‘There has never been a better time for women to work in tech’

Gillian Moody has had some interesting moments during her career in IT, including working on an operational Australian navy submarine and being “guarded” by prison officers while fixing a server in Mountjoy prison. Now the general manager of Carlow-based cybersecurity firm Stryve, she believes there has never been a better time for women to work in tech.

“When I think of the contracts I was going for in the early 2000s, I was already on the back foot because I was female,” she says. “Many company bosses didn’t think that women were suited to technology roles because it was such a male-dominated industry. Now incentives for girls to study STEM and gender quotas are levelling the playing field. While women are still often the primary carers at home, there are companies out there, like Stryve, that genuinely value a work/life balance and foster a culture where it is possible for women to thrive.”

For Moody, who has a young son, this means working a four-day week. “I work Monday to Thursday. I start early, around 6.30am, and the four days are full-on but it suits me and gives me the right balance to be present for my son. I’ve brought in some of our biggest clients to date but I’ve never missed any of my son’s matches and that’s really important to me,” says Moody, who spends Mondays in the office to check in with different teams and joins a twice-monthly company-provided lunch for staff.

“It’s called ‘fika’ from the Swedish to come and chat and chew, and we use it to catch up with each other and to support local businesses by sourcing the food from them,” she says.

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Moody’s background in computer applications allowed her to globetrot as a young graduate and she worked on IT support contracts with Walt Disney, Bank of America and Nokia. When she came home she worked in industry before setting up her own company which she subsequently sold and joined Lidl Ireland as IT systems manager. A career break to have her son followed, and on returning to the workforce she joined Stryve in a sales role. Moody then spent three years as managing director of a food distribution business before returning to Stryve in 2021 as general manager.

“I loved the job with the food company but it required a three-hour commute and that was wearing thin,” she says. “I wanted to be closer to home with more flexibility and I also liked the idea of a new challenge. The Stryve job ticked all the boxes.”

While there are now more females in senior tech positions than ever before, women are still way under-represented in the ICT sector. And as only one in five Irish computer science graduates is female, that’s unlikely to change dramatically any time soon. According to data from the CSO’s ICT value chain analysis published in May, only 32 per cent of ICT workers here are female and only 5 per cent of telecommunications engineers are women.

This low female representation is not confined to Ireland. A quick look at the Eurostat data for ICT specialists in 2020 shows that of the 34 countries listed only 11 have a higher percentage of female participation than Ireland, and in most cases it’s not by much. Women are also under-represented in tech start-ups. Fewer than 15 per cent of founders in Europe are female.

The CSO’s study sample was just over 5,000 ICT companies, mainly domestic, and it emphasised just how lucrative a career in tech can be as employees in the sector have the highest average annual earnings in the State. Tech workers are also among the most highly qualified and over 60 per cent of the ICT workforce have a third-level qualification. The bulk of the jobs within the sector are accounted for by programmers and software development engineers, specialist IT managers and IT and telecommunications professionals.

Irish companies employ almost half of the 90,000+ people working in the sector, and there is good mobility between multinational and domestic companies, with 20 per cent of those who change jobs moving between foreign multinationals and domestic enterprises. As a result Irish companies are benefiting from knowledge sharing and expertise.

Stryve is one of these Irish-owned tech companies that is doing well. It began trading in 2018 having identified the secure private cloud as a substantial business opportunity. Thanks to high profile security breaches of the public cloud its business has grown strongly, and the company now has offices in Ireland, Poland, Morocco and Britain.

Also fuelling its growth is the mass shift to remote working which has made it imperative for companies to safeguard their systems. “When people are in the office and they’re not sure about opening a suspicious email, they can turn to a colleague for help. When they’re at home they don’t have this support and it can lead to bad decisions,” Moody says. “I think it comes down to educating employees, and companies ensuring they have all of their security issues covered.

“When I first joined Stryve we were seven people. By 2021 this had risen to 20. Now we are 50 and [have] invested €1 million in our expansion into the UK this year. Ultimately our ambition is to become Europe’s largest private cloud provider,” says Moody, who will take over as country lead later this year.