Tech Is Hiring More Women Than Men For The First Time In 10 Years

In a surprising shift from the norm, women are now the most popular tech hires.The tech industry added 39,900 jobs between January and September, and 60% of those positions went to women, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In every other year of the past decade, men claimed a greater share of new tech jobs, according to an analysis conducted by technology and engineering career hub Dice. 

- from businessinsider.com article

An industry colleague sent me this article because of my personal experience working in the technology (tech) sector and my active involvement with the Vancouver and Seattle chapters of Women in Games. He thought it would encourage me as I continue to interview with several different tech companies. He would have been completely correct if I had read this article before taking our statistics class. Now, I am forced to examine the numbers more closely in business articles I read, like a film school graduate who finds small movie flaws that no one else notices.

The article continues to say that this is a small but promising sign for women in tech, who have been holding steadily only about 31% of industry jobs over the past 10 years. However, the biggest disappointment to me was that women also continue to earn less than men. For example, a woman working full time in a computer and information system role makes only about 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

This latest shift cannot be explained clearly. A possible factor was the ‘new wave of female tech stars’, with Yahoo CEO and ex-Googler Marissa Mayer, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty cited as examples. Mayer has her masters in Computer Science, while Rometty has a degree in computer science and engineering; Sandberg studied Economics and has an MBA from Harvard. So this led me to question what was considered a tech job? I do not have a computer science or engineering degree, yet I consider myself to have worked in the tech industry for the past 6 years. As a side note, the Wall Street Journal article 'Elite Grads Flock to Tech’, discussed the increasing numbers of MBA grads choosing tech over finance jobs, which again led me to question how tech jobs were defined: where do finance roles at tech companies fall in this study?

 - chart from the Wall Street Journal

In examining the chart below, which shows the change in tech jobs by gender for the past decade, the first thing I realized is that the 2013 figure is not for a full year, with data only til September.  Since there is still a whole quarter left for the year, isn’t it conceivable that the number of men hired could still surpass women hired this year?

 - chart from businessinsider.com

The second thing I noticed was that while more men than women were hired from 2004 to 2008, there were more women who were laid off in 2009! This is probably due to the ‘last in, first out’ effect of layoffs, but I still would have thought the gender split would have been proportional in this job loss year. However, what positions did the women originally hold in the company?

The last thing I noticed in the graphic is that although, proportionally, more women than men have been hired so far in 2013, the actual numbers as a whole are down. Actual numbers of women hired in 2006 and 2007 are higher. However, I understand a bit better how we can spin statistics to support positivity.

In summary, I WAS still encouraged by the optimistic nature of this article but would be very careful about reporting the findings at a tech conference!

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Articles:

Griswold, Alison. (2013 November 20). http://www.businessinsider.com/tech-is-hiring-more-women-than-men-2013-11

Korn, Melissa. (2013 November 5) http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303661404579180152676790032

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginni_Rometty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg

Chart graphic (2013 November 6). http://online.wsj.com/news/interactive/TECHHIRE1105_iPAD?ref=SB10001424052702303661404579180152676790032