What a graduate career in tech can look like

When Pauline Nar­vas walked into her first com­put­ing class, as the only girl in the room she was greet­ed with, “Why are you here? Tex­tiles is upstairs.” Had her class­mates realised that she had been cre­at­ing web­sites for years, hav­ing start­ed to teach her­self how to code at the age of eight, per­haps they might have held their tongues. 

It all began with a game. Like many chil­dren who grew up with the Inter­net, Nar­vas would spend hours play­ing online. Unlike most chil­dren, how­ev­er, she quick­ly decid­ed she want­ed to build a bet­ter ver­sion her­self, from scratch. “I thought, I need to start with learn­ing how to build a web­site, and it sort of snow­balled from there!” She taught her­self how to use edit­ing soft­ware like Adobe Pho­to­shop, and would scan in and upload her game design graph­ics onto the web­sites she built, cre­at­ing dif­fer­ent ones for dif­fer­ent inter­ests, includ­ing an ear­ly love for High School Musi­cal. 

“I was always so curi­ous about how things work. So if there was a but­ton on a web­site, I’d keep ask­ing myself what line of code changes the colour, which changes the tran­si­tion, what does this do if I click on that?” This curios­i­ty led her to do the com­put­ing GCSE class where she was so bad­ly teased.

Getting started as a woman in STEM

Her moth­er and friends were non­plussed by her deci­sion to pur­sue some­thing which was seen as “for boys”, but she did have some sup­port. “My dad said ‘I’ve seen the stuff you’ve been able to build, you have to con­tin­ue learn­ing about this’. And I had a female com­put­ing teacher who real­ly encour­aged me to stick with it.” The result was a dis­tinc­tion and near per­fect marks in her GCSE, and a pas­sion for tech­nol­o­gy. 

While study­ing bio­med­ical sci­ence at Sheffield Uni­ver­si­ty, Nar­vas joined as many tech soci­eties, com­put­er sci­ence clubs and hackathons as she could, and spent some time teach­ing at the not-for-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion Code First: Girls. All this expe­ri­ence led her to apply to the BT grad­u­ate scheme where she now works on the EE brand as a dig­i­tal engi­neer. 

Her expe­ri­ence as a woman work­ing in STEM has so far been over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive. As with many of the women in this series, she has found that atti­tude and apti­tude trump gen­der every time, and that find­ing a com­pa­ny with the right cul­ture for you makes all the dif­fer­ence. “It’s such an excit­ing place to work because the cul­ture is so agile, there’s the mind­set that you want to fail fast so you can learn. It’s refresh­ing to be part of a con­tin­u­ous improve­ment cul­ture and it real­ly suits me because I love self-devel­op­ment — I own way too many self-help books!”

How tech companies can embrace diversity

As with many STEM com­pa­nies who are mak­ing strides for­ward in terms of gen­der equal­i­ty, there is an empha­sis on men­tor­ing (as a grad­u­ate, Nar­vas has sev­er­al man­agers who aid her career pro­gres­sion) and train­ing inter­nal­ly. But what else can com­pa­nies be doing to make tech a more diverse and inclu­sive field?

“I think what com­pa­nies could do more is get­ting involved with ini­tia­tives, like Code First: Girls,  because they know what they are doing. They know what it takes to improve the gen­der gap.” Beyond part­ner­ing with out­side organ­i­sa­tions, or run­ning your own in-house pro­gramme (BT have a pro­gramme called Fur­tHER to train women to code), Nar­vas believes that shar­ing the vast vari­ety of roles and peo­ple work­ing in tech is cru­cial. 

The need for high-profile female role models

“It’s so impor­tant that women work­ing in tech right now have space to talk about their sto­ry. It show­cas­es that the faces of tech aren’t just white, straight, male. Kids grow­ing up think about Steve Jobs and Mark Zucker­berg, but there are so many women who cre­ate things which change the world of tech­nol­o­gy.” She puts for­ward Ida Tin as an exam­ple, the co-founder and CEO of men­stru­al health app, Clue, and the per­son cred­it­ed for coin­ing the term “femtech”. 

“Founders like that need to keep shar­ing their sto­ry, hav­ing their faces in the news and on social media, because it real­ly helps. When I was doing my com­put­ing class, I was heav­i­ly dis­cour­aged by the fact that I was the only girl in that room, but if I’d been able to see there were women work­ing my dream job, it would have helped me to under­stand it was tem­po­rary and moti­vat­ed me even more.”