Hey guys, I just wanted to write a post during my free time here while at the STARS Celebration 2014 on why girl-centric technology outreach matters. Even at events when I am surrounded by other people my age doing the exact same kind of work I do, I am always surprised at the amount of people who really don't understand the numbers working against young women in tech. Here's some of the information I use to help raise awareness (taken from my research paper on the topic):
The numbers don't lie
- Women dominate in terms of college academics by earning nearly 57% of all undergraduate degrees, yet they earn as little as 18% of all computer science bachelor's. (NCWIT 2012).
- The same thing is happening in the private sector, with women again holding nearly 57% of all professional occupations, yet only account for 25% of all computing-related positions. (NCWIT 2010).
- These percentages have been falling every year since the 1980s. Coincidentally this is also the time period in which the movies WarGames, Revenge of the Nerds, and Weird Science, films that popularized the idea of the stereotypical white, antisocial, obsessive computer geek, were released. From each year then on, the amount of women in the computing field has fallen from just below 40% in 1985, to only 19% as of 2012. (NCWIT 2010).
- A study commissioned by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media as conducted by the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that only 16.3% of female characters in family films had a STEM related career, and only 7.7% of that 16.3% had one pertaining to computer science. In comparison, 83.8% of male characters in family films had a STEM career, and 23.1% of those were computing related. (Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media 2012).
- We also have a problem with not just recruitment, but retention as well. Women leave computing careers at twice the rate of their male peers. 49% of these women stay in computing, either moving to the public sector or becoming self-employed, 31% move to a non-technical field, and 20% leave the work force entirely.
- 56% of women in tech companies leave at the mid-level point (10-20) years in their careers, so they do not reach upper ends of earning and leadership potential. This has the added problem of reinforcing beliefs in the misconception of wage-gap between genders. The misinformed believe that women earn less than men even in the same job, but this is just not true. The sad fact is that women are not earning as much as men because they do not choose high-paying careers in STEM or leave the field before reaching that point.
- According to student responses from the SAT, out of 1.6 million students surveyed, 17% reported no high-school computer coursework or experience at all, and 60% of these students were girls. (The College Board, Archived SAT Data and Reports, 1999-2011).
- AP Research shows that students taking an AP exam in a given subject area are more likely to take college coursework in that area that students who did not take the AP. Only 1% of all AP exam-takers--across both genders-- took a computer science exam in 2013. (Willingham, W. & Morris, M. 1986). However, only 19% of these AP computer science exam-takers were female. That's 19% of 1%. In comparison, 56% of 2.2 million AP exam-takers total were female in the same year. Each year since 1999, the CS AP consistently has had the lowest female percentage of any of the 37 AP exams. (The College Board, AP National Summaries, 1999-2013.)
Why these numbers are a problem
- The U.S. Department of Labor has estimated that by 2020 there will be more than 1.4 million computing-related job openings in the United States alone, only only 30% of these positions will be filled if the amount of qualified individuals produced every year remains at a constant rate. (NCWIT 2012).
- By not doing more to make the tech field more inclusive to women or launching initiatives to get more young women interested in CS, we are effectively ignoring and thus losing out on 50% of our potentially viable workforce. Women are the largest untapped demographic in terms of both size and potential talent!
- Not only does the lack of women hurt the industry in terms of numbers, it deprives the industry of ideas from a demographic that is inherently different both biologically and psychologically. These differing ideas from a normally extrinsic source can help contribute to solving modern issues as well as advance the technological progress of society with ideas that men may not naturally come up with. (Sadler, Sonnert, Hazari, & Tai 2012). A study spanning 21 companies showed that teams with a 50:50 gender membership were more experimental and more efficient. (Doz, Y., Santos, J. & Williamson, P. 2004).
- Technology companies with the highest representation of women in their IT senior management teams showed a higher return on equity than companies with fewer women in senior management. Both racial and gender diversity are associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, and greater profits. (Catalyst 2004).
- Women not participating in CS/IT hurts no one more than women themselves. By not participating in a field that is both difficult and rewarding in terms of achievement and pay, women are hurting themselves by not doing more to curb income inequality as well as hindering their potential for personal, lifelong achievement.