'Don't call me a She-EO': why we must keep the gender parity conversation going

At a time where we’ve been discovering the true extent of the pay gap and just how far we are from gender parity (100 years in the UK, if you’re interested - yes, really, we won't see it in our lifetime), it’s been an opportunity for me to reflect on how I will lead my company, Peanut, into the next stage of our growth story, and what part gender has to play in that, if any.

I started life as an M&A lawyer. Bright-eyed and full of enthusiasm on my move to the Big Smoke from Newcastle, where I trained, gender was hardly the first thing on my mind. On my university law course there had been a gender split of around 50:50, while at law school my class had had a 60:40 ratio of women to men. I'd then trained at a firm where the intake of trainees was an even split. So I suppose the playing field seemed equal to me. I had some strong female role models throughout my journey, and at that stage, without perhaps a more worldly view of how the workplace looked, beyond a certain level, I had no evidence I could not be a female leader. In hindsight, I had perhaps overlooked the fact that the number of female partners was not as evenly split as the intake of newly qualified lawyers I was part of, but I found a formidable female lawyer in the team, and set to work on making her my new role model.

From the law firm, I made a side step, first joining a biotech company as in-house counsel and later joining Badoo, the behemoth dating platform. Both bioscience and tech being traditionally male industries, I was often the only woman in the room, almost always (at that point), the most junior.

What did this mean? It meant that I worked hard, and I learnt fast. It meant that if I wanted to progress, I asked direct questions and used skills I’d learnt as a junior lawyer to get to the details that would help me understand. Did I do that because I was a woman, in a roomful of men? No. I did that because I wanted to succeed, and I wanted to be at that table, wanted to keep my place at that table, and to have a voice. I made a lot of mistakes. Why wouldn’t I? I was learning. On one occasion I was asked to get the sugar during a board meeting I’d been prepping for for weeks, and I responded obediently. (I won’t go into what I really wanted to do with the sugar bowl at that moment.) I volunteered to attend meetings that others didn’t want to go to; I took deep breaths and dug my fingers into the palm of my hand when I walked into tech events to find groups of men standing around in close circles, and steeled myself against anyone I felt was expressing a sexist view of the world.

I was the first senior executive to become a mother, and by this point I’d risen to deputy CEO. I navigated this clumsily, determined to show that nothing had changed while knowing ultimately that everything had for me. Again, I made mistakes. I said yes to everything - travel, working weekends, late night conference calls - fearful the position I had worked so hard for would be in jeopardy if I changed anything. I took my son into the office when I couldn’t miss a meeting and watched in horror as he drew on the founder’s expensive antique sound system, and I planned my work on weekends around his nap times.

One of the projects I was working on when my son was seven months old was establishing a new dating app, and the young female CEO of the product at the time, who I was mentoring, would often exclaim, “how are you doing all of this?”, her face a mixture of astonishment and fear (I think). I thought I was doing great things. The reality was, I was probably giving her, and other women at the company, an unenviable portrait of what would be required to sustain the executive position.

I left my position in January 2016 with an idea of my own, and in 2017, launched my own company, Peanut. Inspired by my experience at Badoo and Bumble, and of course, my experience of motherhood, Peanut is an app to connect like-minded women who happen to be mothers. Among many of the items on my agenda to change the world, one was culture. I wanted to challenge culture. I wanted to be a strong, mission-led leader, and a good boss’ To be clear, not a "mumpreneur", or She-eo (or any other myriad fem-words we’ve been applying to the workplace recently), but certainly a purposeful leader. For Peanut, there would be no pay gap, no ceiling to shatter, and more than simply good intentions to challenge bias, a system which prevented it.

So, was that possible? So far, yes. With a small team, and a good deal of transparency, along with open and frank conversations about the current social climate, Peanut represents a workplace I am proud of. We debate the approach we take to the product, how we represent the brand, and of course the workplace, with hunger. Why? Because the team collectively feels responsible for the messages we share. It was only last week that I was debating female role models with my head of mobile engineering (a mother of two girls), with respect to the impact on future generations, a scene that perhaps two years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed was possible.

Change is happening, perceptions are being challenged, conversations leading to action are taking place. Yes, it’s hugely troubling when stories like that of James Damore's Google manifesto break, and we're reminded that there are people who believe biological differences account for the difference in male and female executive representation. Yet I remain optimistic change is afoot.

I attended a dinner hosted by a venture capital firm recently. As I surveyed the room, the male to female ratio was striking, but familiar. I was one of four women. No big deal, I’m used to it. But this particular evening, the reason it became so apparent was because the person who raised the issue was not me, but the male founder to my left.  We spoke at length about the gender imbalance, positive discrimination and gender stereotypes. We spoke about our role as founders and CEOs to make changes, to keep our workplace healthy, to give it longevity, and I left feeling enlightened and bolstered by this man, happy in the knowledge that creating workplaces where gender parity is the norm sits at the top of the agenda for this new generation of founder.

The importance of reports on the pay gap, on conversations around women in the workplace, women VCs and women entrepreneurs doesn’t require it’s own terminology, but it does require airtime. By keeping that conversation going, by continually highlighting the issues that people perceive to be to "female", we make them societal issues; everyone’s issues. I can’t claim to be the perfect leader, and I don’t know what that looks like, but conversations around disparity, around unconscious bias, around flexible working - well, they might just lead to leadership that looks a little more like that 50:50 split I believed to be standard at university all those years ago.