‘We’re building tech for everyone who has ever felt powerless’

“How many stories have you heard that finish, and then she just left?” Danae Shell sighs.

“You’ve heard the stories. I’ve heard the stories. Hell, we’ve both been the person who ‘just’ left. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Shell is right of course. We’ve all heard the stories. Many of us have been the person who walked away from a workplace where discrimination or unfair treatment were impacting on our confidence or wellbeing. The difference is that Shell and her business partner, Dr Kate Ho, are doing something about it.

Shell and Ho are female technologists, friends, and the co-founders of Valla, a “DIY platform to resolve employment issues for people who can’t afford a lawyer.” The tech start-up is still in the initial stages of launch, honing its product with a range of organisations that help marginalised communities facing racial, sexual, disability and maternity discrimination.

Yet despite its youth, its female founders and its diverse leadership team, the platform is also bucking tech-bro trends by pulling in funding from some big-name investors. The question is, how?

“A lot of things are culminating right now to make this important, I think,” Shell muses, stirring a cup of tea while gazing out over her local park in Edinburgh’s city centre. “There’s always been discrimination and bad treatment – illegal treatment – happening in workplaces. Today, one out of three women are sexually harassed at work, and pretty much any protected characteristic you can think of, any marginalised society you can think of, that community has a worse time at work.

“But at the same time, legal services are becoming less and less affordable. People have far less money, and all the different things that are squeezing our pockets are impacting on legal services as well. If you needed to go to a traditional law firm and get support for a discrimination issue at work, you would be looking at a minimum £5,000 bill, rising into the hundreds of thousands for really complex cases. But right now, most people in Britain have less than £300 in their savings account…”

This lack of funding has had a dramatic impact on Britain’s legal picture, Shell explains. “People are still encountering discrimination and the problems are getting bigger and more acute – yet they can’t afford a lawyer, so they’re trying to challenge things themselves. We’ve seen a 243% increase in people representing themselves in employment tribunals in the UK over the last three years alone. And that’s what really jumped out to us. These are the people that we, as technologists, can help.”

What’s astonishing about the situation Shell outlines is that legal protections for marginalised communities already exist. Discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, disability, pregnancy or sexual orientation is illegal. Yet those being discriminated against still too often feel unable to challenge a toxic workplace culture.

“The framework is already there, but there’s a huge difference between the scale of the problem and the amount of accountability employers are being forced to take,” she points out. “If the number of claims being won started matching the reality of how often illegal things are happening, and if employers had to start budgeting for claims and including it on their profit and loss sheets, then they’d start taking it seriously.”

For Shell, the biggest challenge comes in changing the messaging that tells women and marginalised workers that it’s easier to walk than to speak up. “Walking away is a perfectly sensible thing to do when you feel like everything’s stacked against you,” she says. “When you think ‘They have a lawyer. They have money. I don’t even know what’s wrong. I just know I’m crying in the loo all the time and I can’t stand it anymore. I think they were maybe doing something wrong, but I’m not a lawyer, so who am I to know? I’ll just go and get another job.’ But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“The employment tribunal was designed for people to not need a lawyer. And most people don’t even need to go to tribunal. They just need to show their employers that they could go to tribunal and that they’re prepared to do so…”

Still, legal cases are complex, and there’s more to making people feel empowered than showing them the right piece of paper. Can a tech-led DIY approach really work, I ask?

Absolutely, Shell exclaims. Just look at accounting. “Ten years ago, you’d hand your accountant a carrier bag full of receipts and you’d get a report out the other end. Now, you look after your own books, you do most of it yourself aided by technology and then you share your books with your accountant at the end of the year. They’re still doing the accountancy work that they were trained to do, but you’re not paying them for the bookkeeping and admin anymore, which opens up many more affordable options for millions of people who can’t afford to keep an accountant on retainer. We’re doing the same with legal assistance,” Shell smiles. “Kate calls it the Ikea of law.”

It’s a fitting analogy. If you can afford a joiner to build you a beautiful bespoke kitchen, lucky you – crack on with those cabinets. But if you can’t, you no longer have to buy a pile of plywood and some power tools. Instead, you pay for the parts and instructions you need and build it out yourself, step by step.

“We give you guidance about what evidence to collect,” Shell explains. “We allow you to forward all your emails to make it super easy. You build out your case timeline, your research, you generate all the documents that you need. You’re in charge – but you’ve got the Ikea bits rather than just a board and a hammer. And then you can share that with a lawyer and instead of paying thousands of pounds, you can pay a couple of hundred to check your arguments. It allows you to spend your money much more wisely and strategically.”

At the same time as building out the platform, Shell and Ho also want to help employees gain a better idea of when they’re being subjected to illegal behaviour. In line with this aim, last week they launched the first in a series of discrimination first aider courses, designed to increase awareness of diversity issues.

“I wish I had been a discrimination first aider when the first young woman came to me telling me a terrible story,” Shell explains now. “I wish I had known. I wish I had been able to hold her hand and confidently say, ‘Don’t worry. This is going to be okay. I’ll help.’ That’s what we want to create with the discrimination first aiders.”

Shell pauses, ponders. “Ultimately, I want this to be the beginning of the age of accountability. I want this to be the year where things start to change. Yes, any change that is achieved will be fought tooth and nail by people who want to keep the status quo, but I think enough people are fed up with the way things are that we can overcome that.

“Kate and I are not lawyers. We’re not employment experts. We are two technologists who saw a problem, and thought, what can we contribute to this fight? What can we do? And it turns out what we can do can help millions of people – but we’re not alone. Everyone can contribute to this fight for accountability in some way. And it will be hard won. But it’s going to be worth it.”