Why Are There So Few Women in IT?
Although we’re now well into the 21st century, the goals of the gender-equality movement have still to be accomplished, especially in the field of IT – with the number of women working in corporate IT organizations still remarkably low. In the UK, for example, it’s a paltry 27%, according to a report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), which is a full 20% below the UK average of 47%. And if this figure is worrying enough for any woman working in IT – the figure has fallen from 33% in 2002.
Education, Education, Education – STEM and the Gender Gap
So is it a supply problem? Are there not enough girls studying the STEM (Science, Technology, Math, and Engineering) subjects? Maybe. Learning Plus UK’s report of the Gender Gap in STEM subjects shows that there is a clear pattern with the gender gap increasing through higher education for the majority of STEM subjects. With twice as many boys studying math, five times as many boys studying physics, and a massive 14 times more boys than girls studying engineering.
On the face of it, these do seem worrying statistics. Is the UK alone in the underrepresentation of females in STEM subjects? What about other countries? In the US, high school students participate almost equally in STEM electives but once into higher education, gender disparities emerge. While over half of all bachelor degrees in the areas of science and engineering in the US are earned by women, they tend to be within the biological sciences. And the disparity in the workforce remains with only 26% of US tech roles filled by females versus the UK’s 27%.
Keeping Women in Tech
There are many great initiatives to encourage young people into the STEM industry, not just in the UK and US, but globally. These range from STEM Ambassadors, who work with schools and colleges to inspire and educate young people to study STEM subjects, to coding clubs and computer camps – with many of these looking at the specific complexities involved in creating environments to boost the female talent pool from classroom to boardroom.
With Europe allegedly facing an 800,000 shortfall in skilled tech workers by 2020, it seems sensible to put every effort into ensuring there are educated, enthusiastic minds making their way into the tech industry, irrelevant of gender. But what about the talented and enthusiastic minds already in the tech industry? According to Fast Company, people working in STEM jobs who happen to be lacking the ‘Y’ chromosome are 45% more likely to leave the industry within the year. But why?!?
It’s unbelievable. Is it really the same as the oft-given reason for the decrease in women in tech –that they’re taking a career break to start a family? I mean, women do start families (as do their partners). And women in tech start families, but do women who have just begun their careers in tech do this? Many of these women are leaving after years of study and the accumulation of student debt. It just isn’t an intelligent decision to make, and these women are super intelligent remember…they work in STEM. There will of course be women that do make the decision to start a family but surely not enough to cause the 45% statistic?
Tech “Culture”
So what’s the real reason? According to Fortune.com the issue is culture. Kieren Snyder collected stories from 716 women who had left the tech industry to find out their reasons for leaving.
“One-hundred-ninety-two women cited discomfort working in environments that felt overtly or implicitly discriminatory as a primary factor in their decision to leave tech. That’s just over a quarter of the women surveyed. Several of them mention discrimination related to their age, race, or sexuality in addition to gender and motherhood.”
It can be extremely isolating working in a male dominated team. I once asked a member of a network team why he thought there were hardly any women working in infrastructure. His response was to state that he’d worked with a woman once and she was terrible. He then explained that he went out of his way to avoid having to work with a woman again. I was so dumbfounded. This was a man, who up until several minutes earlier, had seemed to be a reasonably sane and intelligent guy.
Then there are the “double standards.” It’s okay for a male colleague to be grumpy and rude – just ignore it, there’s no need to talk about it, he’s just having a bad day/week/month. Yet if it happens the other way around, then it’s perfectly acceptable for the group of men you work with to discuss personal female issues, usually while you are still in the room.
If you happen to be the kind of person who “says it as it is” and take minimal nonsense from those around you, then it’s not a problem – provided of course you are of the male variety. Otherwise you will likely be branded as abrasive and be advised to adjust how you interact with others.
So How Do We Get More Women in Tech?
Well, rather than just pouring more women into the tech bucket we really ought to fix the gaping “culture hole” that all the intelligent, educated, and highly-capable women we already have are falling out of. How can we encourage our younger sisters, daughters, and friends into an industry that treats them inappropriately?
As with many other IT and IT service management (ITSM) cultural issues, sadly there’s no silver bullet. While we continue to address the supply and demand issues, the required cultural shift necessary to make IT a place where women want to work is still elusive. It’s not an excuse to give up though, and maybe the tipping point will finally come due to the aforementioned resource shortages, when IT organizations will move from wanting more women in IT to needing more women in IT.
For this to happen, so much will have to change related to the working environment. And the change needs to start now with a realization that recruiting new people is futile if people don’t stay – female or male. It’s only a start but look to the relative churn rates and gender ratios across your business to see whether anything can be learned from other lines of business that are succeeding with retention, diversity, or both.
How is your organization addressing the overlapping issues of staff shortages, retention, and gender equality?
