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

“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.