'There's a new board role, and we're actively looking for a female candidate' - Softcat CEO

CRN Women in Channel judge Graeme Watt opens up over his efforts to tackle imbalance in the channel workforce

Softcat CEO Graeme Watt has told CRN that following the recent departure of Lee Ginsburg from the reseller's board, he is looking for a female candidate to become the firm's latest director.

Currently, out of Softcat's six board-level directors, only one of them is a woman in the form of serial tech entrepreneur Vin Murria.

"To be honest it is a challenge for us, but I want to see more women in my director team," he said.

"I guess my motivation is that I've been historically very used to working in quite diverse environments and leadership teams. I think it's a basic requirement.

"I really believe that when you're underrepresented by female leadership, we're not able to represent all the needs of our customers, and also of our team, internally."

However, Watt insists that he is not concerned that Softcat may be accused of making a tokenistic hire.

"No. Look, it's healthy for us to look to find a female candidate, but we will also be looking to find the best candidate for the position. If we can't find the right woman for the job, the role will be filled by a man."

A CRN Women in Channel judge

Watt was this week unveiled as one of several new judges for CRN's Women in Channel awards.

He concedes that Softcat is not currently as diverse as it should be, but added that part of the reason he agreed to join CRN's diversity campaign, is to support the industry-wide drive to make the channel more representative.

"Currently, around 29 per cent of our workforce are women, so you could say that our female workforce do need to have a louder voice to compensate for that inequity.

"To get proper representation of their views and experiences, we have to go to even greater lengths to hear those voices….And this will help us to understand how women are seeing various challenges and opportunities in our industry," he said.

Watt pointed to an internal Sofcat women in business initiative, and leadership development programmes.

"Our initiative is made of around 80 men and women - and I do believe it's important to have men involved in this," he said.

"What we've been doing recently, specifically in graduate recruitment, is that we've hired an employer brand consultant.

"They're helping to guide us on what language we're using to attract the right people; to make sure that we're not unintentionally excluding, or putting off, a wider group of people from applying."

However, Watt was also quick to point to the current recruitment pool as being a challenge.

"We should put a lot more effort into making roles attractive and accessible to women," he claimed. "It is difficult however, because a lot of our recruitment at Softcat is in the sales and technical area, and the pools of talent that we're recruiting from are heavily male balanced."

Challenging biases earlier

Watt suggests that channel firms could do more to help diversify the pipeline earlier on through supporting education initiatives.

"We can't change that alone," he said. "We need to come together as an industry to help drive changes in biases in education. So initiatives like the Tech Talent Charter are a positive step for instance.

"I'm under no illusion that this will be changing overnight but we have all the right intent and emotional support for doing the right things."