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Telefónica International Women's Day

Girl Guides: Telefónica's Sarah Evans reveals how the digital industry can resemble a golf course

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By Gillian West, Social media manager

December 16, 2013 | 7 min read

In the latest of The Drum’s Girl Guides series profiling influential women in digital careers, Sarah Evans, Telefónica’s head of online creative and user experience, tells Gillian West why women shouldn’t be afraid to speak up, not least because the digital industry resembles a golf course, with everyone figuring things out along the way and change being the norm.

Sarah Evans, head of online creative & user experience at Telefónica UK

One thing that is certain about a career in digital is constant change, and being able to adapt to that change is vital for survival. Over the last 15 years we’ve seen the birth of digital TV, the dawn of high-speed internet and a real coming of age for the mobile industry, and Telefónica’s head of online creative and user experience Sarah Evans has been at the forefront of them all. Graduating from Reading University in 1998 with a degree in history and politics, Evans’ career thus far has seen her lend a hand to digital products which have revolutionised the way we live and work. “I guess it’s a bit of a theme in my career that I didn’t have a huge amount of experience in any of the ventures I worked on when I started with them, they were all so new, but I’ve always been comfortable to go and try new things,” she explains. “You only have two options in life, you either run away screaming thinking ‘Oh my god I can’t do this’, or you go ‘OK, I haven’t got any experience at this but I’m just going to have to find out how to do it’.” Evans freely admits to a bit of “winging it” throughout her career and accepts that this can be par for the course when working in the digital space. According to Evans the pace of change is as such that job titles now may not exist in five years, and the ones that might exist in the future don’t exist now. “When you think about it that’s exhilarating on the one hand and completing daunting on the other,” she adds. Cutting her teeth on a graduate programme for Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, before moving to Cable & Wireless to assist with the roll out of digital TV, it was those early days when Evans first experienced what it was like to be a woman working within a male dominated industry. She said: “Everyone knew my name; I was the only woman’s name people needed to remember. I think over the years I’ve been quite intriguing to people. Andersen had me running a team of engineers once and it was all these guys in their forties with families and I was this twenty-something girl. For me, the challenge was about trying to fit in and understand them, I wanted to be part of the team rather than an outsider and luckily that felt very natural to me. “The stereotypes you’re brought up hearing and worrying might happen to you haven’t really manifested in my career, if I’m honest. Though I’m sure there have been times when people have had opinions about me being a woman, they’ve just never shown them to me, and it certainly has never stopped me from achieving anything I wanted to achieve.” Of those early days where Evans would “walk into meeting rooms and it was 70 blokes and me,” she is philosophical about why and suspects some women were “put off by the fact it was seen as quite a geeky space and it wasn’t cool to be geeky”. She says: “I guess I was lucky when I was young that my dad was always playing with computers and my sister and I copied programming out of magazines to play little games on our BBC B at home, so I had exposure to technology at a young age. I was really fortunate that I got involved with a technology consultancy at the start if my career but none of my careers advice pointed me in this direction.” And it’s that lack of advice for young women that Evans admits “worries” her sometimes, as girls “don’t get encouraged to do things outside of the traditional female pursuits like fashion and more traditional roles in marketing”. She suggests that young women embarking on a career in digital find a “good mentor who you can talk to and share some of those inner demons with.” She goes on: “We need to remove personal barriers because sometimes we’re our own worst enemies – I’ve been in meetings where they ask for volunteers and only the men put their hands up and I don’t know why that is. There’s probably some brilliant psychology behind that, but it frustrates me that we’re not a bit more game.” Despite being able to face a challenge head on in her career, Evans says she gained insight into how other women might feel when she decided to take up golf: “I just assumed everyone who was on a golf course knew how to play golf, and that was the most stupid assumption ever,” she revealed. “I’ve never been like that in my career but I was like that in relation to golf. I made the assumption that I was the only amateur and you forget a lot of people feel like that with work. Once you realise everyone is figuring things out along the way, that worry about if you can play on the same field as the boys starts to disappear. It’s about getting rid of that perception in young women’s minds that they much be an absolute expert to work in digital.” Looking ahead, Evans suggests: “I don’t think we’ll talk about digital in the future, and young people probably thing we’re odd talking about digital now. It’s just life. There isn’t any job that doesn’t have some aspect of digital in it. What is important is that we help young women to understand you don’t need to be into programming to have a great life in digital. “It’s about confidence and we all have a job on our hands to build confidence amongst young women in schools, colleges and universities, teaching them to be brave, try stuff out, step up and learn what you like and dislike. You might not always enjoy it but you will learn from it and then you can just move on and learn something else. You have no idea the doors you can open just by being enthusiastic.”The Girl Guides series is sponsored by:
Telefónica International Women's Day

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