Women Leading Tech: Quantium’s Lauren Hammacher Speaks Candidly About Coding & Mentoring

Lauren Hammacher has been with Quantium for 17 years. During that time, business and society have changed beyond recognition.

In the latest of our Women Leading Tech interviews, Lauren, who was shortlisted for the Mentor category at last year’s awards, talks about supporting women through all stages of their careers and why it is essential to have more women in technical roles.

Tell us about your career and how you came to Quantium?

Lauren Hammacher: I studied Actuarial Studies and Economics at Macquarie University. That’s where I met Adam Driussi, Quantium’s co-founder and CEO. At the time, he was talking about everything Quantium was doing, and how they would be able to leverage my skill set. Learning how my skills and knowledge would be of value to a newly created organisation, especially straight out of university, was hugely appealing to me. I joined Quantium then, and I’ve been with the business for more than 17 years!

I’ve had quite a few different roles through that time. When I started, I was a data scientist, although, at that time, the industry didn’t use that language. There weren’t data science degrees, and a lot of the talent that came into the business at that time couldn’t code — myself included. I quickly found myself in teaching roles so my mentoring came quite naturally.

From an analytics perspective, I focused on the applications of bank data for third-party businesses. Navigating complex, ambiguous, high-growth environments is something I like and thrive in, and as a result, I accelerated quickly into leadership.

In the last two years, I’ve been running the Analytics Community comprising over 500 data scientists around the world. It’s by far my favourite role.

What was it like teaching tech to colleagues as a woman when you first joined?

LH: In some ways, it felt very natural. In my personal life, I’m the oldest of two girls, so I had to be the big sister. I was also the boarding captain at high school. I think I have some natural leadership qualities, and I care a lot about helping people. Although I didn’t join Quantium with coding skills, we were all in it together as a team and teaching each other, which is a big part of the culture at Quantium as well.

What was interesting is that I was working in a predominantly male environment, and they were confident in my technical ability. I had one mentor who really encouraged me to continue down the technical path, but I followed my instincts and went down the leadership path, and then into client management roles.

That was the right decision for me because I do prefer people over tools. There are a lot of people in the tech world that are the other way inclined and they have real technical superpowers. I try to nurture those people, particularly women, who have those skills to help them develop more because they can quickly leave that behind.

You were a finalist in the Mentor category at last year’s Women Leading Tech Awards. What does mentorship mean to you and how do you put it into action?

LH: Mentoring is very important to me both as a mentor and a mentee. A couple of key words and phrases come to mind when I think about mentorship: ‘support,’ ‘providing space,’ ‘sponsorship,’ ‘shared experience guidance’, and the one I like most, ‘being a mirror.’

That’s what my mentors have provided for me. They saw potential in me that I hadn’t seen in myself, and they offered different perspectives on challenges that I might have missed. They also reflected back to me on how far I’d come and then what was next.

That’s how I approach mentoring — how can I reflect back on what I have heard and help the mentee realise more of their potential?

Putting it into practice, I have formal one-to-one relationships with people and a lot of informal cadence connections with people within Quantium and externally. The benefit of my community role is that I’m talking to lots of people all the time, so I can establish those relationships regularly.

I also mentor through Quantium’s Women’s Network Mentoring Program. I mentor quite differently depending on the individual. A lot of the time, mentees are looking for that experienced perspective on a particular challenge that I might have navigated myself or have some ideas on how to navigate. Often, they know what they need to do and have identified the opportunity or the challenge, and they are just looking for backing and encouragement.

Do you have any examples of when a mentor helped you and when you have helped a mentee?

LH: I spoke about the mentor trying to encourage me into a technical role – I didn’t go down that path, but I now lead a community working with very technical people. It can often be very intimidating in terms of what the really technical people know about the sector, but I’m grateful to have a strong network that educates and informs me (and others) about the latest trends and insights. That has continued to provide confidence and support for me to show up in those meetings and opportunities.

I had another mentor when I was progressing through leadership roles who was that mirror to me and said, “You’re really good at doing this with people.”

I often reflect on how my career has moved to building capability at scale and trying to engage large groups of people globally and the decision to move into this type of role when I had been very client-facing and industry-specific.

And, I still think, “Yeah, I can see that. I like bringing people together and helping lift them up.”

I had garnered support from mentors outside of Quantium to engage in that discussion and help me think through that decision. Part of the reason for that was I was pursuing some passion work on the side as I am also a birth doula. All aspects of my life are trying to help women in different ways!

In mentoring others, I often find myself supporting them during those life transitions, such as becoming a parent, becoming a working parent, or coming back into a high-growth, fast-paced business that might have changed a lot over six to twelve months.

I’ve also supported a lot of sideward moves in the business and when women are going up for promotions. Colleagues come to me to practise those conversations, and I give them feedback and guidance to better articulate all their successes.

In past leadership roles, I was always surprised by the number of conversations I had with male colleagues about being promoted. I rarely had women ask me about this. I now seek out different people in the business to sponsor and help them get that promotion.

What does it look like in the workplace when people are intimidating because of how much they know?

LH: This is more a personal experience rather than a workplace situation. We’ve all read about how women apply for roles where they meet 100 per cent of the criteria and men will apply despite only meeting some. Even though I mentor women to stretch themselves into new opportunities in spite of known gaps, it doesn’t mean I’ve managed to fully overcome this myself.

