I’m a digital product manager at the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) where my focus is global marketing automation platforms and technologies.
How did you end up doing the job you're doing now?
It started with a Tweet! I read History of Art at university whilst simultaneously planning and delivering events for hard-to-reach audiences at Tate and was keen on getting into curation. After graduating I joined a youth marketing agency and on one of my morning commutes saw a tweet about how ‘Myspace had us all coding and not knowing we were flirting with a six-figure skill.’ Aside from making me laugh out loud on my morning commute, thinking back to growing up using MySpace and styling my profile page with music, glitter text and a fancy cursor, the tweet hit home that as a teenager I was using HTML but had no idea that this is what I was doing. It made me I wonder if I’d realised the possibilities of playing with webpages at the time if I’d have stuck with it.
This tweet prompted me to explore how I could start learning to code again. I did some investigation and found out about CodeBar, a non-profit initiative that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community by running free programming workshops. I started attending CodeBar and learnt the basics of front-end development. I became part of an incredible and supportive community that excited me about joining the world of digital.
My passion for tech continued to grow and at the start of 2017 I took up a role at Code First: Girls as a Programmes Manager. My role at Code First: Girls centred on helping to lower the barrier for entry into tech and entrepreneurship for women through the free coding courses that the company run.
Creating meaningful social impact though my work has always been a key driver for me and so in mid-2017 I joined a global digital team at GSK, where the company mission is to help people ‘Do more, feel better, live longer’ and these values really resonated with me. Recent radical tech transformation across the Pharmaceutical industry and life sciences means that there are new opportunities to help medicines and vaccines reach patients that need them and I’m excited to be part of this digital change; in March this year I joined a digital product role in GSK’s commercial tech organisation.
If you could say something to yourself before you started a career in tech what would it be?
Learning never stops; working in the digital space is fast paced and there will always be something innovative and exciting to discover and understand.
What's the most challenging thing you've found about being a woman in tech?
It’s a challenge to be what you can’t see. In the UK just 24 per cent of the STEM workforce are women, with the percentage of ethnic minority women being even smaller. My observation is that within the pharma-tech space there are but a handful of women of colour in senior leadership positions. A shift in workplace female empowerment means that a new pathway now exists for women of colour to pursue leadership roles. At GSK, for example, we have the Accelerating Difference (AD) global talent programme, which focuses on accelerating the development and career progression of high potential women and preparing them for key roles in the company. However, I think there’s still much work to be done before we see a real balance of diversity across tech.
Lockdown bonus questions:
How has lockdown affected your life and your job? Are you working from home? Furloughed?
Are you enjoying the downtime or can you not wait for things to go back to normal(ish)?
I started my current role just as the UK went into lockdown. It was strange on-boarding from home and not having a typical first day in the office – yet I imagine my experience has been similar to what joining a remotely located role would be like. I’m incredibly privileged to be able to do my role from home, though I’m certainly missing the IRL facetime with peers that you get when in the office!
