Saagie

Coley Woyak thinks that, when it comes to diversity and inclusion in the tech industry, we need to empower girls at a young age. As Saagie’s first-ever technical writer, she has built entire systems and processes from scratch. Given her chronic health condition, she cherishes the freedom to work 100% remotely, and argues that a healthy work-life balance should be the norm—not the exception. Good work-life balance: a lifesaver I don’t think I’m your typical American. I was always quite open minded and loved to travel. My wife is French, and when we decided to move here, my mom said, ‘I always knew you weren’t going to live in the States’. So even if moving here was definitely an interesting experience, it wasn’t a massive culture shock. Many Americans have this romanticized image of Paris. I never had that. So when my boss asked me if I’d seen Emily in Paris—the new Netflix show—I said: “Well, that’s definitely not what a chambre de bonne looks like!” Americans can learn a lot from Europeans when it comes to work-life balance—just to accept the idea that you don’t need to be working 70 hours a week for the world to keep turning. Since I joined Saagie, I’ve had a lot of opportunities for growth, but I never work more than 40 hours a week. My boss, who’s the CTO of the company, actually encourages me to have a life outside of work. I need that balance for my life to function, given the complications of my chronic condition, which affects my sleep, pain, and energy levels—as well as my brain clarity. Sadly, in the U.S. there’s the expectation that work always comes first. That was too much for me to handle. Trust and flexibility The great thing about my job at Saagie is the high level of trust they have in me. My team accepts that I need some flexibility sometimes—when I’m not feeling great in the morning I can stay in bed until 9:30 instead of starting at 9:00, and they know I’ll make up for it. That may not seem like such a big deal, but in many companies, that trust simply wouldn’t exist. Luckily, I’m not in a customer-facing job where I’d have to answer calls at specific times, so that really makes a big difference as well. Besides working remotely 100% of the time, I love seeing the impact of the work that I do. I'm the first tech writer to ever join the company, which means I get to create stuff that simply didn’t exist before—systems, processes and an entire book of documentation. With the help of the whole team, it’s been really exciting to build something from scratch.&nbsp; Teaching diversity early onWhen I started working in France, I asked people about how hiring practices work in this country, but most people just didn't want to talk about it—like it was taboo. It’s definitely true that the tech sector is white male dominated, and that’s also the case at Saagie, where just 25% of our colleagues are female. Most of the women at our company work in the service or marketing side, while very few of us are on the more technical product-development side. And race is another thing that we can’t ignore—out of the eighteen developers I work with, only two of them are non-white. So the first step is to recognize that computer science was started by white men, and a lot of problems come from that fact. Algorithms are notoriously racist, and companies have to get more diversity in their workforce if we truly want to solve these issues.&nbsp; Beyond tech, the lack of gender diversity is a systemic problem in society which starts the day we are born. It’s the result of telling girls to play with dolls and boys to play with cars, and it continues throughout our whole life. So we can’t magically have more female applicants to join tech positions. We need to start earlier, in primary school, to make sure women feel confident they can succeed in these fields. My advice to young women is simple: the tech world needs you. Full stop.&nbsp; &nbsp;

“My advice to young women is simple: the tech world needs you”

Coley Woyak