Of course any job should go to the person most suitable for the position. But of course this “thing” is still “a thing”. Stop to consider why Monzo still sees it as a thing. Stop to wonder why banking is still mostly white, able–bodied, males.
I’m glad to see Monzo taking seriously their responsibility, as everyone should, to create an industry, and society, which gives everyone, regardless of gender, disability, sexual orientation, colour or belief equal chances in life so that when that interview room door opens, outside are sitting candidates who truly encompass our world.
I can 100% assure you we do not discriminate in our hiring process. The best candidate is chosen from the pool who apply. We do not set out with a specific kind of person to fill a role, we just want to make sure that we have the best people. Having diverse experiences inside Monzo means we are able to come up with creative ideas that help us make money work for everyone. This isn’t only about gender but a person who has had an affluent background will have very different ideas about money and overdrafts than someone who has not always been financially secure. Being able to have those different view points in the room means we can create an inclusive product. Hope this reassures you!
I think the likelihood of the split being 50% cismen and 50% transwomen is extremely unlikely. However, if that were the reality, I would say we had achieved our goal as it is the ‘women in finance charter’ and we would have 50% women on our board.
In terms of diverse viewpoints on our board - of course we would like to have the most diverse professional and personal experience but how that manifests itself will depend on the best people who apply who have relevant experience.
BlockquoteThe concern to me is Monzos discrimination in hiring and the lack of effort to show people and encourage people to look at positions they might not have before (unless I’m missing that? They seem to be targeting their effort to close to home)
Would you mind expanding on what you mean by this?
It might be worth pinning this response at the top somewhere, as the post this was a response to is one of the most common I see whenever a gender balance post comes up.
It feels like I have to explain (not specifically on this forum) the concept of diversifying the applicant pool in order to be able to truly hire from the best options, vs ‘lets hire more woman, that’ll be good’, to people constantly.
Hello! I am the Head of People at Monzo. I don’t spend as much time on the community as I’d like to, but I would like to say this:
We welcome questions and challenges on everything about Monzo. Our community exists so we can have a personal interaction with our customers and welcome your diverse opinions into our business as well as our own. It’s important to ask questions and challenge things - it’s better to ask and have an answer rather than to wonder. For example, each time we post something related to diversity and inclusion, people wonder if this means we discriminate during the hiring process to achieve our goals. I can conclusively say this is factually not true.
In January 2018 we were around 230 people and since then have hired around 270 people. If we were solely committed to having equal representation then we would have completely paid off our diversity debt. We have not. We still have a long way to go. There are some systemic issues that we as an individual employer will not be able to solve but instead we are committed to making sure that everyone has the opportunity to apply and that our environment is inclusive once they arrive.
Over the last year we have continued to run thorough interviews and hire the best people who have applied. We have also introduced more flexible working hours, made some roles job shares, introduced prayer rooms, trained mental health first aiders so that we are able to offer a work environment that is attractive to all kinds of people so that more people might apply. That way we have an even larger group of people to choose from.
I hope this makes sense and eases some concerns. Thank you as ever for being a part of our community, it really excites me that we have people who are as committed to Monzo as the people who work here day in day out.
I think having a wide range of representation of genders is a great idea and doubt very much anyone seriously has an issue with that.
Not related to Monzo but I just personally find it interesting I don’t often see as much effort to get men into female dominated professions e.g. childcare, nursing, teaching etc as you do for women in male dominated fields but that could be because i’m not looking in the right places . (not trying to start some giant flame war, just a general observation)
A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.
That is to say, a trans person who self-defines as so possesses the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, and therefore is to be treated as the gender with which they identify.
Even if it were not the case that treating someone as they wish to be treated is the right thing to do, doing so has been the law of this country for 8 years (with very narrow exceptions which do not apply in this case).
I can give a simplified example from my workplace. I work for a tech company, so a large amount of developers are hired. When receiving feedback from applicants it was noticed that many did not get a good impression that of the (~5) interview steps they went through all steps had male interviewers. They still continued in good faith, but did wonder if this meant that there was equal opportunity for promotions, if their opinions would hold less value, etc. These worries would be specific to the individual so I can only generalise, and not all people would be worried, etc.
However, we have no idea how many people dropped off mid way through the application process due to this.
Simply by having an internal push for the (few but present) female developers to be more involved in interviewing, in theory this has been reduced, meaning the loss of diversity in applicants due to people dropping out is lower.
At no point does this mean more women will be hired over males, just that there is more chance of people continuing the application process if they are offered the chance to do so, and over time as more women do get promoted or hired into senior positions, more chance in an up tick of applicants who do see themselves represented.
So while the company could say the hiring process was free of discrimination before, the problem of having people apply, and so having as fully diverse an application pool as possible, was previously worse.
As a personal contested opinion, also having males seeing female interviewers also starts to undo any unconscious bias they may have picked up elsewhere.
Its a good example but its quite shocking to think someone would drop out of an interview process because the person interviewing them wasn’t of the same gender
I’d hazard a guess that many women would be put off by entering a workplace where there was seemingly no-one else of their sex.
For example if females in that workplace don’t meet the grade to be interviewer, a person of that sex applying may well be put off by the apparent lack of any potential for progression.
There’s also been some pretty interesting studies of wording and how that impacts people e.g. if an advert asks for empathetic people then it would br more likely to attract women - horribly sexist thinking but we are all the product of the socii we grow up in.
I agree that this is also really important and people who work in those industries should be thinking about. When the gender wage gap report came out, people who had a ‘negative’ result should still feel they have work to do.
The issue there is that as a class women are massively discriminated against - men aren’t dominant in many industries because they are “better”, it’s because they are men. Same as men are perfectly capable of being excellent primary school teachers (and are much in demand) but there are very very few of them.
Ignoring structural inequalities just means they persist.
However, in this case there are 5 interviews to be hired as a developer. So to see 5 interviewers that do not represent you, at a company where all VP and above level of developers are also male, doesn’t indicate great things. In this case there is no malice or discrimination (or at least no intention of such), but it is hard for someone from outside of the company to know that.
If you are thinking you might be one of the first to join in an under represented role, and have decent options elsewhere, I can see why you would just take one of those other options.
Tangentally related, many of my female developer friends are deliberately not active on twitter about development, as they say the abuse they get is not worth it. The same feeling of feeling you might be taking a risk by being one of the first can apply.
If it were all the way through then yes, absolutely. Someone underqualified should not be interviewing. But effort should (imo) be put in to encourage those qualified to interview.
This is a good thing to aim for, but often a privilege of someone who either does not feel any risk is involved in being among the first of a group to work somewhere, or is strong enough and willing enough to take that risk.
It’s a lot easier to be gender-blind and colour-blind when in the privileged group (and I say this as someone who is). One simply isn’t aware of a lot of the institutional and social discrimination that is a part of the daily lives of those not in that group.
I don’t personally know any women working in security, so in any company I personally know while this is true:
I also know very few people who look forwards to having to ‘force themselves into the field’
You seem open to new people around you, which is great, but it is often a culture shock, and many others do no react great to such a shock. Not terribly, but often not invitingly, which is no fun for the new person. Nothing to be fired over, but also nothing to make someone want to stay.
Efforts to manipulate the demographics in a company (if we’re to go there at all) should be based on the demographics of the applicant pool, not the demographics of the population.
