A View from the Top: Jacqueline de Rojas on discrimination in tech

So many business people profess to have stumbled into their highly successful career path that it’s started to ring hollow. However, when Jacqueline de Rojas says she didn’t go looking for a career in tech, rather, it found her, she’s got the backstory to prove it. She studied for her European business degree in Germany, where she “picked up a language or two… or three”, but: “My burning ambition was to be a newscaster on the BBC.”

When that didn’t pan out, De Rojas got a job in tech recruitment, where she stayed for two years, until one of the companies she was working with offered her a job “because I spoke German”, and they needed a German speaker to help them understand a new client. That was the beginning of a 30-year career which has included stints at Novell, McAfee and Sage, and De Rojas has never looked back. She is now president of techUK, the body that represents the tech industry, as well as holding a raft of directorships at some of the UK’s biggest companies.

The reason she stayed in tech, she says, is that “it’s a level playing field from an accessibility point of view, anyone can use technology. It is the great leveller.”

However, that doesn’t make her blind to the faults within the industry. Tech as a sector is notorious for its diversity issues, and that’s nowadays. When de Rojas started out, it was worse.

Her explanation of why the sector is so heavily slanted in favour of men sounds like it could be a quip, but she’s serious: “Part of the problem is rooted in the Eighties when the PC was created and all the marketing was aimed at men.”

She says it actually took her quite a long time to realise that the industry was very male-dominated “because I was just so used to being in rooms full of blokes”.

Eventually though, the prevailing old fashioned attitudes began to hamper her career.

“In 1999 I applied for a job and I didn’t get it. I felt that I was much more qualified for the role than the man who did get it – he ran a business of around $10m while I ran a business of $300m,” she explains.

“So I asked for feedback and they said ‘we simply don’t hire women on the leadership team’ and I thought ‘Wow’. I realised then that diversity and inclusion was an issue.” (Her rival “didn’t last long” in that job, she notes. “I thought ‘I could have told you that would happen’”.)

Even when she got the top jobs, she was not immune from casual sexism.

In one of her managing director roles, she once took a group of clients on a helicopter trip to see the Grand Prix. “One of them asked to meet the managing director, and when I turned around, he said ‘Oh! You’re a woman!’ I just said ‘Oh my god, I didn’t realise you needed a penis to make a decision, we should talk about that at lunch.’”

Humour, she says, has “always played a good part in scenarios like that”. “I haven’t been an angry feminist raging against the machine, though I can see why some women have,” she says.

While it may have taken time for De Rojas to note the lack of gender balance in her chosen industry, the lack of ethnic diversity was immediately apparent.

“It’s to do with labelling,” she says. De Rojas is half-Chinese, and her surname was Yu when she was younger.

“I can’t tell you how tricky it was to get interview with that surname,” she says, recounting instances of receiving correspondence addressed to Miss You or Ewe. “I don’t know if it’s a lack or respect or what… but it was difficult.”

This was compounded by the fact that De Rojas came from “a very deprived background”. “My father was abusive,” she says, and her step-father also behaved inappropriately towards her. “I wasn’t very comfortable in my own skin.”

The problems arising from her surname went away when she married her first husband, and changed her name to Jones: “And suddenly I fitted in and it didn’t feel so bad,” she says, half-joking.

These experiences have clearly led De Rojas to her current position as an advocate for the tech industry, who also pushes for change within the sector.

She decided to move into leadership roles when she realised “if I wanted to fly the flag for diversity I would have to be it, rather than do it”.

De Rojas is realistic about how successful the attempts to balance out the tech world have been.

“There’s pressure to make it happen,” she says. “We need to move the needle – it’s moving, but it’s not going fast enough.”

Part of the problem comes from a lack of diversity in the talent pool, because girls aren’t encouraged to focus on Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects from a young age. However, this will be addressed out of necessity, she says: “The tech industry has to make more progress now because we are simply creating more jobs than we can fill.”

Meanwhile, she says, things must change at the top too: “Boards need to take risks.”

Not that it’s risky to hire a woman or a person of colour, she says, but because it’s perceived as a bit of a gamble, given the relative lack of experience those candidates are likely to have.

“Of course women and people of colour and ethnic minorities don’t have experience because they haven’t been given those jobs,” she says.

“If you say ‘I need someone who’s been on a board before’ then you are going to get what you always got.”

She will keep pushing for more diversity, not least because “it just makes good business sense”. “You need diverse boards to come up with those really original ideas,” she says.

“And especially for tech, you need to have a diverse team building algorithms to make sure those algorithms don’t have a built-in bias.”

Her efforts were recognised with a CBE at the beginning of this year. “I was so proud and very humbled, and quite emotional,” she says, adding: “It was a great excuse to dress up!”

It wasn’t the cap on her career, however, but more of a catalyst: “Interestingly, it makes you want to do more.”