we’ve done 28 different things in that program – mentoring, sponsorship, allyship training, unconscious bias training, outreach events and networking events to name a few. We’ve standardised our hiring processes. We’ve made sure that we have 50 per cent women interviewed for key roles where we find there is an equity which is in the technical leadership roles.” 

Along with those measures, Morris says that one of the most impactful things they’ve done is taking a gender lens in their performance and pay review cycle to make sure that they are making fair decisions.

However despite dozens of initiatives, the company hasn’t moved the needle much on the number of women in technical leadership roles. TradeMe has around 240 people in its tech team and overall the number of women lines up with the industry average at 27 per cent. When it comes to women in tech leadership roles, the organisation had just 11 per cent and through the 28 programs it grew only marginally to 13 per cent.

A new approach

Recognising the need for transformative action, TradeMe’s tech team, led by CTO Paolo Ragone, decided to implement a unique strategy leveraging “special measures” under New Zealand’s Human Rights Act. This provision allows organisations to take targeted actions to address proven disadvantages.

“We’re keeping vacancies for technical leadership roles open for up to six months and giving preference to women during that time,” explains Morris. “It’s a novel approach designed to accelerate the change we need while staying committed to fairness and equity.”

TradeMe has set three primary objectives for this initiative:

1. Maintain at least 30 per cent representation of women in tech roles.
2. Eliminate the gender pay gap across the organisation.
3. Double the percentage of women in technical leadership roles from 11 to 22 per cent.

To achieve these goals, the company is also focusing on retention. “We know that one of the reasons that we have fewer women in tech is actually not attracting them into tech, but retaining them once they’re there,” says Morris.

TradeMe will continue to use special measures until they reach their goal of 22 per cent at that senior level.

“Once we get to 22 per cent we’ll no longer need special measures. We’ll not need this to keep a vacancy open with a preference for women. It also depends on how many vacancies we get, because at the moment, we have no vacancies for technical leaders. Once we get one and probably a few through, we really want to look to see, did this create the change that we wanted?” 

Why it matters

Diversity is critical to IT performance. Diverse teams perform better, hire better talent, have more engaged members, and retain workers better than those that do not focus on diversity and inclusion, according to a report from McKinsey.

Women also face more barriers to promotion and career growth. A 2022 report, also from McKinsey, found that only 86 women are promoted to manager for every 100 men across every industry, but when isolated for tech, that number drops to 52 women for every 100 men.

Tracy Morris says the lack of women in technology is holding back businesses. 

“It matters so deeply because so much of what we do every day, like so much of our lives, is touched by tech right and at the moment – because of the representation gap in tech and particularly in technical leadership – many of the decisions that we make about the products and services that we build are made by men, and that sort of codifies or embeds the bias that’s currently in our world. And so, we believe that increasing the representation of women will help make us a better business and will therefore make better decisions about the products and services that we build.”

TradeMe has spoken to its staff about rolling out the special measures to give a preference to women for technical leadership vacancies and Morris says the feedback generally has been positive.

“There’s some practical questions about how this is going to work. Earlier this year, we ran an allyship program to help teach our staff how to be allies for women and for increasing the representation of women in tech. And as they were going through the course – it was 33 men that attended, so quite a big cohort – and they were like, ‘Yeah, we get it. We understand. We don’t need you to explain this to us. Just tell us what to do.’ So I feel that most of our people are going to feel really positively about this.”