A full decade has passed since Ellen Pao filed a sexual discrimination suit against her employer, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Two years later came the toxicity and misogyny of Gamergate, followed by #MeToo scandals and further revelations of powerful tech-business men behaving very badly. All catalyzed an overdue public reckoning over the industry’s endemic sexism, racism, and lack of representation at the top. And to what effect?
Many slickly designed diversity reports and ten thousand Grace Hopper coffee mugs later, the most striking change has been in the size and wealth of the technology sector itself. Even as the market overall turned bearish in 2022, the combined market capitalization of the five largest tech companies approached $8 trillion. Despite the sector’s great wealth and loudly self-proclaimed corporate commitments to the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and racial minorities, tech remains mostly a straight, white man’s world. The proportion of women in technical roles at large companies is higher than it used to be but remains a painfully low 25%. Coding schools for people of marginalized genders are expanding, and the number of female majors in some top computer science programs has increased. Yet overall, representation remains low and attrition high, especially for women of color.
Much of the burden for changing the system has been placed on women themselves: they’re exhorted to learn to code, major in STEM, and become more self-assertive. In her 2013 bestseller Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg of Meta urged women to push harder and demand more—by acting the way men did.
Self-confidence and male-style swagger have not been enough to overcome structural hurdles, especially for tech workers who are also parents. Even the mass adoption of remote work in the covid-19 era failed to make tech workplaces more hospitable. A recent survey by Deloitte found that a majority of women in the industry felt more pessimistic about their career prospects than they did before the pandemic. Nearly six in 10 expected to change jobs as a result of inadequate life-work balance. More than 20% considered leaving tech altogether.
Continue reading: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/11/1056917/tech-fix-gender-problem/
Many slickly designed diversity reports and ten thousand Grace Hopper coffee mugs later, the most striking change has been in the size and wealth of the technology sector itself. Even as the market overall turned bearish in 2022, the combined market capitalization of the five largest tech companies approached $8 trillion. Despite the sector’s great wealth and loudly self-proclaimed corporate commitments to the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and racial minorities, tech remains mostly a straight, white man’s world. The proportion of women in technical roles at large companies is higher than it used to be but remains a painfully low 25%. Coding schools for people of marginalized genders are expanding, and the number of female majors in some top computer science programs has increased. Yet overall, representation remains low and attrition high, especially for women of color.
Much of the burden for changing the system has been placed on women themselves: they’re exhorted to learn to code, major in STEM, and become more self-assertive. In her 2013 bestseller Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg of Meta urged women to push harder and demand more—by acting the way men did.
Self-confidence and male-style swagger have not been enough to overcome structural hurdles, especially for tech workers who are also parents. Even the mass adoption of remote work in the covid-19 era failed to make tech workplaces more hospitable. A recent survey by Deloitte found that a majority of women in the industry felt more pessimistic about their career prospects than they did before the pandemic. Nearly six in 10 expected to change jobs as a result of inadequate life-work balance. More than 20% considered leaving tech altogether.
Continue reading: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/11/1056917/tech-fix-gender-problem/
