What is this about women and technology and the seemingly lack of correlation between them? Well, women remain underrepresented at the top of corporations globally. In the UK, only 1 in 8 jobs requiring advanced science, technology, engineering or maths (STEM) skills are done by women. Ugh.
But how can women improve the world of technology, anyway? In quite a lot of ways, as a matter of fact:
More people in tech; period.
Through the last decade, there have been a lot of reports creating awareness for the lack of STEM workers in all corners of the world. Although there are a lot of graduates in that area, the job openings available hugely surpass the amount of available workforce.
What’s even more concerning is how employment in STEM is still male-dominated. At the EU level, the share of STEM university graduates has remained basically stable. The only common and persisting trend is the underrepresentation of women among STEM university graduates, not even reaching 13%.
We’ve already shared Europe’s concern of having 900k tech job vacancies to fill by 2020. There are currently almost 335 million working-age people living in the European Union. Guess what: almost 50,1% of those are women. Imagine how many of those vacancies could be filled, how much the economy would grow with the added workforce of these women if they had the much-needed skills.
What’s even more concerning is that when women are employed in STEM roles, they aren’t fairly treated. Recently, the UK’s Institute of Engineering and Technology revealed that two-thirds of female engineers do not resume their jobs after taking maternity leave because of the cost of childcare and inflexible working hours. If companies started more programmes to support working mothers and offered them flexible schedules, the retention number for STEM working women could grow exponentially.
Diversity brings results
The tech industry has never been known for its gender diversity (or a lot of other diversities, for that matter). However, having both women and men in the workplace allows for more innovation, skills, resources and different ideas to be used on improving a business.
We all know that women and men have very different ways of looking at things — don’t get us started on the eggshell white and eggplant purple colours. On a deeper level, though, this different way of viewing the world also applies in the workplace.
For starters, women tend to be more emotionally sensitive and more empathetic, and are also more design-focused. It’s normal for different kinds of people to tackle problems in different ways, and this is good for the tech industry because we need more points of view and ideas to create technology that can fulfill and better resolve our everyday needs.
Having a company made up of people who approach problems differently is a good thing, especially when we’re talking about female-oriented industries. There are some products that borderline only women buy, and thus only they can bring crucial insights for a product’s or service’s success.
Think about it; if you have no relationship to an industry whatsoever, you’re less less likely to start a company in it. With fewer women in tech, the tech world will make much less of an impact in those fields. Think of all the innovative products and services that could be happening and they’re basically not because there is no one with the needed insights.
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What to do?
Some companies are trying to take matters into their own hands by creating educational programmes that teach children engineering and programming skills at a very early stage in their lives. Although this might be a solution in the long run, developers are needed now, and that’s why there are increasingly more programmes (and schools like Academia de Código) that are requalifying the working-age population with tech skills.
Thankfully, there’s also lot being done to get women actively involved and interested in the tech world and in a tech career. As we’ve mentioned before, even supermodels are encouraging young girls to learn how to code. A few TV shows surrounding the tech world, such as “Silicon Valley” and “Mr. Robot”, are starting to use female characters as a part of their cast, portrayed as kickass developers with huge hacker skills or viewed as leaders and decision makers in the industry.
Web Summit’s Sinead Murphy created an amazing initiative for the event’s upcoming edition. Murphy has been responsible for the production of Web Summit since 2013, and she is aware that female participation in the tech sector is a significant issue that needs to be tackled.
To counteract this issue, in this year’s Web Summit, which will take place in Lisbon in the beginning of November, Sinead decided to do something different in order to even the gender ratio of the attendees. The organisation gave away 10,000 complimentary tickets to women in the tech industry across the whole world. This way, Web Summit will manage to not only call more women towards this industry, but allow for a more diverse and balanced audience. It’s a huge step, especially towards raising awareness on the issue.
Other initiatives to attract women to the tech industry are non-profit organisations. Back in 2007, Adriana Gascoigne created the global non-profit organisation Girls in Tech, with the goal to help more women enter the high-tech industry and build lucrative startups. Many other organisations of the sort followed, such as Girls Who Code and Geek Girls Carrots. Both are organisations that aim to reduce the growing gender gap in technology by creating an environment where women can have a real contact with a huge variety of female admins, analysts, engineers and developers (among many others), and learn what’s really going on in the tech world.
They’re all amazing initiatives that are motivating new generations and making them pursue a career in the tech industry.
A shortage of women in the tech world is real, just as its talent shortage in general. Women are needed, not only for the insights, talent and knowledge they can bring, but also to inspire young girls to choose to do the same later in life to further balance tech’s demand and supply and even the gender gap.
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