On Tuesday, April 17th 2018, the Margo HR team attended the French Digital Women Day (Journée de la Femme Digitale), thought up by Delphine Remy-Boutang. It was a great opportunity to meet inspiring, bold, innovative and creative women. On the agenda: CEOs, Senior Officials, intra and entrepreneurs, Heads of Communication, General Managers, Secretaries of State. Many profiles with various careers and one common goal: innovation for all and by all.
The main objective of this day was to actively gather a range of personalities in order to innovate on an intellectual and social aspect. In concrete terms, encouraging women to become actors, like their male counterparts, of innovative and stimulating projects in the digital area.
Between creators and actors, this 6th edition on the theme of female innovation received 57 speakers and allowed a curious audience to share current challenges.
“Do not wait to tick all boxes to dare” says Karine Augoyat, the head of Capgemini Consulting. Entrepreneurship has no gender and no social class. There are only barriers and brakes that we have imposed on ourselves over the years. But being a woman and being an entrepreneur is not an inconceivable project anymore. The key to success lies in self-confidence and boldness. The more female entrepreneurs there are,, the smaller the gender gap will become. However, the facts are less ambitious…
Mounir Mahjoubi, Secretary of State in charge of digital, rightly underlines that the digital industry offers the most accelerated careers with the highest salaries.
However, it’s also the industry where we can find the least number of women. According to a survey realized by Le Parisien, the digital industry employs today 28% women, and a minority of them are in charge of technical projects. “The fastest growing industry is also the one that excludes the most” : why does such a promising and innovating sector limit this much the integration and evolution of women? How can we close that gender gap?
For a lot a people, social constructions play a major part in the exclusion of women from the digital area. From early childhood, visions and perspectives are conditioned by codes that shape society: professional representations are biased and gendered. But for many, 80% of them, “being a man or a woman is no longer a condition to undertake a project”.
It’s time for action and women clearly understood it. Many of them, with different career paths and ambitions went over these representations and took up the digital challenge. They proved that being a woman and being at the head of a company, being a woman and being an intrapreneur, being a woman and being an engineer, was not a lost bet. Clotilde Briend, Public Policy Manager at Facebook, gave an inspiring testimony about her experience and the difficulties she had faced, in her professional and personal life as a woman and a mother. What should you do when a pregnancy happens at the same time as a job interview? Should you stop the process? Should you retire from the professional world while giving birth? For Clotilde, even asking herself this kind of question was alarming. Considering a retirement, even a temporary one, was definitely not conceivable. She chose to pursue the recruiting process and was welcomed with open arms by the company. She was able to fully invest in her professional life and take confidence in her projects by ignoring societal inequalities.
And we were told about a lot of projects: from Anaïs Barut, founder of Damae Medical, a startup detecting cancers via algorithms, to Alix de Sagazan, co-founder of AB Tasty, a company working in specialized marketing, through Cecilia Creuset, deputy director of We Tech Care, a digital social startup, they all had the courage to innovate and realize their projects in the digital industry.
Between parity and ambition, the French Digital Women Day has a vocation for gathering tomorrow’s actors around current issues. Cultivating one’s singularity, making one’s independence a strength is the key to this enterprising success.
By Soizic Thiébaud