Next week marks International Women’s Day. This year, the theme proposed by the UN is “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”.

The digital gender gap has a significant impact on widening economic and social inequalities. The scope of the issue is huge, but today I will focus on the underrepresentation of women in the technology industry.

Let’s start with some statistics:

74% of girls want to study a career in Science and Technology.
(Source: TechCrunch)

Currently, women who graduate from technology careers in the United States represent 18%.
(Source: ComputerScience.org)

One possible reason for the loss of interest is gender stereotypes. Interestingly, in the early days of programming in the 1950s, women represented 30 to 50% of all programmers. I strongly recommend watching a documentary available on Amazon Prime called Top Secret Rosies, which tells the story of women’s contributions to the ENIAC project, one of the first computers created to solve ballistic problems for the US military.

Later in the 80s, the idea (promoted by the media) began to form that a programmer is a man, a nerd genius with few social skills, who sits in front of his computer all day in a dimly lit room and drinks a lot of coffee. And the stereotype feeds itself, women find it difficult to project themselves in technology careers because it is hard to find role models.

But we need more women and minorities creating technology. Otherwise, the tools we use every day would be oriented only to the people who design them.

Last year, during Women’s Month, I heard a well-known person named Ana Corrales, who is the Director of Operations for the hardware engineering area at Google, talking about inclusion in product design.

She said that at Google, they create products for everyone, so the people who create them must be representative of people from all over the world. She mentioned that, for example, a mobile phone must have the right size so that a woman can hold it in her hands.

Another issue that impacts female representation in the field is motherhood. As we saw, the number of women who graduate from technology careers is low. A World Bank report shows that currently, women occupy less than a third of technology-related positions.

Few women graduate from technology careers and start working in Tech, and then a large percentage of them take a break or abandon their careers when they have children. Unfortunately, this has been aggravated by the pandemic, as many women had to leave their jobs to face the new tasks that appeared due to isolation.

Moreover, in Silicon Valley, the latest layoffs in 2022 show discouraging statistics. The WomenTech Network’s research shows that almost 70% of the fired employees are women.

If we continue at this pace, we will need 133 years to close the gender gap.

The good news is that currently, many companies have diversity and inclusion departments, although not all of them implement specific actions to progress. In my opinion, some actions that promote progress are:

  • Mentorship or coaching programs.
  • Returnships.
  • Celebrations of different types of diversity and promotion of role models.
  • Personalized training plans, including Unconscious Bias, Inclusive Leadership, and Inclusive Hiring.
  • Participation of non-minority groups in diversity and inclusion initiatives.
  • ERGs: Resource groups to support minorities in the organization.
  • Diversity and Inclusion reporting dashboards.

Every day I walk through the park and see this steel sculpture called Push, made by an artist from Santa Cruz, which depicts a female figure pushing a large weight. Celebrating technology, progress, and humanity, ‘Push’ was a temporary installation that was later bought by the city for permanent exhibition.

It just reminds me that we have to keep moving forward.