The IT field has been fairly homogenous for some time and continues to be dominated by men.
John Zappe, of ERE, explored this issue recently, citing some statistics that’ll make you scratch your head: the number of women earning computer science degrees has fallen from 37 percent to 20 percent in the past 25 years, and women currently fill little more than one-quarter of IT roles. In some specialties, the disparity is even larger, with a nine-to-one ratio of men to women.
It’s true that efforts to staff more women in the field have been successful; tech career site Dice reports that in the past 10 years, the number of women finding jobs in tech fields has more than doubled. Even so, in 2012, women landed some 35 percent of all jobs in IT.
Sarah Allen, CEO of software development firm Blazing Cloud says the answer to building a more diverse tech workforce is in more aggressive recruiting, specifically to seek out and attract more female applicants. In 2011, Etsy took an innovative approach to attack the gender gap, putting in place a three-month-long Hacker School to train up junior coders. As a result, Etsy was able to hire 500 percent more women than in previous years.
The road to staffing equity in IT is likely to be long and winding and require more finesse than the average placement. Consider these resources to amp up your search:
- The Society of Women Engineers
- Black Girls Code
- Rails Girls
- Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
- GirlGeeks
- Webgrrls International
Read more here.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