I work with people that have more than 20 years of experience working on the most complex applications of modelling with different techniques. They read academic papers outside of work and think about the techniques they’ve read about. I’m not an expert on any of this, which can make it challenging when I’m trying to lead and engage a community and to understand what motivates and drives them. I need to be able to connect with them and support them, but also challenge their ideas and thinking and whether they are pursuing the right things from a business perspective.

As someone who puts a strong emphasis on high-quality work, it is a balance to get right. But I have received guidance from mentors and I regularly remind myself that I’m not expected to be an expert – that is the job of those around me. Rather, my superpower is driving great outcomes and genuinely caring about and engaging my talented community, and I’m continuously working on building that technical knowledge and confidence.

There are so many people in the business like me who may not be the most technically knowledgeable, but they have other superpowers that are vital, which is why we are all there. And it’s great to be able to learn from such an incredibly diverse group of talented people.

You have been with Quantium for 17 years, what has changed in that time?

LH: The company has grown significantly, both in terms of size but also in geographic coverage, operating out of 12 locations across 6 countries. We’ve also expanded in terms of the industries we operate in, the clients and partners we work with, and the diversity of skill sets and expertise we have in-house. It’s an exciting time with lots of changes and opportunities for our people.

But at the heart of it, we still have that entrepreneurial spirit and a strong culture of supporting others and sharing learnings. We recently took a look at our company values. We learnt that a lot of those values have remained consistent throughout the growth periods. Having been here for a long time, those things have continued through, and that’s why I still like it here!

Have you seen shifts in the way Quantium supports and promotes female talent during that time?

LH: Building that supportive and inclusive workplace is a big priority.

From an analytics perspective, we do a lot around our recruitment and our strategies for graduates. We have a very reputable graduate program and the recruitment team helps to educate and remove biases in that process and to attract more female graduates to join our team.

We also reflect a lot on the different strengths that women have. They might be very technical and want to continue to develop technically, but they might be good at a whole raft of things. How do we support them to have that space?

We also look at whether we’re getting enough women into those technical roles and the pipeline for them through the business. We’ve done a lot of work identifying women in those technical roles and how we can support them to become a lead reviewer, which is very highly regarded in the business.

More broadly at Quantium, we established our Women’s Network a couple of years ago, and I’m a co-champion of that. The Network looks to foster an inclusive workplace for women, works to elevate and celebrate the success of women in the business, and it looks at potential biases in processes. We also want to be known in the market as an organisation for women in STEM. As part of that, our Women’s Network established a mentoring program, reviewed talent processes, and educated our male allies on how they can support women in our organisation.

When we run Women’s Network events, it’s heartening when we get a number of male allies showing up, wanting to participate and contribute to the discussion. For me, that’s a sign of success.

We also have a very active Slack channel for everyone where we share a lot of resources, and we partner with the Grace Papers platform, which helps empower parents/careers, people leaders and organisations around workplace gender equality.

The business is also really focused on having more women in our senior leadership positions – over 35 per cent of our executive managers and above are female, which is above the technology industry norm.

What changes would you like to see in the tech industry to support women and make them feel more empowered?

LH: There’s more work we can do at a grassroots level in schools and universities. There are lots of university societies that advocate for women in STEM. At Quantium, we regularly engage with these groups and participate in their events to encourage more diversity in STEM. I also encourage my network of colleagues and friends to participate in data science career events at schools.

I remember reading an article last year claiming that boys outperformed girls in maths. However, there was nothing of substance in the article to demonstrate how that performance was measured, so the article was just unhelpful and fed into the narrative that women are not cut out for jobs in STEM.

As the mother of boys, I have an important role in challenging their thinking about what the girls in their classes are capable of. I’ve seen it, I hear the slight remarks. All parents have a responsibility and a role in making sure these slight remarks become a thing of the past.

But that is just one part. As an industry, we have to really look at the number of women in prominent leadership roles — particularly in technical roles — because they can end up going off into different areas when they are really capable. It can be difficult to get metrics on the progression of women within the workplace but as businesses and an industry, we should be able to articulate and track the number of female senior leaders, for example. We should also get more clarity on what a STEM role actually is in order to report representation and track progress.

As part of leading our Analytics Community, I have a steering group of technical leaders across Quantium. I actively review the representation of both women and strong women allies (there are many!), and I can confidently say we have made huge progress over the last three years. If we’re measuring progress, we are taking appropriate action.

Reflecting on the analytics sector itself, the type of work that people with data science skill sets are doing now has changed. The analytics that we were doing 17 years ago is different to now when we’re building big, complex decision engines to solve the biggest problems that our clients and partners face and that ultimately have an impact on society, which is, obviously, 50 per cent women. It’s essential to have diversity and representation in the design of those algorithms and technical solutions because research has shown that getting different questions leads to different results.

One way we are doing this is through multi-disciplinary teams, with product, UX and delivery stakeholders all working together, which in turn leads to more gender-diverse teams as well. We’re also using peer and lead peer review processes to enable more diverse thinking and constructive challenges in the solution design.

A combination of process and active talent management is a good place to start.