Women Mean Business
Kathryn Parsons on why tech doesn’t have to be toxic
On a quiet afternoon at a private members club in Mayfair, the exuberant Kathryn Parsons leans in from a cushioned high-back armchair and talks at length about what really matters to her. At the top of the list is getting more women into technology.
“Technology is driving the future economy and it is not good enough to accept that a lot of women opt out at an early age,” she says assertively.
“If you start looking at salary, high growth industries are those that have technology at their core – you cannot come in to a decent role in any of those businesses if you say that you’re not interested in technology. If you say that you’re opting out of a high-growth industry.”
Having co-founded Decoded, a tech educator company in 2011 along with Alasdair Blackwell, Steve Henry and Richard Peters, the 36-year-old knows what she is talking about. The company is now a global brand hosting technology masterclasses in 85 cities across the world, reaching 250,000 people face-to-face as well as hundreds of thousands more online.
We are, Parsons says, living in a technological renaissance, but despite being an industry of the future, girls are seemingly opting out of jobs which could not only guarantee a secure career, but also some big money, too.
So why is this? Frustrated, not by the question, but by the situation, Parsons says: “Number one, it is not to do with proficiency or ability. Number two, it is absolutely to do with branding and how it’s taught and presented to women. And it’s just unacceptable. There is nothing factual, no hard reason why women should not be a part of it.”
Look at what has been dubbed “brogrammer” culture and you’ll also notice almost all of the top tech CEOS are white and male. A 2017 report by the Chartered Institute for IT showed that just 17per cent of those working in technology in the UK are female. The number of female founders is even fewer, with Bathurst’s Scale-up Index of 2017 showing that just four per cent of UK scale-up companies have a female founder.
However, Parsons insists that shouldn’t put women off: “I wouldn’t be such a champion for women getting into technology if I thought it was a toxic environment. The benefit of being a female tech founder is you can establish a different culture and can change problems you want to change.
“If you put this powerful toolset in the hands of more women, more diverse problems would get solved and more businesses would get created to make the world a better place.”
It is one reason Parsons has become a high-profile supporter of The Telegraph’s Women Mean Business campaign, which is seeking to help close the funding gap between male and female founders, and boost female entrepreneurship and start-ups in the UK. Parsons says: “What you’re doing is amazing. I think I would have benefited from it.”
Leading from the front, Decoded has just started accredited data science courses. “I really want 50per cent mandatory attendance for women,” says Parsons. “The starting salary for a data scientist who is fully qualified is something like £150,000 and I am certain that every employer can find at least 15 women to go through apprenticeship levy funded courses and programmes.”
To get to the top, Parsons knows it is imperative that education and hard work starts young, but recognises that family has an important role to play, too. The youngest of two daughters, she says her dad was key in pushing her to make her own luck. “My dad, I think was a little unusual,” she says, smiling. “He was thrusting books called ‘how to start a business’ into my hands when I was seven years old. He was an accountant and was just very ambitious for me, and I love him for that. It meant that when I was young I didn’t think it was weird that I wanted to start a business.
“Both my parents are Irish and when they came to the UK there was an element of ‘make it yourself because no one is going to give you a job’ and that rubbed off.”
After attending the independent Channing School and Cambridge University, where she studied ancient Greek and Latin, Parsons joined Ogilvy & Mather’s graduate scheme. She focused on tech, and worked with MTV to create “Cherry Girl” – a character designed to promote environmental awareness among a younger audience.
It was around this time, aged 26, that she really caught the tech bug. Of going it alone with a digital creative agency and without a workplace, Parsons says: “One of the first places to get free Wi-fi was Wetherspoons, so at 7am I would get in there and get working. It was lonely.”
Eventually, the gravitational shift towards east London started and Parsons became immersed in the tech area she calls “the Silicon drinkabout”.
She soon met Decoded’s co-founders and in 2013, Parsons won the Veuve Clicquot New Generation award for her work at their annual businesswoman of the year ceremony. It, she says, opened doors across the world.
“It took code from being the preserve of guys hacking into laptops in their pants in a basement, into the glamorous world of Veuve, which was all about these game-changing women with really big ambitions,” she said.
Tonight, she will be making a keynote speech at the ceremony, which will see either Matches Fashion founder Ruth Chapman or Severn Trent CEO Liv Garfield take the overall prize. Parsons still meets up regularly with previous winners and nominees, dining with ITV’S Carolyn Mccall, IBM’S Harriet Green and banker Katherine Garrett-cox last week. “I think the women’s network is a force to
‘To change the culture of business, more need to be founded by women’
be reckoned with,” she says. “The best way to change the culture of business is for more businesses to be founded by women. For that to happen, women need a few things. Environments like incubators that allow you to learn, and I think it’s great doing things in teams, so I think you need to do a bit of ‘dating’ to find a CEO or COO.”
In 2014, the UK became the second country in the world to make coding mandatory on the national curriculum, something Parsons calls “a massive success and something we should be proud of ”.
What it has also done is normalise coding in gender terms, because girls and boys are both exposed to the technology, in the same way as they would be for history or science.
“There are something like four million seven-year-olds every year now getting exposed to potentially one of the most powerful and relevant skills and tools of the future,” she adds. Looking forward, Parsons says the future lies in quantum computing. “There are fewer than 30 quantum computers in the world and this will be a space race for computing, because the person who manages to crack it will have exponential computing power. All the promise of AI is almost a bit moot because the computing power you need to power an Ai-driven society doesn’t exist yet.”
And quantum computing is what exactly? “We have always computed in binary – so something is always 1 or 0. I believe that you’re sitting there because you happen in my imagination to be in front of me, but this idea that you could both be there and not be there at the same time is more to do with quantum reality and quantum physics and that’s how quantum computing works. It is making the state of entanglement and quantum a reality.”
I’m slightly perplexed, but wideeyed and talking with genuine excitement, Parsons adds without a beat: “It’s absolutely fascinating.”
To find out more about The Telegraph’s Women Mean Business campaign go to telegraph.co.uk/women/business