Women in Tech: Breaking Through the Gender Equity Divide

The gender equity gap continues to be a serious issue in corporate America and around the world. Despite years of battling for an equal seat at the table, women are underrepresented in the workplace and are still paid less than their male counterparts.

In 2019, men outnumbered women by more than 7:1 in the highest ranks of corporate America, with male CEOs outnumbering female CEOs nearly 17:1. Can you believe Amazon (as of 2020) did not have a single female named executive officer (NEO)? To add insult to injury, the highest paid senior executive women earned 84.6 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts in 2019.

Unfortunately, the inequality isn’t confined to matters of compensation or to the C-suite. Gender inequity permeates all facets of the tech sector—both at technology companies and within tech roles at organizations across all industries—with women underrepresented and often discriminated against in the workplace.

Employment & Education Gap

Research from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) found that women held only 25% of computing roles, despite comprising 47% of all employed adults in the U.S. in 2015. More recent NCWIT data highlighted the lack of women in engineering roles, with women representing 23% of computer hardware engineers and 19% of computer software engineers in the workforce in 2019. Tech jobs are the fastest-growing sector of the global economy but, of the 16 million people who hold jobs in tech worldwide, only 4 million are women!

If you look at the limited number of women earning post-secondary degrees in tech-related fields, the low tech employment figures aren’t surprising—and the trend is continuing to move in the wrong direction. While it’s true that more women than ever are earning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degrees, data from the National Science Foundation found that women earning computer science degrees at the bachelor level dropped from 27% in 1997 to only 19% in 2016. These depressed rates are a fraction of the level they need to be to close the gender gap.

The Pandemic Effect

Before the COVID-19 pandemic turned the workplace upside down in 2020, the McKinsey Women in the Workplace report that looked beyond just the tech industry into a view of women in the US across all industries, found that representation of women in corporate America was slowly starting to move in a positive direction, most notably in senior management. Between 2015 and 2020, the share of women in SVP roles grew from 23% to 28% and from 17% to 21% percent in the C-suite. But then COVID-19 hit and the situation took a grim turn.

The pandemic disrupted the workplace in ways we’ve never seen before. The McKinsey report noted that women, in particular, have been negatively impacted. Women—especially women of color—are more likely to have been laid off or furloughed during the Covid-19 crisis, stalling their careers and jeopardizing their financial security. And with one in four women contemplating downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce entirely, gender equity in the workplace is slipping further out of reach.
In fact, between August and September 2020, 865,000 women left the workforce. That’s four times more than the 216,000 men who also left the workforce, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis. This is the first indication that women are leaving the workforce at higher rates than men; in the previous five years of the McKinsey study, women and men left their companies at similar rates.

This workplace exiting trend, alongside the overall accelerated adoption of technology across all companies, has the potential to exacerbate the gender gap in technology and extend the impact to all industries. According to the recent World Economic Forum, at the current dropout rate for women, it will take another 135 years to reach gender equity!

Why Diversity Matters

In addition to the ethical and social justice arguments, gender diversity is a smart business decision. Firms with more women in senior positions are more profitable, more socially responsible, and provide safer, higher-quality customer experiences.

From the bottom-line perspective, companies with more women executives outperform those organizations that don’t prioritize gender diversity. Indeed, a 2020 McKinsey report found that a substantial differential likelihood of outperformance (48%!) separates the most from the least gender-diverse companies. Similarly, a 2018 study by Boston Consulting Group found that increasing the diversity of leadership teams leads to more and better innovation and improved financial performance.

Gavriella Schuster, the former Corporate Vice President of One Commercial Partner at Microsoft and a leading voice in the drive for gender equity in the tech industry, notes:

“As women entrepreneurs and leaders, we can use our courageous voices to step into powerful leadership roles, inspiring others to become agents of change. Through connection, outreach, mentorship and empowerment, we build healthier workplace cultures, attract new employees, customers and investors, increase opportunities for all women and meet the needs of the next generation of leaders to stimulate a new economic revolution.”

Agents of Change

In order to turn the tide, we need to work together to disrupt the status quo. We sat down with Gavriella to discuss why it’s so important to increase the number of women in senior tech roles and how we can use her BeCOME framework (Connect, Outreach, Mentorship, Empowerment) to become agents of change and help narrow the gender equity gap.

Why do we need more women in tech, especially at the senior and C-suite level?

When I started in the industry in 1991, 36% of the computing workforce was women; in 2019, that number had fallen to 27%. This downward trajectory is accelerated further by the digital transformation that is impacting businesses across all sectors. Seventy percent of all public organizations are going through digital transformation, bringing technology into every industry and disproportionately displacing jobs of women and people of color. Adding fuel to the fire, the global pandemic has forced women to drop out of the workforce at alarming rates.

When you look at the statistics on gender diversity in tech, it’s a pretty dire picture. Did you know that less than 5% of women hold leadership positions in tech? Or that only 1% of female tech entrepreneurs are awarded corporate contracts and less than 2% of VC investments are made in woman-owned businesses? How about the fact that white women in tech earn 70 cents on the dollar compared to men, black women earn 60 cents on the dollar, and Hispanic women earn 50 cents on the dollar?

We need to take intentional steps toward closing the gender gap. I believe that when you have diverse representation, you create a more inclusive environment and enable more people to bring their authentic selves into the workplace. And when people are bringing their best, they perform better and so the whole organization performs better.

On a strategic level, when women join the C-suite, through the lens of their experiences and the diverse point of view, they shift how the top management team think. Firms become more open to change and more willing to examine their options and possibilities. Indeed, women tend to raise the collective intelligence of a group that’s trying to solve a problem because they are bringing in a different perspective. They tend to be more collaborative and empathetic in their decision making and tend to review all options before pursuing a path, instead of narrowing down to a single approach.

