"I just didn’t fit into the community, because I don’t look like a woman of colour, but I don’t look entirely white either."
– Flavia D'Alo
“Stop pointing out that the fact that if I’m a girl somehow that’s going to make a difference to how you see me. I don’t think that’s okay. It offends me that we have to talk about this.
“So organisations need to stop saying that we need special women’s initiatives, but we need to look around a go “Why is this not 50/50? What do we need to do differently to make sure that we’re represented well? if we don’t have enough women to promote?
“So what do leaders need to do? We need to walk the floor.
"Don’t look at how many boys, how many girls, that’s ridiculous. Tell me, do I know them? Too often we don’t walk the floor.
"We want to look at spreadsheets, we want to look at data. But walking the floor, people cease to be their race, their colour, their creed, their religion, their gender. They start to be people. And that changes things.”
Flavia says the rise of technology could spell good news for women.
“The world of technology is changing for women, but there are some caveats on that. As we become more cloud-based, the flexibility that comes with working in tech is attractive to us. We can do our job quite literally from anywhere. But I still think where we fall down globally is in our education system.
"It’s gotten much more cool to be a nerd, which I think will attract young women. But I don’t think the way we present women in technology makes girls go: ‘man, I want to do that!’
It’s about seeing more women being willing to talk about their experiences.
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