#203 Diversity Is The $60 Billion Opportunity Australian Businesses Can’t Ignore With Azadeh Khojandi, Co-Founder & Director and Katrin Schmidt, Co-Founder & Managing Director, GEEQ Sydney

GEEQ (Geeks With EQ) is a non-for-profit with an important mission: helping women get into IT and boosting the diversity of IT companies in Australia. To this day less than 20 per cent of Australia’s IT workforce are women, and this has far-reading implications, from the bias that gets built into technology itself through to the depth of innovative thinking available in the space.

The two founders of GEEQ, Azadeh Khojandi and Katrin Schmidt, join us on this special podcast to discuss the work that they’re doing, and the traction that diversity is getting across Australian corporate spheres.

“It’s important for us that we’re not only bringing women into the workforce, but helping them to grow and get the promotions, more responsibilities, and the fulfilment they deserve,” Khojandi says in the podcast. GEEQ is more than an advocacy group. It focuses heavily on skills and mentoring, providing women with books on leadership and managing events to assist with knowledge transfer.

On the side of advocacy, the two are focused on helping the Australian business community recognise biases in the hiring process and how to mitigate against that, Katrin says on the podcast. “It’s really difficult to have awareness of your own unconscious bias,” she says. “It’s like stopping and thinking to yourself, ‘what did I just do?’. The first step is a change in awareness. You don’t have to jump to conclusions, but you do need to watch and be aware.”

Azadeh and Katrin are sponsors at the upcoming Data Engineering Summit and will be hosting a luncheon. It will be a rare opportunity to talk directly to some of the speakers from the summit and discuss how to tackle the ongoing challenge of diversity.

In the meantime, tune into this in-depth podcast, and hear from the experts about why diversity is a $60 billion opportunity for Australian businesses.

Learn more about GEEQ: https://www.linkedin.com/company/geeq-australia/

Thank you to you our sponsor, Talent Insights Group!

Join us at the Data Engineering Summit: https://www.datafuturology.com/data-engineering-summit

Join our Slack Community: https://join.slack.com/t/datafuturologycircle/shared_invite/zt-z19cq4eq-ET6O49o2uySgvQWjM6a5ng

“We identify what community needs, what’s actually good, and what skill is good to have to secure your next role or get your dream role. So, we try to make sure that we viewed those fireside chats as an opportunity for everyone to learn those skills, or hear about those technologies, so they know how to upscale and how they can get the information that they need.”

WHAT WE DISCUSSED

00:00 Introduction
9:14 How did things change or evolve from 2020 onwards?
11:40 Can we cover some of the things that you do in the community, and the type of events that you organize?
16:38 What was the last favourite book that you had coming out of book club?
17:39 Tell us about speed hiring. That sounds amazing.
19:53 How has the flagship event been? How has it gone since COVID-19?
22:04 Essentially, you're helping provide the support and almost like the antidote for so many challenges. Can we spend some time discussing what those challenges are?
27:21 What are some of the things that we can do, and maybe we can talk about women in tech?

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• We attended the first woman hackathon, and our team got selected. We were one of the winners. And we were super excited.

• If you're a community that has no business structure, it's really hard to organize events to really get engaged with sponsors. So it was one of my dreams to really make that into a non-profit. So we can actually give back properly to our community. And we fulfilled that in 2020, when we incorporated it into GEEQ.

• GEEQ has the vision to improve equality in the workplace. And our bringing more women into IT industry and helping them to grow in their careers. It's important for us not only to bring women into IT, but also help them to grow and get promotions, get more responsibilities, get the fulfilment that they deserve, and have similar rights as their male counterparts.

• Out of a few crazy ideas, speed hiring was born. And speed hiring is essentially a networking event to bring new opportunities closer to our community.

• During a speed hiring event, you get to know a new company, what they're doing, what their culture is, what jobs they have open, how you best apply, and how you prepare for the interviews. And if you like what you hear, and you're like, oh, yeah, I want to have a chat with these guys. You can book yourself into a speed hiring conversation.

• Based on the latest Australian government report, the Australian workforce is highly segregated by gender out of 19 industries, only nine industries have an equal balance of men and women.

• When you look at these numbers, you see that each of us has a responsibility, because, at the end of the day, the benefit is for everyone. It's not only for a woman. So from my perspective, it's first accepting that there is a problem. Second, knowing that if you solve that problem, it solves it for everyone.

• It is not necessarily about equality. It's about equal equity. You have to provide everyone with the same equal chance to create this.

• It's really difficult to have awareness of your own unconscious bias. This is literally like stopping and thinking what did I just do? Was that bias?

• Do you have a diverse pool? Or everyone is a cookie cutter of one persona? When you're making a decision to hire, are you actually aware of those biases? We feel closer to someone that is similar to us.

---

At Data Futurology, we are always working to bring you use cases, new approaches and everything related to the most relevant topics in data science to help you get the most value out of these technologies! Check out our upcoming events for more amazing content.