Utah Firm Unearths Insights About “Women of Grow” Group

Grow, the business-intelligence (BI) company that provides technology solutions for innovators, is recognizing International Women’s Day and diversity in technology workplace with the creation of a custom dashboard that unearths insights about the “Women of Grow” (WoG), an innovative group that allows the company’s female contingent to help each other, learn, and advance their careers.

WoG meets every month for lunch to just talk—about how things are going at work and at home; expectations; what would be good for women at the company; and other career and personal issues. The dashboard, created by Growth Engineer Juliet Fletcher, is based on data collected from a survey of the group. The collected data was aggregated and anonymized and used to create the Grow dashboard.

The company produced a two-part blog series on the Women of Grow and the results of the survey. To view those articles and the interactive data dashboard, click here.

What the numbers say:

25.64 percent of all Grow employees are women; they have a total of 115 years of work experience and 63.5 years of tech experience; and they care for nine children and 14 pets (including a horse). Seven are individual contributors, three are managers/directors, and one is C-level leadership, a rarity in the technology industry.

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Beyond the numbers, Grow employs women who:

• speak Albanian
• have an MS in Pharmaceutics
• were adopted and born on the fourth of July
• spent a year in Nicaragua working with street children
• love wrapping paper

Grow also employs women whose hobbies are:

• making homemade popcorn
• going down waterslides
• woodworking
• cuddling her pup

Of course there are also many who love skiing, trail running, camping, yoga, biking—and just generally anything that’s good for you or done outdoors (this is a Utah-based company, after all). But not all of them are enjoying the fresh air—there are also some movie watchers, painters, dancers, and music players and listeners.

Women in business

According to Bridget Quinlan, Grow’s Growth Officer, one of the criticisms about women in business, in general, is that they continue to occupy roles that have been traditionally held by women, such as human resources, marketing, and administration. That’s not the way of things at Grow, she explained: “Here, we have female engineers, data scientists, and even C-level leaders. These are roles almost always held by men. As an industry we might not be making as much progress as we would like, but, here at Grow, we are putting our money where our mouth is and disrupting some of these norms.”

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And the WoGs agree, and get really excited when discussing the strides women are making in business. We asked them: “Do you think women are making enough strides in tech and in business, in general?” Here’s what they had to say:

“I think there is effort being made in some areas but I don’t believe all effort has been valuable. I think the focus on helping women is too often to make strides simply on numbers. I often hear of companies setting a goal to have a certain percentage of women make up their workforce. I personally don’t find this a very productive goal. However, despite this, I generally believe that women are making strides in tech and business and it’s exciting to see.”

“I think women are making strides in the right direction, and that, within the next 10 to 15 years, we will have achieved an equal footing in the business world. We have come a long way in my own lifetime, and the message that I tell my children is that a woman can do any job as well as a man–not in a boastful or proud way, but just as a matter of fact. I honestly don’t like to focus on myself being a woman in tech because it makes it seem like something unusual.”

“I think the strides that have been made are incredible and I’ve been able to enjoy the benefits from them. However, I believe there’s still so much more that we can do for future generations.”

Heady stuff, indeed. But in the end, the overall feeling one gets from the Women of Grow is this:

“I feel women are definitely becoming a force to be reckoned with.”

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