The American Association of University Women (AAUW), a non-profit group that promotes gender equality, reported last Thursday the fall off in the percentage of women joining the technology sector, from 35 percent in 1990 to 26 percent in 2013. The organization also reported that the number of females taking up computer science as a course is also suffering a significant decline.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently forecasted that by 2020, there will be 1.4 million computer-related jobs in the country and there will be a need to fill them up. According to the same agency, more women than men are enrolled in college, but the females make up only a quarter of the total workforce in the technological industry.
At Google, for instance, women comprise 30 percent of the total number of employees, but only 17 percent occupy tech positions. At Facebook, only 15 percent are doing such kind of jobs, while at Twitter, it's only 10 percent.
A co-author of the AAUW report, Christianne Corbett, told The Huffington Post that the number one thing that holds women back is stereotypes. "The stereotype is that girls and women are not as good at math and science as boys and men are," Corbett said. She added that such is a reflection of our culture wherein as early as first grade, most kids associate math with boys.
This belief now has a tendency to find its way to the company's hiring process wherein women are commonly viewed as "less competent in math or tech."
A robotics expert from Google X, Leila Takayama, on the other hand, believes that a major issue is not conscious sexism. "Being cognizant of being more inclusive I think makes a big difference. It's really the implicit biases and the things that we just do because we didn't think about it really hard that end up excluding parts of the team," Takayama expressed. She gave an example wherein a tech team has this tradition of having scotch, a drink preferred by more men than women, in the afternoon. She raised the issue until the scotch was replaced by cupcakes. Takayama added that it can be tiring to be raising issues, specifically on matters that will exclude women from the team, every now and then, and that will eventually prompt females to leave the company or the entire sector.
