Gender Diversity in Technology Roles: What Women Want?

The world is progressing towards an innovative future with a creative workforce and advanced technologies. For any business's success, besides evolution, its workforce plays a crucial role. The human brains behind artificial brains are the ones driving the world of advancement and innovation. However, when I say the workforce, it means both females and males. Today women in technology are the ones accelerating the bars of ultimate success beyond all odds. Odds that restrict them to come forward, odds that make them stay weak despite having a great brain, odds that demands them to drop careers for family.

Almost all nations are chasing the cause of women's empowerment, at least in theory. But when it comes to women in technology, are they on the right track in practical? Probably not! This is what the status of females who are tech-enthusiasts tells us.

We need to understand that the premise of technology like cloud computing, data analytics or artificial intelligence (AI), has nothing inherently masculine about it. The tech sector, even in the 21st century, is dominated by men.

Neglecting their potential, across a number of sectors that deal with technology, females remain underrepresented. They are obviously not the first choice for most top management roles even if they possess equal or above standards than their male counterparts. And as we enter into a new decade, this the high time that we should move from gender discrimination to gender diversity in technology.

According to McKinsey, in the last five years, we've seen more women rise to the top levels of companies. Yet women continue to be underrepresented at every level. To change the numbers, companies need to focus on where the real problem is. We often talk about the "glass ceiling" that prevents females from reaching senior leadership positions. In reality, the biggest obstacle that women face is much earlier in the pipeline, at the first step up to the manager. Fixing this "broken rung" is key to achieving parity.

Let's hear from women directly what they want.

More so, early education is also a place where they go through several stereotypes that obstructs them to even get into the race where they can get the opportunity to prove and achieve their talent. Mostly, girls are deprived of STEM education in their formative years due to the misconceptions that they don't have a very technical mind and they would not like to go for something very complicated and logical. Based on the same reasons they are not encouraged for technical careers.

Kelly Hopping, chief marketing officer of Capterra, said that many people still think females don't really understand or care about technology. "Many of my female peers are more geeked out on technology than their male counterparts, but the assumption is that women want to be in less technical roles, like HR or customer service," she said.

Moreover, it is considered that work-life balance is not a women's cup of tea. In case of any family emergency or sickness, women are considered as the primary caretaker of the family, which urges them to devote most of the time for such situations. Once again due to the pay-discrimination, they are asked to sacrifice their career if necessary because they don't earn well, therefore it is easy for them to leave their jobs.

"To encourage more women to pursue careers in technology, we have to start by emphasizing a STEM curriculum for girls early on. Females also face professional hurdles during the transition from managing to leading, typically during the promotion to director-level positions. At this stage, the potential for conscious and unconscious bias is high, as the people in decision making roles for leadership promotions tend to be men. Companies can address this by ensuring that interview panels and promotion decision-makers include both men and women and that there is a diverse group of candidates being evaluated for each position," says Leila Pourhashemi, VP – Technology Business Operations, Blackhawk Network.

Empowering women through programs, training sessions and workshops are ideal ways to encourage their participation and give them a platform to express themselves, says Sashikala Viswanathan, Director – Corporate Quality at CSS Corp. "We believe that giving women the freedom and space to forge and foster deep interpersonal connections help in developing relationships beyond the workspace. Not only does that create a premise for collaboration, but it also creates an environment of support for women at large," she says.

Lakshmi Mittra, VP – Center of Excellence (CoE) and Clover Academy, Clover Infotech believes that alongside technical skills it is essential to facilitate soft-skills training, team-building workshops, and leadership and mentoring sessions to enable women to take on leadership roles in the near future. "It is important for the IT industry to create more opportunities for women to not only enter the workforce but also lead it. More initiatives and forward-thinking policies need to be introduced for the upskilling and leadership training of women at all levels," she says.