Why are there so few women in tech?

This is a much discussed topic at the moment and I’m not surprised, especially when you see the figures. According to Tech Nation only 19% of the work force are women, 22% of tech directors are women and with the ‘computer gaming’ sub sector only 13% of the directors are women.

Combined with these shockingly low figures what makes it worse is the fact they haven’t changed much in the last 20 years – yes that’s right, 20 whole years without hardly any change or improvement!

So it’s not really a surprise that we are talking about women in tech so much right?

Having worked in recruitment for a number of years now, I know what it’s like to be a woman working in a male dominant industry (although luckily I don’t think the stats for recruitment are quite as bad!)

But why are there so few women in tech? I think there are a few reasons for this and I’m going to delve in to reason 1 today.

We are conditioned from an early age

We dress girls in pink and boys in blue.  Girls play with dolls and boys play with cars. Girls go to ballet and boys go to football.

From a young age this gender bias surrounds us.

How you are encouraged at home also plays a big part in it, if you are encouraged to choose any hobby you want, choose any subject you like at school, and choose any career path you want, usually you will go for it.

At school we are taught that men and women traditionally follow specific career paths. Hairdressers and cleaners are thought to be women’s jobs and fire fighters and mechanics are thought to be men’s jobs. Unfortunately a lot of these roles are still considered gender-specific and even then, a “stay at home mum” still isn’t considered a proper job to many, when it’s probably one of the hardest jobs you will ever take on.

This therefore influences the subjects we choose at school, college and university. For example, Computer Science, Maths and Chemical Engineering are almost always considered “male subjects”.

Tech isn’t the only sector that there is an issue with gender representation and we need to get out of this mind-set. Our gender doesn’t determine our ability to succeed.

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