Mind the Gap

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Mind the Gap!

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Ideas, innovations & a progressing world – all sounds great! The technology sector is seeing a boom, attracting new

businesses and giving life to innovation every day. But there still exists a huge issue of gender gap in parallel to

progress. Despite all the attention being paid to diversity in technology, gender outcomes across the companies are not
showing a transition. Women are still an apparent minority in the technology workforce – and an even smaller

proportion of corporate leadership

Traditionally, engineering roles have been dominated by men and this has been “Acknowledging this gap is
carried on through the new tech sector, with women in a minority. And so there only the first step.”
remains a distressing absence of women in technology-related fields.
That gender gap not only impacts women’s career prospects and financial lives,

but the world economy as a whole. Though most of the companies, including
the IT giants, have all-time high commitment to gender diversity, they are
struggling to put their commitment into practice.

More than 75% of CEOs include gender equality in their top ten business priorities, but the gender gap is getting worse.

How big is the gap?

The gap is huge – so big that we don’t anticipate to close it in this century!

It starts right at the age of playing with technology (read, most of the games have guns not dolls!) and then goes on

widening with lack of interest, lack of awareness, lack of encouragement, lack of women friendly work environment
– still if a woman survives through these deficiencies, she lands in a gap of being paid less – that’s what all research

in this area points to.

A report from Accenture and Girls Who Code concludes that without a broad- “Women accounted for less
based strategy that sparks and sustains girls’ interest in computing from middle
than a third (28.4%) of those
school through college, the percentage of women in computing will fall from
24% to 22% in 2025. That’s already a big drop from 37% in 1995. employed in scientific

research and development
(R&D) across the world”

“5% of leadership Advancing further in career, women are less likely to receive the first critical promotion to
manager—so very few end up on the path to leadership. Also, they are less likely to be hired into
positions in
more senior positions. As a result, the higher you look in companies, the number of women
technology sector are
held by women” becomes minuscule. 27% women say they often or always experience gender bias.
And the working mothers! (Read, only women can be mothers. It’s nature!) - Studies
show that 1 in 2 mothers reported experiencing workplace discrimination, let’s not go to
the opportunities they don’t get there.

Ironically, until recently, only male dummies were used during testing aimed at helping car buyers choose between

vehicles. Also, early voice recognition software didn't always recognise female voices, because none of the developers

had been female and no-one even thought to test out the technology on women. The other side of the coin, a very
familiar scenario – just look around you for cell phones or laptop or a desktop. The AI personas — Siri or
Window’s Cortana or Amazon’s Alexa — have default-set women’s voices and not to miss, feminine names.

While gender-switch options exist but it points out that how obvious it was to choose a female representation while
creating a virtual assistant to serve the commands.

Results from annual global gender gap report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) for 2016 are not daunting - The
annual report looks at progress towards equality between men and women in four key areas: educational attainment,
health and survival, economic opportunity, and political empowerment.

Progress towards economic equality in 2016 has slowed globally, with the economic participation and opportunity
sub-index dipping to 59% — worse than any point since 2008. The report shows a drop in women's labor force

participation, with the global average for women standing at 54% compared to 81% for men.

According to the Gender Gap Index (GGI) data in the report, the world “Globally women receive 10% to 30%
would need approximately 83 years to reach gender parity given the current
situation and current trends. Reflecting the current state of progress, some less pay than men for work of equal
regions should expect to see their gender gaps narrow faster than the global value.”
rate of change. Among these are South Asia, with a projected closing of the
gender gap in 46 years, Western Europe in 61 years, Latin America in 72
years and Sub-Saharan Africa, due to achieve parity in 79 years.

“The world would need Projections for other world regions suggest closing their gaps will take longer
than 100 years, namely 129 years in the Middle East and North Africa, 146 years
approximately 83 years to reach in East Asia and the Pacific, and 149 years in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
gender parity.” Given the slow progress over the last decade, the gender gap in North America is
expected to close in 158 years.

WEF report for 2016 included 144 countries - The following table shows the regions ranked based on the gender gap.
Iceland tops with minimum gender gap, followed by Finland, Norway, Sweden and Rwanda for top 5 places.

Source: WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2016

Why Diversity Matters

The gender gap not only impacts women’s career prospects and financial lives, but economy as a whole. Enabling
diversity is not only a social imperative, but also a competitive advantage for companies and institutions resulting in
demonstratively greater returns.

Comprehensive studies have shown that the presence of diversity “76% - Percentage by which women could
results in superior performance. Diverse companies have greater
collective intelligence and a greater range of ideas as well as increase income globally if the employment
perspectives.
participation gap and the wage gap
between women and men were closed.”

According to McKinsey, global GDP could increase by $12 trillion by 2025 simply by advancing women’s equality.

“If algorithms learn from users and the users There is real risk, technically, is that such gender imbalance is invisibly
shaping machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence
are mostly men, are we good with that biased applications. If programs are coded by men, inevitably with themselves
machines learning?” in mind as the end user, will that exacerbate gender inequity?

For Decades, crash tests only used male dummies: The Result? Women were injured and killed more in car accidents. If a
woman had been in a key position in any of these car manufacturers over the past 30 years, she might have wondered
“why aren’t we testing for women?”

There are social and moral constraints too - The very intent of democracy and equitable human society is disturbed if one
part of the population is made to feel inferior. How the world can progress if a populace is left behind? Does the “world”
means “men-only”?

For a balance & composure, it is critical that women must have the same opportunities and representation as men.

Barriers to Success

There are a number of factors that have been leading the situation so far including but not limited to - lack of access,
nature of computer games, lack of career guidance, perception of competitive environment and/or solitary occupation
and gender differences in socialization.

I believe discrimination had the largest impact of
all factors. We tend to label the jobs as men’s job
or women’s job rather than seeing as just a job.

For example, men are believed to be more

competent than women in engineering, sports etc.

while women are advantaged in female-typed

settings like childcare, teaching, or

communication.

Sex categorization followed by gender stereotype,

somehow, governs the minds in society.

What next? They become default rules in the society and affect our behaviour and judgments - So if equally
qualified applicants apply for a computer engineer, male applicants will have an advantage relative to female
applicants. But if the applications are for a primary teacher, the woman would be more likely to receive the job
offer.

Conclusion

Mind this gap!
Although the demand for IT jobs continues to grow, the percentage of women in IT-related fields continues to
decline. Still women are better positioned than ever before to rise to leadership roles in technology - where we
need to bring the change is dropping that gender stereotype. A job should be tagged as a job not as a male-job
or female-job. Setting a goal to have x% of female employees is not a milestone – employing & then retaining
that x% will be the milestone. It needs awareness in the early education system followed by the equal
opportunities at every stage in her studies & career.

References:

https://www.accenture.com/us-en/cracking-the-gender-code
https://www.morganmckinley.com/article/global-gender-gap-women-work
http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-science-technology-engineering-and-mathematics-stem
The Future Tech Workforce: Breaking Gender Barriers, ISACA, 2017
https://womenintheworkplace.com/