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Anne de Kerckhove Demonstrates the Power of a Woman in the Tech Space

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Anne de Kerckhove Demonstrates the Power of a Woman in the Tech Space

Perhaps ‘fascinating’ is the right word to describe Anne de Kerckhove’s work experience. Her 15+ years of experience includes some of the most renowned names from entertainment, advertising media, banking, and the technology sector. Besides managing challenges that come with being a Chief Operating Officer, MD, or other top roles, she has taken several initiatives towards creating awareness about diversity and equality in the corporate world. Anne has proved to be a great role model for young women wishing to start their own business or get into tech.

What’s Anne’s current role?

Anne is currently the CEO of Iron Group, a London-based ecommerce company that invests and helps in building digital subscription businesses. The company builds tests and builds its own digital assistance services that helps users become more productive as well as offering their expertise to early stage companies and budding entrepreneurs wanting to build a subscription business. With a broad set of services, Iron offers an all-in-one solution from managing payment infrastructure for recurring billing to acquisition traffic management and an ID Lab where start up ideas are validated.

Iron has reported a whopping annual growth rate of 55 percent YOY. According to the company’s website, the firm generated £80M+ in 2016 and is on track to grow another 50 percent this year. The woman behind Iron’s meteoric success; Anne de Kerckhove.

CEO’s must remain proactive to solve gender pay gap issue

Anne recently spoke at the Tech London Advocates Women in Tech event last month.

Just 24 percent of senior management roles in companies around the world are occupied by women. On being asked about how she attracts and retains female talent, Anne pointed out that company management needs to be super proactive in this matter. It won’t happen without taking efforts. Kerckhove highlighted the point that as a CEO she believes that every organization should look at an equal number of men and women’s CVs while recruiting.

“CEO’s should check and make sure that both men and women in the organization are paid equally for the same job. You have to keep the same thought in your head or nothing will change. This won’t happen naturally, no matter what culture you create in the company,”- said de Kerckhove.

World Economic Forum has released data suggesting that the world would need at least 118 years to remove the gender pay gap. While sharing her opinion on this data, Iron’s CEO said women tend to ask for fewer pay hikes. She agreed that two companies where she previously worked as a part of the management team did not pay men and women equally. Both companies never compared salaries paid to women with those offered to men.

Anne believes that to avoid this indifference, companies must compare salaries paid to men and women who are on same roles. Salaries should be readjusted accordingly.

“Women have a huge role to play in the tech world, but there are not enough of us right now. Increasingly women need to be role models for the next generation and make sure that the next generation does not face any hurdles to reach the top.”-Anne says.

Anne holds an MBA from INSEAD and her performance while at Reed Elsevier, Videology, Inspired Gaming Group as well as Iron is remarkable. Anne de Kerckhove biography says it all, she is a ray of hope for all those women who wish to take their career to a new level.

Anne can also be reached via Twitter and LinkedIn

I am the founder of Startup Today. I am the main writer and have put in many hours of work into creating this blog. If you want to find out more about me then lets get in contact.

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