Women ‘crucial’ to fill skills gap in IT
Summary of story from Women in Technology, August 16, 2011
Figures from the USA’s Bureau of Labor Statistics show that there will be a surge in the number of technology jobs in the USA over the next ten years, with demand for computer specialists growing by 1.4 million by 2018.
And while many say that encouraging young women from an early age to pursue IT careers is important, Jane LeClair, dean of Excelsior College’s School of Business & Technology, suggested in an article for the TimesUnion.com that the retention of women in IT roles is also important.
“Fifty-six percent of women working in technology vanish from their field in mid-career,” she writes.
“For every woman entering a tech field such as engineering or software development after college graduation, there is a higher chance she will leave the IT profession than she will finish her career.”
And one of the reasons for women’s poor retention rate could be a persistent gender pay gap.
In the UK, figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest that female graduates earn 20 per cent less than their male counterparts.
I accidentally started my IT career nearly 3 years ago when I was offered a temp web writing job and found I was actually quite good at the technical side too. Now I’m just about to leave my second (and first real) IT job after two years because I am tired from having to fight so much harder to have my voice heard because I’m both young and a woman working with male colleagues almost twice my age who think a young woman can’t possibly know anything about technology. The worst thing is that this discrimination also came from women who were used to men knowing about technology but would often ask for a second opinion from men rather than listen to me. The men, even others of a similar age, were never undermined in this way.
This hasn’t made me want to give up on technology as a career though, I’m seeing it as an opportunity and going freelance to help the many people (particularly women) who find it difficult to talk to overly technical people who talk jargon at them and make getting a website seem like a difficult and terrifying experience.