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Culture August 30, 2017
Behind most thriving tech companies are strong women working twice as hard to deserve just as much.
Photo by Ollyy via ShutterstockNational Techies Day comes around every year on Oct. 3. When Techies.com created the holiday, which is supported by CNET, they intended to encourage students to join the tech industry.
However, National Techies Day hasn’t done much for women in tech since its creation in 1998.
Need proof? Here are some statistics we found to lead to this unfortunate conclusion.
According to Women in Tech at the Telesummit, there aren’t very many women in four-year colleges that graduate with computer science degrees. There are only 28 percent, in fact. And as a reflection of this low number of graduates, only 25 percent of women hold jobs in the computing industry. In their 2016 report, the Bureau of Labor explains that “the percentage of computing occupations held by women has been declining since 1991, when it reached a high of 36 percent.”
Unsurprisingly, the lack of diversity in tech is perpetrated by the culture of the industry. More specifically, the culprits tend to be the recruiting process and the work environment. For example, NC WIT explains that biased exclusionary language, such as “extreme modifiers, gender-specific pronouns and overuse of historically masculine descriptors,” leads to fewer women applying for jobs. It does this by making women feel like the “other” and unwelcome.
Additionally, when women are hired, they are often treated like the “token” woman and eventually pushed to leave the company. Forty-one percent of women quit – compared to the 17 percent of men who quit – and NC WIT contributes some of this to “token treatment.”
Token treatment is basically when jobs expect women, for instance, to speak for or represent their entire demographic. It can also include when they are required to handle customers of their similar demographic to be able to gauge all of the customers’ needs based on shared sex or race.
As a result, 40 percent of women believe that companies don’t spend enough time on diversity. Contrastingly, a whopping 82 percent of men feel that diversity efforts are just fine. How unsurprising.
On the other hand, according to research published on the Social Science Research Network and conducted by Jason Greenberg and Ethan Mollick, women have proven to have a success rate about 35 percent higher than males in tech start-up companies. This includes raising money and creating the connections with other companies.
In this study, they explain that this is not because of gender. These numbers actually stem from women who know how to appeal to their “activist choice homophily.” In other words, they’re appealing to people who have structural barriers stemming from a common social identity (i.e. womanhood).
But that’s women for you. When someone creates a barrier, instead of bursting through it, we simply climb around it. And we’re doing it with each other.
This prowess has led to women raising over $58 billion in equity and creating more than tens of thousands of jobs. Moreover, 80 percent of these female-led startups are still in business.
According to Women in Tech at the Telesummit, only 11 percent of executives in Fortune 500 companies are women. This number may not appear shocking when taking into consideration the other facts on this list. However, it does strike us as odd when these very women produce nothing but positive results.
WIT continues to cite that Fortune 500 tech companies that had three or more women in directors’ chairs increased equity by 53 percent or more. What’s more, they sold 42 percent or more products, and increased capital by 66 percent or more. So, although women are more than qualified to lead and thrive in tech companies, they’re disproportionately represented in the workforce.
We know these current facts don’t look inviting. This is especially the case on National Techies Day, a holiday meant to be uplifing and empowering. However, trust us, there are tons of organizations working to make the environment for women in IT, engineering and all other tech fields easier so we can continue to dominate.
The Anita Borg Institute, for example, is a social organization that helps women in tech fields expand their careers by offering them communities and other resources to help them cope with issues like token treatment.
Additionally, Women Techmakers, founded in 2014, constantly launches initiatives and creates programs to not only help women enter the tech workforce but also empower women who currently work there. They recently partnered with Google to expand their resources to provide global relief.
To join meetings, job fairs and other great events for women in tech, visit the Women in Technology website and view their events calendar. Celebrate National Techies Day in 2017 with a new sense of empowerment and drive to overcome these statistics and make a difference in the tech industry. You won’t be alone in this endeavor.
