Gender balance in tech jobs. Two strategies
Diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones. Gender diversity in particular has positive effects on radical innovation, a criterion that is crucial for tech companies. The best teams are made up of diverse talents, Deena Gergis, Lead Data Scientist and Mikhail Kachala, Global Head of Data Science, both at Bayer, write in Harvard Business Review.
The create more balanced teams with more women, they recommend two concrete tactics: 1) create new jobs with interdisciplinary nature to attract more women into the field and 2) offer development paths for women with interdisciplinary roles to develop to the dry-coding jobs.
“Closing the gender gap within your IT organization won’t be easy, but it’s an important task that will improve your team’s overall performance. To attract more women to IT roles at your company, identify which roles lack female representation, then create roles that combine technical skills with interdisciplinary skills.”
“Once you’ve successfully diversified your team, find ways to develop your new female employees’ skillsets so that they’re ready to take on roles that focus solely on technical expertise (should eventually want to move into these roles).”
The authors anlyzed a 2020 developer survey and the gender-gap within each of 23 roles in the survey. Male respondents accounted for the vast majority (71.4%) of respondents. More than a fifth (21.6%) of the respondents did not specify their gender. Women accounted only for 5.96% of the respondents. And just 1.1% of respondents identified as non-binary.
All 23 roles were dominated by men, but Marketing and Sales had the smallest gender gap, with 9.97% of the respondents identifying as women. This was followed by the Data Scientist role, of which only 7.67% of the respondents identified as women.
The largest gender gap existed in DevOps, for which only 2.58% of the respondents identified as women, followed by System Administration, for which 2.61% of the respondents identified as women.
Front-End Development ranked as the fourth most popular job for women, but it ranked 15th for men. Desktop development ranked as the 17th most popular job for women, while it ranked fourth for men.
After calculating the differences for all the roles, the authors categorized the roles according to female respondent popularity:
- High: Marketing and Sales, Data Scientist, Analyst, Designer, Researcher, Front-End Developer, Quality Assurance, Scientist, Educator
- Border-line roles: Data Engineer, Full-Stack Developer, Mobile Developer, Senior Executive
- Low: Backend Developer, Game Developer, Product Manager, Embedded Systems Developer, Database Administrator, Engineering Manager, Desktop Developer, Site Engineer, System Administrator, DevOps
“The data revealed that the roles most likely to attract women had interdisciplinary characteristics. They combined other domains with programming. Meanwhile, the least popular roles tended to have a stronger “dry-coding” nature.”
“To bridge the gender gap in your IT organization, create more jobs that combine programming skills with skills from other business domains. We recommend that you analyze the following two points to decide which new interdisciplinary jobs will best fit your organization:”
Analyze stakeholder expertise: If your IT team is working with business units to develop domain-specific solutions, create vacancies that combine the domain and IT role. For example: an HR product manager will both require a prior expertise and background in the HR domain and the technical expertise required for IT product management. In addition to the benefits of gender diversity, such jobs will also bridge the communication and expertise gaps between the teams, leading to better final business results.
Analyze tasks and responsibilities: Acquire deeper understanding of the daily tasks and responsibilities that your current team has. Find commonalities in those tasks that correspond to the roles with more appeal to female candidates. Create a new vacancy for those tasks. For example, you might find out that your Embedded Developers are spending a significant portion of their time on Analysis. Open a new analyst vacancy and target women. If the position doesn’t require a full-time employee, create this vacancy as a part-time role, which will encourage even more women to apply.
“Once you have attracted more women to your organization with interdisciplinary roles, offer them development opportunities to move to roles that have a stronger “dry-coding” nature. Follow these three steps to decide on the development programs that best fit your organization:”
Analyze: Start with analyzing the gender ratios for each role in your organization. Those gender ratios will be unique, depending on the nature and the geographical location of your organization. Mark the jobs with the best and worst gaps and compare your internal results to the previous results. Afterwards, prioritize the roles that need urgent diversity improvements.
Match: For each of the roles that you have prioritized, find another role that is technically similar and has a better gender balance. Consult your technical experts to guide you through the similarity of the different jobs to one another. For example, if your organization needs to improve the diversity of your full-stack developers, a viable match could be the front-end developers where the gender balance is better.
Develop: Ask your HR and technical experts to develop a technical development program to train female talent on the new technical skills required for their new role. Incentivize such programs if necessary. Ensure that there is positive mentorship available for the candidates.
Moonshot News is an independent European news website for all IT, Media and Advertising professionals, powered by women and with a focus on driving the narrative for diversity, inclusion and gender equality in the industry.
Our mission is to provide top and unbiased information for all professionals and to make sure that women get their fair share of voice in the news and in the spotlight!
We produce original content, news articles, a curated calendar of industry events and a database of women IT, Media and Advertising associations.