CW@60: The language I could speak – and a lesson from a Sony Walkman

The jobs that were inconceivable

It’s a career that led me five years ago to found and now lead a charity called Tech She Can, dedicated to improving technology career opportunities for hundreds of thousands of young people.

Technology gave me the language to create a future for myself unimaginable to that young girl struggling so badly at school. My experience has shown me that, given the opportunity, working with technology can provide rewarding futures for many people like me with diverse and perhaps unpromising backgrounds. Indeed, that diversity adds a powerful voice that technology can and should work for everyone.

My story has had its fair share of diversions, dead-ends, and disappointments. But all along, through work and adult education, I began to build the confidence that I understood technology and how it should be used.

In the early 2000s, Accenture took a risk on me as I pivoted into technology, and it was there that my career began to take off. I went on to hold leadership roles on large scale national and international programmes. Later in the 2000s I was a leader of a major technological transformation programme in PwC. I have also consulted and advised on the use of technology in countless public and private organisations.

All these jobs were inconceivable to that young dyslexic girl and, I’m pleased to report, for my old classmates when I tell them what I’ve done.

Diverse thinking

So, what have I learned? I have seen technology improve organisational efficiency and productivity and create new jobs and skills. I have also seen massive waste in poorly planned investments, job-losses and de-skilling.

In all my roles I have learned at least as much from what went wrong as from what went well. There’s much we know about getting the right strategies and processes in place, and these account for a great deal of success. I have also seen, again and again, the difference that diverse teams and diverse thinking made to successful outcomes, both for clients and for the people I was leading.

Most importantly, I believe, is the need to really understand and come to terms with the nature and purpose of technology. This has never been more crucial as we urgently need to question the motives and morality of the small number of people controlling the development of AI, the most powerful technology ever.

The yin and yang of technology

It is a small anecdote, I know, but I find it very revealing. When Sony developed the Walkman it included two jacks for earphones as it assumed music was a social rather than a solitary activity. Sony believed no-one would want to listen to music by themselves and technology was a way of sharing enjoyment.

Since then, of course, technologies have developed which have exponentially increased the opportunities for connections between people. They have also led to unprecedented levels of personal isolation and social exclusion.

“How do we get back to Sony’s belief that technology can be a socially as well as commercially beneficial phenomenon and away from the feeling so prevalent today that so many technologies are malignant?”

Sheridan Ash

This is the yin and yang of technology – the shady, damaging part and sunny, productive part. The great economist, Joseph Schumpeter, nicely summarised the process of technological change as “creative destruction” – as it destroys the old, it creates the new.

What have I seen that intensifies the creative and ameliorates the destructive parts of technology? How do we get back to Sony’s belief that technology can be a socially as well as commercially beneficial phenomenon and away from the feeling so prevalent today that so many technologies are malignant?

There are those who argue that technology is itself neutral, and certainly there are wide-ranging choices that can be made about how technologies are used. But assumptions and prejudices are often built into the design of technologies.

With all disruptive technologies, from quantum computers to synthetic biology, it is important we ask what is happening, and why has it happened, but most critical is to answer the question, what are we going to do about it?

When it comes to AI, for example, what are we going to do to accelerate its prospective benefits, overcome some of its limiting assumptions and prejudices, and remove its potentially existential threats?

What is to be done?

One thing that has to be done is to urgently improve the diversity of those designing technologies and making decisions about their application. I have seen what this is worth and the value it delivers.

At PwC I started and led a women in technology initiative which took the proportion of women in its technology staff from 15% to 40%. Just think what would happen at that scale, everywhere. Would we have the same technology outcomes and trajectories if women’s voices and experiences were fully heard and used? I have no doubt that collectively women can change the yin and yang balance, stimulate innovation and creativity, and redirect technology towards realising its social as well as its commercial and military benefits.

Unfortunately, among all the deafening noise and unsettling turbulence surrounding technology, evidence on increasing the number of women in decision-making positions provides grim reading. Sixty years ago Dame Steve Shirley and other remarkable women were forging a path for women leaders in technology. Sixty years later that path remains rocky.

Given the extent of the challenge, and the consequences if it is not met, we simply need to throw everything at this problem. Every organisation and mechanism that can influence and promote women in technology is welcome and urgently needed.

Charities such as Tech She Can and publications such as Computer Weekly will continue to try to influence the impact women can have in and around technology.

I regularly see the fantastic work Computer Weekly is doing to encourage diversity around technology. Its articles, journalists, and overall ethos are inclusionary, something to be welcomed and celebrated. It has been exemplary in the way it recognises women for their roles in technology, such as in Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in UK Technology campaign.

A picture of progress

We have to build on the decades of experiences of organisations such as Computer Weekly, and their lessons, successes and scars, that point us to what is to be done. We cannot be dispirited in these challenging times where a great deal of social and political unrest is aided and amplified by technology. We have to be clear that there is much that can go and is going wrong, and that new directions are needed.

We have to paint a positive picture of potential progress and opportunity and describe what could go right.

Unless we demonstrate how technology can be a force for good nobody will believe us and follow us. It will take every voice we have, and a roar of women demanding to be heard.

Although the girl in the back of the class didn’t know it at the time, there is a language that all can use to voice the need for positive change and to bring it about. You just have to know what it is and fight for how it should be developed and used.

Sheridan Ash is founder and CEO of Tech She Can, a board and policy adviser on technology and the future workforce, and was Computer Weekly’s most influential woman in technology 2024.