The world has experienced three industrial revolutions; steam power (1784), electricity (1870) and electronics (1969); each of these revolutions has brought such unique changes that it has changed the basic ways of living life, they have made lives easier, simpler and faster. And women have always played a huge role in each of these revolutions, right from the very first one in 1784, extensive research in each of these revolutions have shown women’s involvement as textile workers, miners and seamstresses, in a way the women pushed the wheels of the revolution forward in every way as heavily as the men did. However their contribution has been heavily undermined or absent in most sources of history that do talk about the industrial revolutions, history has always been a man’s world.
We right now in the 21st century, are currently undergoing our fourth industrial revolution, this time it is digital technology which is taking over the world, it is the umbrella that shelters every industry that exist in the books and also the walker that supports it forward. Digital technology is revolutionizing our world at an unimaginable and unprecedented pace which we have never experienced and it’s only getting faster by the minute.
Tesla’s self-driven car and the drones that hover over our heads today have managed to put us in an era which only existed in science fiction up until a few decades ago. And while that is a truth which is to be cherished, another truth is that once again, women will be left out of this. This time not because their presence wasn’t acknowledged, but because there wasn’t enough of a presence to talk about in the first place. People want to either ignore the elephant in the room or argue that it doesn’t exist, but let’s talk about the glass ceiling in the tech industry.
- While women make up 59% of the total workforce, they are averaging only 30% of the workforce across major tech companies. That 30% includes both tech and non-tech jobs, like marketing and HR. When it comes to representation of women in tech jobs at tech companies, they can’t seem to break even 20 percent: women hold only 17 percent of the tech jobs at Google, 15 percent at Facebook, and 10 percent at Twitter.
- Women-owned companies in New York City today get just 17 percent of venture funding.
- Of the 41 Fortune 500 companies in the technology sector, only five have a female CEO.
- Only 14.3 percent of board seats of the top 100 tech companies are held by women.
- A 2013 study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that men are two times as likely to be hired for a job in mathematics when the only difference between candidate profiles is gender.
- Nearly 40 percent of women with engineering degrees either don’t enter the field at all or quit soon after. Women in tech with business degrees also tend to leave the industry before rising in rank.
One of the biggest implications, outlined in The Industry Gender Gap report, is just how harmful this revolution may be to the progress of women because they are underrepresented in tech. As market forces transform industries to favor technological skills, women only hold 26 percent of all tech jobs. Worse yet, they only stand to gain one new STEM job for every 20 that are lost in other disrupted industries. For men, that ratio is a much more favorable one to four.
Microsoft reported that women comprise 29.1 percent of its workforce, but only 16.6 percent work in technical positions and just 23 percent hold leadership roles. Twitter said women fill 10 percent of its technical jobs with 21 percent in leadership. And women Googlers account for 17 percent of the search giant’s tech jobs, while 21 percent manage others. Statistics and figures are always boring, but in this case they matter because they show us how few women are influencing product development and business strategies- the top two rungs at the top of the industry’s corporate ladder. Not only is that bad for women, but also it’s extremely harmful for business; studies show that companies with different points of view, market insights and approaches to problem solving have higher sales, more customers and larger market share than their less-diverse rivals.
As tech remakes the world, women will miss the chance to affect the massive economic and social changes this fourth industrial revolution will bring. If women don’t participate in tech, they are losing the chance to influence the largest economic and social change of this century. It’s a downward spiral the whole way, female representation in tech actually used to be higher in the mid-‘80s that it is now and this decline is unique to the field of computer science since women participation has increased in every other field.
What women have been experiencing in the tech industry isn’t any form of discrimination or sexism, instead they are faced with an air of condescension which just leads to isolation and discouragement. It’s time that companies admit that there is a problem. This situation doesn’t only require creating policies that create cultures that are open to women and support their career advancement, it requires changing an entire mindset. We just have to wipe out the stereotypes of the last 200 years or so, one thought at a time.
