Mr. Mark Fielding:

The flattening of organisations in recent years has meant that the layers of management have been stripped out so there is a big jump. When a woman takes time off from work, there is a need in respect of the difficulty in coming back into the workplace. Would that we had the buddy system in the SME sector. It would be great to be able to afford that. Mentoring is an issue in terms of being able to mentor a person into the workplace because technology and business are moving so fast, people are left behind.

Training managers is needed in terms of mitigating unconscious biases in business. Analysing job descriptions and recruitment practices for unconscious bias is important and would help more females to reach a higher level. I agree and disagree with my IDA colleague in the sense that I think secondary level is too late to be talking about STEM and female students. It must take place at primary level. Entrepreneurship must start at primary level rather than waiting for somebody to get to the leaving certificate, or transition year where they spend a couple of hours every week making socks and selling them to each other. We need to start talking in terms of what the reality of life is and that has to be done well below secondary and tertiary level.

We hear about the culture fit. Women talk about how when they go for interviews, they are told they do not fit in. It is not a culture fit. It is because they are female and the technology area is so male-dominated that there is a difficulty there. Again, this is where we need to talk in terms of the people who are interviewing. If one looks at any engineering business, it is very difficult to get women at the top level but very often the directors are not engineers. They are all different. The difficulty is that women are held to a different standard and this needs to be overcome.