Home » Tealium’s Catherine Ballantyne On Speeding Up Gender Balance In The Tech Sector

26 August, 2020

Tealium’s Catherine Ballantyne On Speeding Up Gender Balance In The Tech Sector

Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard recently pointed out that if we continue at the current rate, it’ll be 95 years before we see gender equality in politics.

“That’s too long to wait,” she said about the statistic.

It’s a sentiment that resonated with Tealium’s regional vice president APJ Solutions Consulting Catherine Ballantyne.

“I would say the same issue exist for women in technology,” she said about Gillard’s comments.

“We are improving our representation in the business, but until you reach parity you are always looking to improve..”

Ballantyne spoke with B&T ahead of the upcoming Women Leading Tech awards.

“How we get it to go faster, is to actually give it some focus, invest in some energy and start measuring – what gets measured gets done,” she continued.

“Apply the same processes we apply to growing the business to ensure that we get gender balance within the business.”

Ballantyne joined Tealium six years ago, after stints with big-name US tech companies such as Oracle, IBM, Marketo and Acxiom.

Today she leads a team of 10 staff from Japan through to Australia and helps Tealium continue its development as a company.

Creating balanced growth

After joining Tealium when it had just six staff in APJ, she has seen the company grow to a team of 70 during her tenure.

And while the company continues to grow, Ballantyne is also helping to ensure it develops with a gender balance.

In early 2018, she was part of the formation of the Tealium Women in Leadership program alongside some of her colleagues from the US and UK.

“It was something that we really were missing,” she says about the initiative. “At the time, we were sitting at just under 30 per cent female representation in the business – which would have been about industry standard.”

While the goal is to reach gender parity, the more pressing issue for Ballantyne and the Women in Leadership group is how they achieve this.

“We formed this group that we call the Tealium Women in Leadership, but we’re not just about leadership, we’re about data, engineering and we’re about technology.

“We’re making sure that the women’s group is representative of all of the different kinds of interests and is actually inclusive within itself.

“Just because you’re in a technology company doesn’t necessarily mean that leadership is the thing that you want to be known for – it might be technology or marketing. For me, it is about seizing our power and our privilege to make space for others.

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