Women in Technology: Bridging the Gender Gap

Women in Technology

Bridging the Gender Gap

Why do women represent only 14% of the US engineering workforce?

Why do women represent only 9% of the engineering workforce in

the UK?

In Israel only 8% of the hardware engineers are women,

in a country where 49% of the overall workforce is female.

And women’s advancement continues to shrink.

In India women hold only 7.7% of board seats and just

2.7% of board chairs.

Why do women turn away from technology careers?

What are the spoken and unspoken barriers that make it

difficult for women to advance in STEM fields?

Distinguished Professor & Department ChairEducational PsychologyUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Nadya Fouad surveyed

5,300 women who earned

engineering degrees within the past six decades in order to figure out why so few stayed in engineering.

Fouad reported that only 62% of respondents were currently working in engineering.

17% of women left engineering because of caregiving reasons.

About 11% said they left because of working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement, or low salary.

“There is little to NO RESPECT for women in male-dominated fields.”

Approximately one-in-five women in engineering left because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss, or the culture.

"It's the climate, stupid!”

Respondents in her study reflected this sentiment, with many calling

the engineering workplace unfriendly and even hostile to women.

Lack of confidence was not a factor – Fouad’s study

found no difference in confidence levels between those who left or stayed in the field.

Science, Engineering, and Technology (SET) industries

It is not women who need to change – it is the work environment that must change.

Digital fluency is the key to closing the gender gap.

Source: Getting to Equal: How Digital is Helping Close the Gender Gap at Work, Accenture 2016*Colors modified from the original.

An analysis of users’ submissions of new code to other developers’ projects revealed that code written by women was accepted 78.6% of the time and code written by men was accepted 74.6% of the time.

But when female coders indicated their gender, their code was less likely to be accepted: their acceptance rate

plummeting to 62.5%.

The findings suggest that women coders face a persistent gender bias.

Will changing the pipeline equalize our opportunities?

Bias, not pipeline issues or personal choices, pushes women out of science – and that bias plays out differently depending on a woman’s race or ethnicity.

Where do we start ?

Change is

Seeing people like me

Girls can be put off science careers by the prospect of being part of a minority in a male-dominated sphere.

Mind the Gap was established by a group of female engineers from Google Israel in collaboration with the Israeli National Center of Computer Science Teachers.

Groups of female high school students are brought into the Google office each month and told about computer science and its applications; they also meet female engineers in an informal environment and experience their working environment.

After these visits, 40% of the girls choose to study

computer science.

Tomorrow’s Engineers shines a spotlight on engineering careers in a way that young people, and particularly girls, may have never considered before.

a world of powerful examples

The Most Powerful Women In Tech 2015

but something is still wrong

"Unless we break the psychological barrier we will have enormous problems for years to come," Cable, the business secretary, told the Guardian. "Half of all state schools don't have a single girl doing physics. We are only tapping half the population."

What does the gapcost society?

Intervening at the ‘Fight-or-Flight’ Moment

Research show that on the lower rungs of

corporate career ladders, fully 41% of highly qualified scientists, engineers, and technologists are women.

But the dropout rates are huge: Over time 52% of these talented women quit their jobs.

Most strikingly, this female exodus is not a steady trickle. Rather, there seems to be a key moment in women’s lives—in their mid‑to‑late thirties—when most head for the door.

The changes have to be on the social level by increasing the

awareness of the attrition of women STEM.

We have to help women to

identify their passion in life.

Making a difference matters to women

Women are drawn to engineering projects that attempt to

achieve societal good.

At the interdisciplinary D-Lab at M.I.T., the focus is on developing “technologies that improve the lives of people living in poverty.” 74% of over 230 enrolled students this past year were women.

This makes the D-Lab one of the few engineering initiatives in the country that has a several-fold higher enrollment of women than men.

Amy Smith, eco-designera mechanical engineer who designs for developing communities

"When you're designing a consumer product for people with less than a dollar a day to spend, affordability becomes extremely important."

The Phase Change Incubator is designed to test for microorganisms in water supplies without the need for electricity, or expensive equipment or a lab, making it perfect to use in remote areas and/or poor communities.

D-Lab’s Designs Against Poverty

We envision a future where the people who

imagine and build technology mirror the people and societies they build it for.

Rebecca RalstonRebecca Ralston is recognized leader in the field of digital presence management. With experience honed over her 30 years in technology Rebecca provides strategic insight guiding on matters related to Search and Social media management. She leads a group of specialists providing services researching, auditing and strategically aligning a client’s digital media to manage factors related to online presence, influence and risk.

Rebecca’s clients rely heavily on Agile’s confidentiality – her clients have included individuals such as United States ambassadors, Forbes and Fortune 100 C-Suite Executive Teams, and the world’s wealthiest individuals. Agile’s clients also include of some of the world’s largest brands in financial services, legal and consumer goods and the United Nations in the areas Web strategy and digital threat management. Agile is a certified Woman Owned Business.