As advances in science continues to grow, more and more people are finding interest in jobs related to such fields. Especially in the internet and communications age, there are countless open jobs in just the United States alone for engineers, computer scientists, and data scientists. However, when you really look at the demographic of professionals in these technology sectors, you will see something quite alarming, and that is that there are just not very many women in these fields.
And that is honestly quite concerning. Sure you will always have a few women here and there working in high-tech companies, but they are always surrounded by many more men. In fact, they are dominated in the workforce by men, statistically speaking.
With half of the population being men and half of the population being woman, it would stand to reason that that sort of gender disparity would be present in technology sectors as well right? Or at least if not an exactly 50-50 split, then something relatively close. But that is not the case, whatsoever! The reality is that only about 1 in every 5 tech jobs are held by women. That is simply not acceptable, and you can see just how insane that is when you imagine a room of working professionals, and having just one women surrounded by four men. That is a huge disparity that needs to be fixed!
Now how can this sort of thing be fixed? Well for starters, employers need to make sure that they aren’t being sexist when making their hires. Many people still wrongly believe that only men can thrive in high-tech jobs, which often eliminates women from consideration from the get-go if the hiring manager maintains that point of view. Hiring managers and even the companies themselves need to go through sexism training to ensure that they are not letting their implicit biases influence their hiring practices.
Once that is fixed, then it becomes a matter of the women actually putting themselves out there and seeking those high-tech positions. This however is yet another systemic issue that stems from the education system itself. The simple fact of the matter is that while so many young men are steered towards STEM-related fields at an early age, young women are not just neglected in this regard but oftentimes even steered in the completely opposite direction. Schools need to therefore make sure that they aren’t just preventing young women from going into STEM-related fields, but that they are also encouraging them to do so explicitly. Sure, not every young woman will go into STEM-related fields, but when you level the playing field by having both genders encouraged to go into fields that will ultimately lead them to high-tech jobs, the end result will be a correction in the obvious gender bias in the technology sectors that we are seeing today.
Nothing is stopping women from succeeding in the technology sector other than the implicit systemic issues that have plagued our society for decades. And quite frankly it is about time that we collectively fixed those systemic issues permanently to allow for the technology sector to be an equal blend of both men AND women, as it should be.