The magic of Twitter tells me that the Plugg conference has just put a call-out for start-ups to hire more women. It’s not something I’ve thought about much before, but doing some Googling I see that it’s not the first time the tech industry has had this debate, with some lively stuff about a year ago.

As I’ve mentioned before on here, I’m writing less on this personal site because I have my heart, soul and eighteen hours of the day invested in my own technology start-up, WorkSnug. We’re a small core team with a large field of outsourced and freelancing talent brought in when needed. I’ve had to make many recruitment decisions in the last six months and I thought I’d share how the male/female thing has panned out.

First of all are the directors. I’m the Managing Director and we have three non-exec directors. Two are male and one woman. The two men are an experienced entrepreneur/investor in the mobile tech space - A no brainer to ask him to come on board. The second is a talented creative and design guy with his own studio, and also a long time business associate/friend of mine. The woman is both an events and international commerce specialist. Not incidentally, she’s also my long-term partner!

So that’s the core team.

When all we had was a cool idea, a lot of hard work ahead and a tiny dose of seed-funding, I decided to bring on an intern. Advertising through the normal channels I got dozens of CVs from tech graduates, peppered with acronyms I didn’t understand and mostly from men (almost boys). Only one stood out, a young Russian woman who liked the sound of the varied work we could offer. She was the only person I interviewed and I brought her on because we got on well personally during that interview. She did an excellent month of intern work for us, then a short period of paid work afterwards before moving on to a full-time position elsewhere.

Our application tech development has been done by all-male teams. There is a limited talent pool of augmented reality developers out there and I recruited on the basis of personal relationship and overall cost. In truth, there was no gender decision to make.

Similarly, our ongoing web development (we’re still in Beta) has been done by an all-male team. When looking for a web dev team I prepared a brief, circulated it amongst the members of The Hub (a large coworking community) in which I work and selected from the responses. In the responses there wasn’t a woman in sight, though the Hub itself, aimed at social entrepreneurs, appears to be slightly more than 50% female.

Last month I asked an experienced community manager to write us a community management strategy document and plan. She was a she (that sounds like a mantra - I like it), selected because her past experience, with TripAdvisor, was directly relevant to WorkSnug’s user-generated content requirement, and because it was clear she understood what we’re trying to do. We hoped to take her on full-time but just lost her to another company, mainly because our product offering is not yet in a position to move into full-blown community management. We’re sad about that, she’s great.

Then there are the local teams. We send small teams of paid reviewers around big cities to review libraries, coffee shops, coworking centres and similar places, to see if they’re suitable for mobile work (we then share this data on the web and in an augmented reality app). We’ve done this in London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco, Brighton and many more are on the way. WorkSnug has a no flight policy - No WorkSnug employee gets on a plane because of WorkSnug - It’s part of our views on environmental responsibility. Because of this, I recruit these review teams using a mixture of CV’s, Skype video calls and trust.

A weird thing has happened here. Only the Barcelona and Amsterdam teams have been men. All others have been women. Though I hadn’t considered this until today, I suspect this is because I inherently trust female applicants more than male. I can certainly recall strong male candidates, but time and again I selected the women. Was there subconscious sexism at play here? Did I see women as more suitable for a subtle, intellectual role like reviewing a workspace? I’m not at all sure. Incidentally, the trust thing has worked out well - We’re yet to be burned, and I’m really happy with the quality of the reviews (but should confess that we ask our reviewers to take a photo of each place they visit, so there is a built in safeguard there).

So there we have it. The WorkSnug board of directors is 25% female, all of our tech development has been male, and what could be described as the softer-edged work, community and reviewing, has been overwhelmingly female. I’d hazard a guess that this makes us slightly more female than most tech start-ups, but still subject to the normal accusations of sexism. We may even be guilty of sexism, but if so I’d say it’s systemic sexism, not something based on conscious prejudice. I’m open to other views.

Because I’m proud of the broad-based global team we’ve put together, we made this short film - Plenty of female faces, women outnumber men by five to six, but this is because many of the men ignored my requests to do a short piece to camera!