Women in Tech
The 2019 International Women's Day campaign Better the Balance, Better the World calls on all of us to help accelerate the global drive towards gender balance.
Though slowly changing for the better, the IT sector remains a male-dominated field at every level. Indeed, there are issues in gender balance in almost every sector from politics to finance, whilst women are dramatically underrepresented in STEM subjects throughout schools, university and professionally around the world.
There are many reasons for this, ranging from the labelling of these subjects as ‘male’ to peer pressure, the difficulties of working in male-dominated fields and a lack of role models (The Guardian 2018 and Forbes 2019).
The path forward seems clear – at least in theory. Break down stereotypes, positively encourage all children to study STEM subjects, support budding female tech students, actively seek to hire, develop and retain female talent, invest in female role models and make the workplace more welcoming and flexible to parents (and mothers in particular). Work to change this is underway with organisations such as Girls Who Code in the USA tackling stereotypes head on from a young age whist several large organisations are commissioning studies into these issues within their own workforce.
This week saw the publication of a rather surprising study from Google into the gender pay gap which revealed that men were being paid less than women for similar work. Perhaps less surprisingly – spoiler alert! - this is said to be because women are often put in lower salary bands than equally qualified men – so though they may be getting paid more than the men in the band, they should actually be in a different band altogether.
In conclusion, a lot more work is still to be done!
Why do we need more women in STEM? Commercially, women around the globe have increased spending power and one argument is that tech businesses (and all businesses) need to make more effort to understand and cater for these markets. However beyond simple capitalism, journalist Bianca Barratt argues that:
“This push goes beyond the need for simple gender parity. It is not just a case of making the STEM workforce fair – we need more women in STEM roles to make scientific innovations useful and, more importantly, safe. After all, how relevant can innovations really be if they do not even take into consideration the needs of half the population?”
Barratt goes on to mention the example of the seat belt which when first designed, “was modelled solely on the physical attributes of men so when it was first introduced as a safety measure in cars, several women and children died because their physicality had not been considered.” Forbes 2018
It seems a no-brainer that the inclusion of diverse perspectives to any project inspires more creative thinking and the generation of more innovative solutions that suit a greater number of people.
At Clea, we admittedly do not have gender parity - yet. By way of explanation, we have a very small team and have just opened our doors. We will however be making a concerted effort to hire female technical analysts as we expand our team. We will invest in the professional development of all our team members so they in turn can act as mentors to the next generation and have a healthy work life family balance. We have a lot to learn but will certainly be working to help ensure #BalanceforBetter in the UK, Zambia and beyond.
What do you think? How can small IT or tech businesses be better positioned to better the balance?