Alternit One recently recruited Alyssa Grindstaff as the first female engineer at the business. Alyssa started her career in IT eight years ago after studying games development. Following her studies, she moved on to working with Managed Service Providers. As Alyssa has progressed throughout her career and studies, she has been in a male-dominated world. When questioned on this with regards to her career, she shared ‘you have to be open to everything and embrace opportunities. Don’t let being the only girl in your class or in a boardroom meeting make you feel awkward’.
Alyssa joins a well-established team of industry leading engineers who work both on site and remotely for our clients, nationally and internationally. With decades of experience supporting users in the Alternative Investment industry - we put that knowledge to use when building our Support Services team.
Our goal is to deliver the best possible service to every single user, day in, day out, 24x7. It is important to Alternit One that we help clients to scale without affecting the user experience, or the loss of relationships between engineers and users. This is why we use a Support Pod to deliver a white glove service offering 24x7 User Support and Onsite Support engineering. Our goal is to support Alyssa alongside our other engineers working towards both their personal and professional goals.
At Alternit One, creating a diverse team and helping women grow within the world of technology is of high importance for the business’ long term workplace culture strategy. Our Founding Partners, including Carrie Whamond, are passionate about making this a reality. Earlier this year, Carrie sat on the Women’s COO panel hosted by With Intelligence and HFM Global that explored the following theme: ‘Achieving personal and professional development’.
When it comes to the performance of firms operating within the IT sector, diversity is key. In 2022, Forbes shared evidence stating diverse teams make better decisions in 87% of cases and deliver 60% better results in comparison to non-diverse workforces. However despite such findings, the current workplace does not reflect these statistics. The technology sector is heavily dominated by men. According to CIO (Chief Information Officers), women occupy 24% of computing jobs and just 11% of the engineering workforce is female.
The gender gap in technology is a critical issue for both young girls considering technology at school and university and women already working in the industry. Following A-levels results in 2022, PWC interviewed students about their potential career goals. In the study, just 27% of female students expressed that they would consider a career in technology, compared to 61% of males. Only 3% of female students said that a career in technology is their first choice. Yet despite these figures, the Girl Scout Research Institute shared findings that 74% of female teenagers express interest in STEM topics.
The discrepancy between the 3% of females selecting technology as a first choice in comparison to the 27% interested in technology and 74% interest in STEM is a cause of concern for the industry and illustrates the need for further efforts to encourage women to pursue a career within the field. We hope to be a part of the future that helps encourages greater representation in the workplace for IT and will be supporting staff on both a personal and professional level to achieve success.
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