Gender gap bad for technology business
Summary of story from Bloomberg Businessweek, September 17, 2011
The lack of women in technology will hinder the global competitiveness of US companies, leaving a valuable source of female workers untapped.
At least that’s the assessment of Cisco Systems Inc. executive Kathy Hill at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco yesterday.
At the conference, attended by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Hall, a senior vice president of development strategy and operations, called for an overhaul of policies starting at the training level to ensure a gender balance.
Currently, women only account for 25% of science, technology, engineering and maths positions according to the US Department of Commerce.
Hall pointed out that “technology makes a lot more money than other businesses, and we’ve got job growth.”
Clinton agreed, saying that women need to take a greater role because “we need to unlock a vital source of growth that can power our economy in the decades to come, and that vital source of growth is women.”
The problem starts in college. According to a 2008-09 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, almost nine times more males than females graduated with technological engineering degrees.
Marilyn Nagel, chief executive officer of Watermark, a Palo Alto, California-based, 4,000-member organization for professional women highlighted the need for corporations and universities to retain women in those areas throughout the students’ college careers.
Nagel extols the virtues of diversity claiming “a homogeneous team is not going to be as innovative and is not going to produce the same level of well-thought-out results as a diverse team.”
Weili Dai, the 50-year-old co-founder of Marvell Technology Group Ltd., claims that the old image of technology as a boring subject is long gone. “Technology is fashion” she said.
Dai suggests companies should provide female mentors for younger employees claiming that it “allows women to more easily see themselves in top positions”.
Gender difference seems only to be a problem when the balance is off. By not properly tapping into the female population then the technology industries are losing out on 51% of the potential talent.
“In my company, any function could be done by a man or woman,” Dai said. “How do we leverage the natural attributes and talents of women?”