This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Technology companies need more women, and they're on an early recruitment drive. A few months ago I saw a US Super Bowl commercial for GoldieBlox, a startup that makes engineering toys for girls and whose mission is to attract them to pursue careers in tech.
But getting women to stay in technology is the real challenge.
According to a February study from New York's Center for Talent Innovation, women in science, engineering and technology (SET) companies in the US were 45 per cent more likely than men to leave the industry within a year, and nearly a third of men and women in the US at SET companies felt that a woman would never reach a top post in their company.
The study also looked at women at SET companies in China, India and Brazil, and the results were equally disappointing. While more than 25 per cent of US women feel they have stalled in their careers, in India the number is 45 per cent.
Women across all geographies in the study felt there was bias in training and performance evaluations: 72 per cent in the US; 78 per cent in Brazil; 68 per cent in China; and 81 per cent in India.
Other problems included feeling isolated or marginalised by "lab-coat, hard-hat and geek workplace cultures" and difficulty with executive presence and projecting leadership attributes.
The UK has a massive gender gap in the sciences too. In its 2012 report, "Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics:
From Classroom to Boardroom", WISE reported that just 13 per cent of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) jobs are held by women in the UK, and fewer than one in ten managers in STEM companies are women. And it gets worse: just 5.5 per cent of UK engineering professionals are women and nearly one in five STEM companies in the FTSE 100 have no women on their board of directors.
So what's to be done? I hear people articulating their worries in the personal-branding talks and workshops I host with women's groups across the US, Europe and Asia. Many progressive companies want to change their cultures with women's initiatives and sponsorship programmes. Case in point: for years women arrived at Harvard Business School with test scores just as high as the male first-year students, but almost immediately their grades began to fall behind. Turns out, the women did well on tests but lagged in class participation, which contributes up to 50 per cent of the final grade. As one female Harvard Business School professor said, the lagging performance of its women was a "dirty little secret that wasn't discussed". In most universities, it's the girls who are eager to participate and outperform the boys. But not at Harvard, where alpha males band together and dominate class discussions and the women tended to recoil. It is a corporate environment not dissimilar from the culture at many technology companies.
In 2010, Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's first female president, started a programme to try to address the gender performance gap.
The school put monitors in the classrooms to ensure accurate record keeping of class participation. It provided private coaching for the women -- including group classes on topics as mundane as hand-raising. The experiment made a difference: the female grade gap fell substantially.
Will the Harvard experiment be the template for keeping women interested in staying with technology careers? Or will it be necessary to pass laws mandating the percentage of women on corporate boards -- as countries such as Finland and France have done -- to ensure that women succeed at technology and other companies? Women need to participate in technology for its continued success. How it will be accomplished remains to be seen.
Catherine Kaputa is president of SelfBrand. She is the author of You Are a Brand! (Nicholas Brealey Publishing)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
