Facebook is used by 1.7 billion users each day and Google handles around 3.8 million searches per minute. Do you know what all these people have in common? You might say: “Access to the internet.” But if you think about it from a more holistic perspective, they don’t have anything in common apart from that they are a very diverse group of people.
On one of my travels, I was sitting in a yurt in Mongolia, a day’s car ride from the next city, waiting to meet a champion eagle keeper who had gone “riding.” The woman hosting me, with whom I shared no common language, took out her phone and asked to add me on Facebook. That woman and I were inherently different, but we were using the same products.
Why Does This Matter?
The reason why this story matters is that whilst the user base of our favourite tech products is incredibly diverse, the workforce creating these products is not. In the U.S., only 26% of the computing workforce is female and only 3% (!) is African-American. Moreover, women software engineer hires have only increased by 2% over the last 20 years. That’s not very diverse.
The reality is that, in order for the tech industry to create great products and to steer innovation that is truly representative of the population that it serves, it needs to improve its ethnic and gender representation.
Where Does the Problem Originate?
Tech recruiting seems like the obvious scapegoat for this problem. But most large tech employers are very aware of the issue and working hard to improve their diversity and inclusion. However, the industry leaders are incredibly aware of this problem and are working hard to address the gap. Of course, there are still issues with the process, but evidence suggests that the root cause of the problem occurs before the recruitment phase and is an issue of perception.
A recent study by PwC has found that a career in tech is the first choice for only 3% of women in the U.K. The picture in the U.S. is not much better with only 21% of 2019 computer science graduates being women. If this underrepresentation alone does not incentivise you, as a woman, to investigate a career in an industry that governs so much of our daily lives, this article aims to identify some of the innate, gender-specific skills that can make women so valuable to tech firms and that are often overlooked when looking at traditional tech job descriptions.
#software-development #career-change #programming #diversity-in-tech #women-in-tech
