We are in a make-or-break moment for women in tech, and the choices that leaders in our industry make this year will have profound consequences for women, families, our economy, and the future of technology itself.
You’ve surely read about the so-called “she-cession.” We know that women have disproportionately borne the economic effects of the pandemic, and the tech industry is no exception. While the tech sector writ large has thrived in the shift to remote work, women have not always enjoyed the fruits of that success. For starters, women have taken on the majority of household and childcare duties during the pandemic; unsurprisingly, 47 percent of the women in tech surveyed believe that the effects of COVID-19 have delayed their career progression due to family or home pressures. Women in tech are also nearly twice as likely as men to have lost their jobs or been furloughed due to the pandemic, and men are three times more likely to have received promotions. Of the women who are still working in tech, 57 percent feel burned out, compared to only 36 percent of men. And 75 percent of women working in tech companies report that they do not have the bandwidth to consider pursuing a new job at a new company.
What makes these setbacks for women in our industry especially concerning is that the social and economic impacts of gender inequality in tech are so far-reaching, with ripple effects throughout so many areas of our lives. Fewer women working in tech means fewer women with access to some of the most lucrative career paths. In addition, the implicit biases of the people who make our technology impact the shape that technology takes; historically, the lack of women and people of color in tech has resulted in technology that works primarily for white men, and gender-based, racially-based and socioeconomically-based algorithmic bias have repeatedly led to profoundly dangerous outcomes.
With stakes this high, inaction is not an option. While there are certainly large, multi-year programs and investments that can and should be made to promote gender diversity in your tech organizations, immediate action is also possible — and necessary. Here are five reasonably lightweight actions you can take this year to benefit women from the earliest stages of their tech career journeys to their progression into your leadership team.
1. Grow the pipeline: Partner with local or national organizations that specialize in working with companies like yours to give undergraduate women who are computer science majors the chance to add real-world tech projects to their portfolios. Perhaps this takes the shape of sponsoring a traditional capstone project, over-indexing on women in your summer internship program, or participating in an innovative microinternship program. Research shows that job applicants with such real-world experience have a strong competitive advantage. Working with your company could launch a young woman’s tech career — perhaps even into your own organization.
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By2. Avoid the “woman-as-default-project-manager” trap: Over the course of my more than 30 years in tech, including as a CIO at Verizon, I have seen time and again that early-career women in tech are more likely than men to raise their hands to take on project management responsibilities as a way of showing their management skills, their commitment, and their ambition. Unless they are also given management responsibility for the technical folks on the team, more often than not, these women get pegged as project managers and lose out on more senior tech roles. Be mindful of this pattern and avoid repeating it. The short-term loss of a great project manager will pay off as a long-term gain in female senior leaders on your team.
3. Schedule conversations with up-and-coming women: As remote or hybrid work environments become more and more common, impromptu, hallway opportunities to offer up-and-coming women a pat on the back or inspirational feedback are increasingly unlikely. As a leader committed to lifting up the women in your tech groups, you have to intentionally plan for these kinds of critical conversations. Schedule skip-level calls where you can tell the women in your organization who show leadership potential how you see them as future leaders. More often than you might think, it’s conversations like these that help traditionally marginalized employees find the confidence to imagine just how far they might soar.
4. Increase the visibility of mid-career women within your organization: Go out of your way to make sure that the up-and-coming women in your tech organization are visible throughout your company and give them assignments that put them in the public spotlight. The more senior leaders in your company that know these amazing women, the more likely they will be approved for a promotion when the time comes.
5. Pay extra attention to the diversity on your advanced technology/exploratory projects: Make sure that the women in your organization learn about where technology is going — not just where it is today — so that they can be primed to be leaders in emerging areas of the industry, which are often the most lucrative. In particular, ensure that you put women on your AI project teams.As I have written before, gender diversity is our first line of defense against algorithmic bias. But beyond this, being intentional about giving these “future-focused” opportunities to the women in your organization will allow you to build diversity into the DNA of your future, rather than trying to ‘“engineer it in” after the fact.
Your leadership is needed to make sure that women in tech don’t take a step backwards as a result of the pandemic, to make sure that more women are accessing the wealth the tech sector has to offer, and that they are in the room where decisions are being made — and where our future is being designed.
