Gender Equality in Tech. It starts with us

We all know that women are underrepresented in the information technology industry and paid less than their male counterparts. They face sexism in the workplace, not limited to a single geographic or company; it’s a global phenomenon. 

Introduction 

We have read/watched countless news articles that women have been subjected to harassment by males in their homes and workplace. Gender bias has been going on for decades without any proper solution, even with strict laws introduced by the government.

Women are vastly underrepresented in the tech industry. As a result, the issue of gender discrimination in technology has been a hotly debated topic among many experts for quite some time now. This problem needs to be addressed directly by everybody, including the government and leadership.

This blog focuses on how sexism is taking place in the Information Technology Industry worldwide, its impact on women and their lives, and finally, how men, companies, and governments can change their actions to make the IT industry a better place for women. 

Women in the Information Technology Industry 

In the United States, women make up 47% of all working employed adults, but when it comes to the IT industry, only one out of three employees are women (35%). The situation is even worse in the big tech firms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, where women hold only 22% of tech positions.

We still see fewer women in the higher positions in the IT industry, as only 28% of women are in managerial positions, and only 24% of them are in executive positions. According to TrustRadius 2020 women in Tech Report, six out of ten women said their company’s leadership and the executive team were 0 to 25% of women. From the border perspective, this is not the case for the IT industry; every other sector has similar statistics; as the men in executive positions outnumber women by 26 to 7.

How Bad is Gender Discrimination In the Information Technology Industry?

For decades IT companies have been trying to decrease gender/ sexual discrimination where women are denied better working opportunities, privileges, or monetary rewards. The IT companies proactively worked to find common ground to solve such issues. Their effects have shown some positive results to a certain extent, but more needs to be done. 

According to Dice’s report on “Equity in the Tech,” six out of ten women believe there is inequality in the tech sector on a frequent or very frequent basis compared to 10% of men. Women in the tech industry have witnessed gender discrimination in their salary and benefits, promotions, and project and leadership opportunities. In addition, they feel that proper respect is not given to technical abilities such as coding and hiring new employees. Nearly half of women (48%) have also seen discrimination in their technical skills – double that of men.

Discrimination Starts with Salary 

In the Information technology industry, salary is the key element determining employee satisfaction. However, there have been disparities in the compensation offered to the women, as they only make 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. In addition, one of the biggest challenges faced by women is that there I no transparency in many organizations, and it’s unclear whether progress has been made or not.

According to a Glassdoor report, the gender gap related to salary is a global issue—the tech industry is no different. Men earn more than women in all eight countries studied, but the gap has slowly closed over the last four years. In the United States, there has been little progress on the wage gap, and overall the rate of progress is very slow; if similar trends occur, the pay gap will not happen until 2070.

Australia, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, and the UK require companies to provide sex-disaggregated wage statistics. Such laws must be universal to overcome the wage challenges and disallow discrimination against women.

How can IT Companies Overcome the Challenge? 

Companies should be transparent about the salaries of their company, as this will provide employees clarity about their paycheck if the industry standard is being maintained, which will help remove gender bias.

Social media scheduler Buffer.com provides the salary of its employees on its website to be a transparent company and remove any bias based on race, religion, or gender. Furthermore, out of 5 members in the leadership team of the Buffer, 4 of them are women.

Another aspect of gender bias is to provide more power to the HR team, and they must be more diverse during the recruitment process and promotions. HR managers should also focus on reducing biased decisions on sexism and providing accountability to ensure all women employees are fairly treated.

The HR managers should be responsible for not bringing up any gender-biased questions during the interview process, such as “are you pregnant?” “Will you be able to work after getting married”?, “How old are your kids”? and ” How do you manage your family and work”?

To conclude, to tackle sexism in the workplace, it must be a collective effort from the employer, managers, HR, and team members and require changes in the regulation from the government. In addition, more females must be encouraged to work at the IT companies and need equal support and growth to make their office a better environment.

What is the solution? It is not easy to point out one specific answer. To begin with, let's start with changing the workplace culture and making it more inclusive for women and people from other backgrounds who have traditionally been excluded from this industry.