When you have women on the leadership team, they provide a different perspective and bring more balance to a dialogue. And they’re more willing to be vulnerable and admit making mistakes which leads to greater innovation—a driving force for success in the tech and start-up environment. In addition, having a diverse leadership team positively impacts the customer experience because women have more empathy, are more willing to listen to other points of view, and are skilled at building collaborative environments.

Tell us about the BeCOME framework.

I am encouraging everyone to be an ally, a leader, an agent of change. We need to scale. We need force multipliers. We need more men and women to become agents of change. That’s why I developed the BeCOME framework, which is comprised of four actions every one of us can do to be an active ally and help move the needle: Connect, Outreach, Mentor, and Empower.

Through the BeCOME framework, we can build healthier workplace cultures. We can attract new employees, customers, and investors. We can increase opportunities for all women and build a new generation of leaders that understand the value of equity.

Connect

Reach out and give women access to yourself and to everyone in your professional network. By making intentional connections with women in your network, you can become a force multiplier to turn 20,000 women in technology roles to the 8 million needed to reach gender equity. This purposeful action can make all the difference in the world.

Join an organization dedicated to connecting women in the technology field and creating access to opportunities. Here are a few options:

• Women in Cloud
• The WIT Network
• Women in Tech
• Women Who Code
• Girls Who Code
• She Runs It
• The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT)

Outreach

Outreach is about examining your recruiting and hiring practices. When you post a job, do you screen out candidates, or do you screen in for diversity? Stop hiring for expediency and intentionally go outside the company and generate truly diverse candidate pools—and then ensure a diverse panel conducts the interviews. You’ll generate a high quality of diverse candidates that can change the culture of your organization for the better.

Supplier selection is also an important element of the Outreach step. Examine the suppliers you work with or the vendors you hire. Do they have diverse representation? Can they do more to create access for women?

Mentor

Mentoring—and being mentored—is a beautiful and fulfilling endeavor. It is a simple action you can take to bring light, energy, and focus to someone’s life. I know first-hand, it’s a key component to bring in and retain more women in the technology industry.

Studies show that good mentoring leads to greater career success for the person getting the advice, while the person giving the advice broadens their network and can strengthen their position as a leader. And mentorship benefits organizations by developing a culture of learning and growth, which increases employee engagement and attracts high-quality talent.

Empower

Giving someone the ability and the confidence to learn, grow, and do something for themselves is a powerful gift. The most impactful thing you can do for another human being is to empower them and help create an inclusive environment where people can be seen and heard for who they are as individuals. 

Women barely represent a quarter of the tech workforce. What actions can men take to help move the needle?

Men need to be allies to women. They need to take intentional action to disrupt the status quo and, through every action, think about bringing more women into their organizations, into their leadership teams, into their BOD, and into their supply chain. How? By embracing the four steps of the BeCOME framework:

Connect – Make intentional connection to women through the way they network. Intentionally expand their networks to include more women.

Outreach – Set governance and process to include more women in every candidate pool, for every role, at every level of the organization. Think top down instead of bottom up; by setting a tone from the top that diverse hiring is important, future candidates can see that there are people who look like them at the top of the organization and be assured that this is an organization where women can be successful.

Mentorship – Ask every member of the organization to mentor women.

Empowerment – Build an inclusive environment by empowering everyone. Include women in the discussions and decisions, value their input, and encourage them to bring their authentic voice.

The goal is to work with intentionality: set up systems, processes, and measures to work with intention and measure outcomes.

What are some key steps that would make a difference in the pursuit of gender equity in the workforce?

1. If every man in high tech took intentional action to mentor and sponsor at least one woman into high tech (and was successful), we would achieve gender equity.
   
   
2. Require diverse representation of suppliers in our network and require that they report on their diversity before we do business with them. 
   
   
3. Require that every public organization be transparent and report their gender diversity numbers and pay equity numbers annually.
   
   
4. Accelerate the adoption of laws, like the ones adopted in California, Germany, France, and Norway, that require female representation on the BOD of every public company, coupled with laws that make it illegal to ask someone what they were paid in their last position. 

Today, through technology democratization, purpose-driven leadership, and male allyship, we can close the gap of inequity and create a new narrative. As women entrepreneurs and leaders, we can use our courageous voices to step into powerful leadership roles, inspiring others to become agents of change. Together, we no longer remain invisible.

QorusDocs Stepping Up

At QorusDocs, we’re working hard to create the new inclusive narrative that Gavriella discusses, with diversity and inclusion anchoring our journey. We recognize that diversity is not just a metric to be strived for; it is an integral part of a successful revenue-generating business—and it’s not just lip service for us.

Women make up more than 70% of the QorusDocs U.S. leadership team and 60% of our global executive team, including a female CTO—an impressive accomplishment in the tech industry. We’re sponsors of Women in Technology (WIT) and Jennifer Tomlinson, our EVP of Marketing, is on the board at WECAN (Women Executives Channel Advisory Board). WECAB is group of senior leaders in influential technology companies, with a common passion for lifting up and normalizing women in leadership roles in technology companies. The organization offers advisory, mentorship, and educational programs intended to elevate more women into technology leadership roles.

While we’re always striving to improve diversity in our workplace, we’re proud of our commitment to and our success in building a culture of inclusivity. We will continue to work towards bridging the gender equity gap to create a more diverse tech industry that economically empowers women, levels the playing field, and future-proofs the technology ecosystem.