Dayle Clarke

A diverse workplace provides a powerful competitive advantage in today's globalised and interconnected world. Bringing together people with different skills, experiences, characteristics, cultures, and perspectives leads to more innovative and creative thinking (Woods & Tharakan, 2021). Placing people together who see the same thing in different ways, leads to new ideas, opening doors to innovation. Diverse teams also tend to solve problems faster and make more informed decisions (Stahal, 2021).

Technology is built for all members of society. Therefore, it is crucial to develop an understanding of different people's requirements to ensure meaningful, responsible technology is developed. Caroline Criado-Perez (2019) highlights the importance of this in her book Invisible Women when she states that the iPhone has now become larger than the average female hand size significantly impacting on its functionality. Male domination in the tech industry also led to the development of voice recognition technologies that, trained, and tested solely by men, struggle to understand female and minority voices. It has also resulted in virtual reality that disproportionally impose motion sickness on women (Bajorek, 2019).

If you are a woman, there is a distinct possibility that Alexa (the Google assistant) and SIRI (the Apple assistant) are less likely to process your voice correctly. In fact, Google's voice recognition software is 70% less likely to recognize women's voices accurately.

— Gabriella Obispa

A global software developer survey in 2021, revealed that only 5% of developers worldwide were female. In Australia, according to the Australian Computer Society, women make up just 29 per cent of the technology workforce (ACS, 2021). While this is more than most countries, Business Insider Australia (2021) found that Australia has one of the world's worst gender pay gaps in high-tech companies. This highlights the importance of removing the barriers women face in the male dominated tech industry. It's crucial for all underrepresented groups to know that there's a seat for them at the table.