Tag Archives: diversity

Breaking Down the Women in Tech Numbers

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Increasing diversity in technology remains an ongoing goal. A global 2018 Women in Tech Index provides some interesting numbers and perspective:

The study focuses on 41 countries in the European Union and OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). It compares the proportion of female employees, gender wage gap and opportunities for women in the IT field, among other criteria.  

“McKinsey found that $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality.  As tech recruitment specialists, we are often confronted with the gender imbalances of the industry,” says Emma Tracey, co-founder at Honeypot (a leading technology career platform). “With the proportion of female tech workers remaining under 30% across the board, we hope that this study will enrich the conversation concerning equality in this industry and inspire more women to seek out opportunities in tech.”

  • Portugal, the United States and Latvia offer the best opportunities for women in tech, with an industry gender pay gap around 6-7% less than the overall average wage gap in each country.
  • The United States offers the highest wages to women working in tech, at $86,608 per annum, followed by Ireland ($60,558) and Switzerland ($59,029).
  • At 30%, Bulgaria has the highest percentage of women working in tech, followed by Australia with 28% and Romania at 26%. The U.S. is at 24.6%.
  • Lithuania has the highest percentage of overall female workforce, at 51.17%, one of only two (alongside Latvia at 50.25%) countries in the index that have a higher percentage of women than men in their workforce. Turkey has the smallest percentage of female workforce, at 31.55%.
  • Latvia has the highest percentage of women legislators, senior officials and managers at 44.4%, while South Korea has the least with 10.7%.
  • Sweden has the highest percentage of women in parliament positions, at 44.5%, while Japan has the least, at 9.9%.
  • Finland has the highest percentage of women in ministerial positions at 62.5%. Notably, France is the only country with 50% of its ministerial cabinet made up of women. Hungary and the Slovak Republic both have zero women in ministerial positions.
  • Luxembourg has the highest overall wage for women, at $59,191 per annum. Bulgaria has the lowest, at $12,278.
  • The United States has the most women working in the tech industry, at just under 1.5 million. Malta has the least, with 800 women working in tech.
  • The United States offers the highest wage both overall in tech and for women in tech, at $98,265 and $86,608 respectively. Mexico offers the lowest wages in tech, both overall and for women, at $19,492 and $15,456 respectively.

Making Diversity Work in the Workplace

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fThe Successful Recipe for Disability Inclusion is a free, one-day training event for supervisors, hiring managers, HR professionals and business owners.

Guest speakers include Deb Dagit, former chief diversity officer of Merck & Co., and Marcy Hintzman, chairperson of ADA Indiana. They will provide common sense, easy-to-implement strategies for employing persons with disabilities. Americans with Disabilities Act regulations, disability etiquette, mentoring programs, hiring practices, employer resources and more are among the topics.

A working lunch and breakout sessions are included. The Palms Conference Center in Plainfield is the site for the March 24 event (8:15 a.m-4:45 p.m.). Advance registration is required. Learn more at www.makingdiversitywork.org. Contact Mary Ann Clark (mclark@hamiltoncenter.org) with questions.

Defying – Not Glorifying – Stereotypes

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Every once in a while, something really fires me up. Today’s trigger is about misconceptions regarding women engineers.

First, there’s the words of wisdom (insert heavy sarcasm) of Nobel Peace Prize winner Tim Hunt. This summer, he declared – at the World Conference of Science Journalists – that labs should be segregated by sex. “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” he reportedly mused. “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry!”

Shameful, indeed. It reminded me of another recent high-profile controversy, this time involving Isis Wenger. The brilliant OneLogin platform engineer unwittingly found herself at the center of a firestorm when she posed for a recruiting photo.

To both the company and Wenger’s surprise, what got people talking about the campaign wasn’t the image of its security engineer wearing a black hat and hackers shirt … Instead, it was the photo of Wenger. TechCrunch reported a taste of what people had to say about it:

“This is some weird haphazard branding. I think they want to appeal to women, but are probably just appealing to dudes. Perhaps that’s the intention all along. But I’m curious people with brains find this quote (appearing on Wenger’s shirt) remotely plausible if women in particular buy this image of what a female software engineer looks like. Idk. Weird.”

And here’s what another guy said:

“If their intention is to attract more women, then it would have been a better to choose a picture with a warm, friendly smile rather than a sexy smirk. …”

To change the way people think about engineers, Wenger started the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer.

“#ILookLikeAnEngineer is intentionally not gender specific,” Wenger says. “External appearances and the number of X chromosomes a person has is hardly a measure of engineering ability. My goal is to help redefine “what an engineer should look like” because I think that is a step towards eliminating sub-conscious bias towards diversity in tech.”

Wenger’s hashtag has inspired women to post their own photos illustrating that they also “look like an engineer.”

You go, ladies!