One Simple Way to Help Retain Technical Women
Want to keep your technical women from quitting? Here’s one simple thing all software companies should be doing. Hint: it’s not creating yet another women-in-tech group for your female employees.
When you meet an engineer, you meet someone who loves making things. Chances are, they grew up tinkering with stuff around the house. They played with toys and games that allowed them to build structures. And they created gifts with whatever material they could get their hands on.
Along the way, some of them fell in love with making software. The thrill of writing code called to them. These are the people who chose to become software engineers. They’re the ones creating innovative tech solutions. They’re the reason software is eating the world.
Now, within any software company, there are going to be choice assignments for engineers. If you’re in the tech industry, you know what this list looks like: Working on a 1.0 release, joining a task force to define a new service, developing the latest and greatest features, researching new technologies. Less appealing is fixing bugs in legacy code bases, day in and day out.
Sure, a software company needs people both building new products and maintaining code. Yet, I wonder how many managers think about diversity when they’re assigning teams for the choice assignments. As long as the work gets done, why worry about the gender breakdown?
This is actually a pretty big deal. If managers favor men, women are going to notice. They’re going to be discouraged if they’re stuck working on old corners of the code base while their male counterparts get to work on the cool new projects. They’ll notice if they’re excluded from the assignments that lead to patentable inventions. They’ll know if they’re missing out on high-visibility opportunities and career growth. Many will leave your company for something better.
While there are myriad reasons why people leave jobs, don’t let the lack of access to choice assignments be the reason your technical women quit. Instead, do this one simple thing: Pay attention to the gender diversity of your project assignments. Ask questions like:
* Does the gender ratio on “cool new projects” match the gender ratio in technical roles at my company?
* How about the gender diversity of our inventors? Does the percentage of women on our patent-filing teams stack up against the gender ratio of the company?
If you find you have a problem, dig in. Understand what might be the root cause and make changes. Set targets for improvement. Do the right thing, this one simple thing, to help retain your technical women.
© 2014 by Karen Catlin. All rights reserved.
Image courtesy of Gualberto107 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
