It’s no secret that women and certain minorities are rare in technology positions, as a Forrester report out today illustrates (see chart). In practice, this means that as a woman who covers tech I don’t have to wait in line at the restroom when I’m on assignment at a conference, but leaving such significant proportions of the population out of the IT world is still discouraging — especially as technology such as social networking, GPS and gadgets become less the domain of gadget geeks and go mainstream.
Want an example? Earlier this week at a GigaOM event designed to look at the next generation of the web, I counted four women and no African-Americans or Hispanics among the participants. And as these folks debated aspects of online privacy, how data should be handled across multiple networks and how people use technology today, it struck me that there was no way these white, South Asian and Asian men could address all of the needs of the cross-section of users that they hope will adopt their respective technologies. For example, as a woman, I think I’m far more conscious of the divides between my work life, my “mom” life and my friend life. I also am a bit more leery about letting folks know where I am at all times via GPS services. Such issues are barely addressed by many of the products out today, and were actively scoffed at by some of the participants of Monday’s conversation.
So we should employ more woman and minorities in technology, especially given the degree to which technology will continue to touch our lives. The Forrester report lays out several ways to do this that include flex time, setting up mentoring programs, recruiting at schools and organizations for the targeted demographics, and tweaking job listings and interviews to bring out softer skills in addition to technical skills (I’m actually a bit perturbed by this one, since the assumption is that this primarily helps women, when in fact I think it would help an entire section of people who are technically savvy but also have people skills).
However, the biggest component to a lack of women in tech speaks to a cultural problem rather than simply an employer problem:
Make time for training and skills advancement during the workday. Almost 80% of midlevel women in IT who have partners claim that their partners work full-time. For men, this number is almost 38%. The end result? Women in IT are much less likely to have free time outside of work to invest in developing and maintaining their technology skills. Thus, it’s important to make time during the workday for all employees to engage in training and skills development and allow all employees to excel in their positions.
I would argue that making technology a field where one can succeed without working 50-hour weeks all the time is implicit in this fact. The anti-family, macho startup culture that, while it may grant people flexibility, also requires them to be tethered to their jobs, is only accessible to a select few. And such an always-on attitude is pretty far from the mainstream, which means products and services that don’t take such a reality into account may find huge success in Silicon Valley but fall flat everywhere else.
More women in tech is a laudable goal, especially in terms of having a diverse group of people in the room when talking about the “why are we doing this? What real life problem are we trying to solve?”.
As far as execution of the idea however, the politically incorrect reality is that delivering (on-time, on-budget) products that beat the competition requires a team of pretty obsessed folks. Folks who may not think about anything but a particular technology (AJAX, Algorithms, take your pick) for most of their waking hours.
Currently, the people comfortable with this work-life imbalance are generally young white & asian males. Perhaps there’s a better to do it, but I don’t think it’s an accident that people that have accomplished great things generally had kids later in life or not at all. That’s not anti-family: it’s just that there’s only so many hours in the day. Hard work trumps all.
Dante, I think attitudes that women somehow can’t or aren’t willing to put in hard work are part of the problem. Here’s an interesting article I ran across on this subject: Why women quit technology careers.
Katrin
As part of the Educational Technology Debate, an initiative of infoDev at the World Bank and Unesco, we discussed why there are so few women in technology:
Gender Equality in ICT & Education
http://edutechdebate.org/gender-equality-in-ict-education/
Though our 7-part series we found several major factors to the low numbers of women in technology and several ways to remedy the situation:
- More female IT mentors and role models for girls to connect with
- A greater focus on IT as part of every industry, especially traditionally females ones
- Increased professional development for women already in IT fields
Good post, Sarah. And thanks for covering this. As a “tech” father of 3 with 2 daughters, these numbers are not new and always discourage. Not that I necessarily want my girls to be coders. But I want them to have the opportunity if that is how they are so inclined. The fix is in education and catching girls before they fall off in math and science in middle school. IMHO, single sex education helps many as it stem the other huge piece of this complex equation: the toxic “popular” culture.
Why our girls are at Atlanta Girls’ School (www.atlantagirlsschool.org) here in Atlanta.
Keep up the good work!
Steve, I think that single sex schooling is a good option. Another is having parents who can break the mold and show kids that it’s okay to not always listen to the popular culture. I agree that large parts of our culture are toxic to girls, especially if they’d rather spend more time playing with computers or solving problems than putting on make-up.
No way men can address women’s needs? Really? It is a totally bankrupt proposition that you have to look like your customer to serve them well. What you need is to respect other people, to listen to them and to design, build, sell and support according to their needs.
If people want to rise in an industry they must have the talent and be willing to make the sacrifices to be competitive there. In the tech business that will mean taking the hard classes in school, spending more time with technology products and services than with US Weekly or Sports Illustrated, or, as another poster mentioned, putting in more hours than others are willing to, even if it means shorting family or social responsibilities.
Yes, there are boys’ clubs. And white boys’ clubs. And also Chinese and Indian clubs. The clubs can be barriers to women and others, and also barriers to their own success when they won’t look outside for stronger talent. But wielding unfortunate statistics and bogus arguments won’t make winning businesses.
I have seen men solving problems by talking about it in meetings for hours while I’ve seen women solve problems by working on them.
Many studies have shown that women pursue tech careers but often drop out at the point where one has to go into management (and, essentially, stop doing what one was trained for) or stop getting raises. At that point, starting a family begins to look a lot more attractive than a job you didn’t want.
“So we should employ more woman and minorities in technology, especially given the degree to which technology will continue to touch our lives. ”
Is there any bias of sorts happening when it comes to recruitment? If that is so, that can be legally tackled.
Otherwise, just employing more women because they are less doesn’t make sense. That’s like devaluing meritorious candidates. Why are there less women in the industry? Probably more so because women don’t like coding or IT-related stuff than because employers consider them less hard-working…
I’m not convinced that ‘taking hard classes’ is what brings success in the tech sector: in Europe, IT tertiary studies are actually relatively easy to get into to, as there is relatively little demand.
So the ‘women need to work hard if they want to succeed’ argument is fallacious. Research commissioned by Cisco shows that women and girls have the academic achivement needed to be in the tech sector.
However, girls who show preference at school level for doing further ICT studies or going into an ICT job are often dissuaded by parents, teachers and role models. There are few ICT-related role models for young girls. Parents and teachers have a distorted view of the sector, and pass this on to girls – encouraging them to choose careers in medicine, law and other fields where women are known for being successful.
I agree with you about girls being dissuaded from certain careers, have even seen this in my own family. It isn’t fair, should be stopped (but not by the courts).
Academic achievement is just a start, for most people (if not for Bill Gates and a bunch of uncredentialed, self-starting colleagues whom I admire), since working 20 hours per week for a couple of technical classes is much easier than putting in 60+ hours in a management position. But taking the harder classes lets us mortal types build the reasoning skills that will help us advance later. It isn’t just women avoiding these classes, of course.
This probably sounds trite, but I have not noticed discrimination against the women I’ve worked with in tech companies. If they were sharp and worked hard, everyone seemed to respect them. Some were the targets of disparaging comments, but so were guys, and people didn’t try to knock down the women or underplay their abilities any more than they did the guys they feared / disliked / were jealous of. Not that discrimination doesn’t exist, but it wasn’t strong where I worked.