Women in Tech
Lack of gender diversity in the tech industry is a pressing issue of our times. However, this was not always the case. Women in fact were among the pioneers of this field. For decades, the number of women studying computer science was in fact higher than the number of men; though this changed in subsequent years. The computer field became more synonymous with engineering, a field dominated by men. Few women who do now enter into tech careers find themselves in a hostile work environment. Lack of opportunities for career advancement and persistent wage gap for women leads to a low retention rate.
For women, getting into the industry is difficult in the first place. Some who do find themselves in a toxic workplace often described as a ‘bro-culture’ of ‘brogrammers’ where their abilities aren’t valued as much. Male colleagues doing exactly the same work as women often get paid more. A hostile workplace, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, unequal pay and unacknowledged historic contributions of women to the industry adversely affect the retention rate of women continuing their tech careers.
Unfortunately, many issues facing women in the industry today often go unreported. Reported incidents reveal a grave situation for women in the industry, such as last year’s memo of a Google engineer questioning the intellectual abilities of women in software development and reports of sexual harassment allegations at Uber. However, these are just two reported incidents of a myriad of issues women working in the industry face on a daily basis.
A Harvard Business Review study notes that women are more than twice as likely to quit the tech industry as men (41% vs 17%). Women leaving organizations at the mid-career level means few of them can make it to senior positions. Only 5 percent of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women.
It is ironic that women, once the pioneers of the tech industry, now find themselves under-represented. Janet Abbate, a professor at Virginia Tech, explains in her book “Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing” how we got here. She provides an interesting historical perspective of how women were recruited during the second world war who then continued to dominate the field before their invisibility in computer science today. Abbate narrates stories of women at the helm of affairs of this emerging field who worked on early computers such as ENIAC and Colossus that helped in the war effort.
A decline of women joining computer science started in the 60s. Abbate explains how gender bias toward these pioneering women during that period was among the causes. She explains how mathematics was given more emphasis in early programming, a skill women at the time had in large numbers. Later, the focus shifted to engineering in an attempt to exclude women. “The association of programming with math proved helpful to many women,” Abbate says. However, viewing programming as a subset of engineering led to a decline in women entering the field. “Identifying programming with engineering was arguably a status move.”
The engineering label makes programming less welcoming to women even today. Engineering was and still remains a highly male-dominated occupation. In addition, stereotypes associated with engineers, such as them being only men with inept social skills, further make tech education less enticing to women. As a result, the pipeline of women entering tech careers further gets smaller.
A lack of diversity in tech is a lack of perspectives. Women represent half of the world’s population. They have their own unique perspectives on issues and problems and their own solutions. Developers from a specific section of society cannot design and develop software and tools reflective of the needs of the overall population. Technology should be reflective of the overall society we live in. It should be created by everyone, not just by a privileged few.
Regardless of the efforts by companies to diversify their workforce, a bigger paradigm shift is needed to address the issue. More women in tech as token employees does not help. Company policies and mindset of male developers toward women colleagues need to change. That can be made possible if the industry acknowledges contributions of women in early computing and provides women a conducive environment to thrive. By doing so, we can appreciate the women already working in the industry and encourage those aspiring to take computer science as a career.
References
Abbate, J. (2017). Recoding gender: Women’s changing participation in computing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Hewlett, S. A., Luce, C. B., Servon, L. J., Sherbin, L., Shiller, P., Sosnovich, E., & Sumberg, K. (2008). The Athena factor: Reversing the brain drain in science, engineering, and technology. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review.
