How the tech industry is changing to help women
The tech industry has diversity a problem. For every 100 people working in the technology industry only 18 of them are female, less than one fifth! Now there’s many reasons behind this, the most prominent is the fact that tech has always been quite a male orientated industry and even the products they make are mostly aimed at men.
Years ago back in my retail days, I saw an average family come into the shop, mum, dad, a boy of about 12 and girl about 10. The boy couldn’t have been more thrilled that he was getting an Xbox for his birthday, running up and down the shop looking at all the games, but somewhat interestingly so was his sister. After they made their choice of what they were going to buy, I saw the girl pick a box off the shelf and say “can I get this game to play?” which was quickly followed by dad saying “No, video games are for boys, you don’t want that”. Not “no, it’s your brothers present” not “no, we can’t afford it” Just “it’s not for girls”.
Now I’m sure he didn’t mean it to be nasty or to make his daughter feel like she can’t do the things she wants to do, it’s just kind of a symptom of the industry and how it’s perceived. Tech is a bit of an all boys club.
What’s positive though is some of the bigger companies have recognised the problem and are doing their part in encouraging more women to come and work for them!
Intel in the US has a referral program that pays a bonus to employees that find talent to come and work for them. This is by no means a small piece of compensation either, $2000 for anyone who is recruited. However, to help diversity efforts in their company they have DOUBLED the reward for finding suitable women and minorities for roles within their business. To give you an idea of how seriously they're taking the need to diversify they've set aside $300 million to help expand the workforce.
While money (nearly) always talks, one thing that can make a female employee feel uncomfortable is parental leave. Taking long periods off of work to raise a child can really cause someone to worry about the effect on their carrier. Netflix have addressed this with their policy of “unlimited” parental leave for the first year after a birth. Not only that, they allow you to dictate your own schedule! Need a few months off? Fine. Want to get back to work at your own pace with a few weeks of part-time work? No problem! The whole system is put in place to help new parents and mothers keep their careers in tech.
We still have bigger issues stopping women from getting into tech and I'm not for a second suggesting that these changes will solve the problem over night. However, with more big companies addressing this issue head on and at last seeing that there’s an issue at all, we’re bound to start seeing an improvement. As more and more of the big tech companies change their approach and start to see better diversity and better results from it, it’s only a matter of time before the smaller companies follow suit. Hopefully we’ll not only see more incentives to get women working for tech, but more of an adoption of flexible working to keep them there long term!