[qi:010] 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.
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