Monster initiative to get more women in tech - can it work?
- Summary:
- Monster has launched the latest industry initiative to address the lack of women in tech. But concerted action will be vital to change entrenched attitudes
The call to action, made at the online job board’s ‘Girls in Coding’ event in London, is to put together a cross-industry group in order to come up with ways of attracting and retaining female talent in the IT industry. A further goal is to devise a charter setting out concrete goals for how such objectives will be achieved.
The scheme is the brainchild of Sinead Bunting, the firm’s marketing director for the UK and Ireland, but the plan is also to share it with US colleagues “shortly”, with “a view to replicating it in that market” too.
And the issue is a pressing one, as an interesting stat from Baroness Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of travel website Lastminute.com and former digital champion for the UK government, would appear to reveal.
At the everywoman in tech forum in London at the end of March, she intimated that the House of Lords (the UK Parliament’s Upper House), that conservative bastion of the British political establishment, was now actually more diverse than the local tech industry, with female representation standing at 22 percent and 14 percent respectively.
Presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton also made the salient point recently that the gender gap is getting worse – a situation that holds true on both sides of the pond.
During her keynote speech at Lead On: Watermark’s Silicon Valley Conference for Women in February, she said ruefully:
We are going backward in a field that is supposed to be all about moving forward.
Technology inequality
For instance, the US National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) indicated that in 2014, a mere 26 percent of the computing workforce were women.
Moreover, according to market researcher Gartner, the number of females taking on the role of chief information officer in North America amounted to only 18.1 percent – although the situation was slightly better than in Europe, where a mere 11.2 percent were in leadership positions – figures that have changed little over the last decade.
To make matters worse, activist website Narrow the Gapp also pointed out that women working in the US tech sector make only $0.84 for every $1 earned for a man, which equates to a huge $214 less each week.
The situation is similar in the UK too, where pay differentials between full-time, permanent female and male IT workers is around 16 percent, and rising, according to the ‘Women in IT Scorecard’ (PDF) report from BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT and e-Skills UK.
So what is going on here and just how have things got so bad? A key starting point in trying to get to the bottom of it all is to understand why so few women appear to going into the industry in the first place.
According to the UK’s Department of Education, only one in 10 girls chose to study computer science at school in 2014, opting instead to self-select out of the sector before they even really understand what it is about.
Debbie Forster, joint chief executive at educational charity Apps for Good and panel member at the Girls in Coding event, explained the rationale:
Girls don’t make active career choices at age 10 to 14, but they do say ‘ooh, I don’t like that’ and start ruling things out, often based on stereotypes. So we need to get them as young as 10 to make a difference.
Stereotypes and role models
Things like a lack of positive female role models also aren’t helping much, especially as many of the candidates routinely wheeled out, including Ada Lovelace, arguably the world’s first female programmer, lack contemporary relevance.
As Ruth Nicholls, managing director of Young Rewired State, a community for young software developers and designers, said rather drily:
We need modern female role models. Would you use Beethoven as a role model if you were trying to encourage young people to take up a career in music?
But this point is also closely linked to the idea that coding is not a “normalised” thing for girls to do – and, even if it were, the uses to which the activity can be put is rarely expressed in terms that they can relate to. Nicholls explained:
It’s about finding use cases that appeal to everyone. For example, the stereotype is that women love shopping. So if they do, introduce them to the idea of developing a new kind of ecommerce app.
Gina Jackson, managing director of the Next Gen Skills Academy, continued:
What we tell girls they can do has a huge impact. We’re very prescriptive and very ‘pink’-oriented. But we need to break that down and encourage girls to do whatever they want.
Another key challenge, however, is that, even if girls do defy all of the odds and take up a career in IT, chances are that they won’t stay in it for very long.
Why women leave
According to NCWIT, around 56 percent of women in technology leave their employers mid-career, around twice the rate of men. Here’s what they do instead:
- About a quarter take a non-technical job at a different company
- Some 22% become self-employed but stay in the tech field
- Around one in five take time out of the workforce altogether
- One in 10 go to work for a start-up.
As to the reasons they leave, there are four key ones, research from the well-respected not-for-profit Anita Borg Institute reveals:
- Some 30 percent feel that there are no career progression opportunities, their hours are too long or their salary is too low
- Around 27 percent are unhappy with their work-life balance and want or need to spend more time with their family
- About 22 percent simply didn’t like the work, having either lost interest in it or having found that they didn’t enjoy the day-to-day tasks that they were expected to perform
- Some 17 percent were unhappy with the organisational culture or didn’t get on with their bosses or colleagues.
Important considerations here include the fact that many women feel uncomfortable being the sole, or even token, female in an often otherwise ‘laddish’ department, where managers and co-workers have little inkling of their needs.
But another vital issue for employers to consider should they be keen to up their female quotient is how appealing their corporate image is likely to be to this segment of the population.
Amali de Alwis, chief executive of social enterprise Code First: Girls, explained:
On a lot of company websites, the pictures will be of men and they’ll recruit for ‘ninjas’. So there’s work to be done on how they present themselves. It’s about making conscious choices about how you share your brand.
Alexa Glick, Microsoft’s global diversity program manager, agreed. She said:
It’s about how people see the company so if you’re sharing stories on social media or putting job descriptions out there, the wording is very important.
Why it matters
For example, while women are unlikely to apply for a job unless they have every single skill listed, men will go for it even if they have less than 50 percent, Glick added.
As to why any of this really matters, former US Secretary of State Clinton is adamant:
Building a diverse talent pool can’t just be a nice thing to do. It is a must do. When women’s participation is limited, our country’s prosperity is limited.
The Times columnist Caitlin Moran put it another way during her “How to Build a Girl” book tour last year, in a statement that inspired Monster’s Bunting to try to do something about the situation in the first place:
If 90 percent of coders are men, developing and owning the language of the future, women won’t be part of the conversation.
In other words, if you buy into the notion that the internet is the future and that it’s for everybody, “then it should reflect everyone and be build by everybody,” Bunting added.
But Andrea Bertone, Monster’s president for Europe, also raised a final, important economic consideration:
We’re experiencing a digital skills gap of about 750,000 people in the region by 2017, growing to one million by 2020 – and without women it will be impossible to close the gap, which is likely to damage growth.
My take
The tech industry has been wringing its hands over the lack of female representation among its ranks for decades and little appears to have changed over this time.
So it will be interesting to see if the mounting skills crisis will have any impact on getting employers, governments and educationalists to change their ways. Or whether well-meaning initiatives such as Monster’s will be able to make any dent on an apparently entrenched situation.
Image credits: Woman explaining technology to male colleague © Andrey Kiselev - Fotolia.com.