Pro Colleague

Top managers of major IT companies do not hide the fact that there is a place for gender inequality in their teams. At the recent Mobile World Congress, CEOs of IT and telecom companies were asked, “On a scale of 10 (10 being excellent, 1 being very bad), how do you rate the situation with gender equality in the IT industry?” Accenture’s managing director of communications, media and technology, Harry Hefernan, gave a 4, FTI Consulting’s director of strategy Caroline Das-Monfrace gave a 3.5, and AT&T vice president Bill Hague gave a 6. In other words, the tops’ answers ranged between “very poor” and “satisfactory.”

You can’t argue with the numbers: the gender gap still exists. If you happen to be the first woman in the IT-team, be prepared for a test of professionalism. One could argue that any recruit passes such a test, regardless of gender. But, as some female programmers rightly and ironically point out: if a male developer starts out as a junior, a woman starts out as a woman. She needs to prove that she can in no way less than a man, and that she is capable of taking on a project of any complexity. And this must be stated immediately – at the interview.

In IT-team, as in any other, there are tacit attitudes: for example, that the woman can not become a top-level professionals, because she has family obligations and childcare. For this reason, employers, when selecting candidates, prefer men, even if a woman has more experience.

Meanwhile, American women, thanks to their persistence, have already won a place under the technological sun and receive one of the highest salaries in this industry. According to Forbes’ ranking, the profession of software, application and software systems developer is in seventh place among the 25 highest paying professions for women. The average weekly income for this position is $1415. Slightly less is earned by female programmers at $1,302 per week (tenth in the ranking). Women IT managers have the highest salaries in IT, earning $1563 per week (fourth place).

Pro friend

Female colleagues are thought to have a harder time finding common ground with male developers. Outside the IT sphere, there is a widespread stereotype that developers are special people so involved in their work that they live in their own world, and their character may seem bad at first glance: the constant concentration and immersion in work provoke chronic fatigue and emotional burnout syndromes. But when you begin to work with them on the same team, it becomes obvious that the image of bearded, stern guys does not correspond to reality. They are really passionate about what they do, so much so that even on vacation they are not likely to lie on the beach, but do something useful, such as learning a new programming language or reading professional literature. Finding a common language with such colleagues may not be that easy, but also not too difficult. Relationships in the IT-team are built the same way as in any other. To join a male team, it is enough to follow three unspoken rules:

• Maintain a professional level (not just for work projects). Women are becoming more and more involved in the life of IT communities. In last year’s Stackoverflow developer survey, the number of women was about 9%, but this year the number has increased, albeit slightly, to more than 11%. This means that women’s activity in professional communities will gradually melt away.
• Being part of a team: mixed teams work more efficiently – people with different perceptions are able to look at problems from different angles, generate more creative ideas, and create successful products. That’s why balancing roles on the team is important for both women and men.
• Being a trusted friend: In the field of interpersonal relationships, simple human qualities such as mutual support, trust, and, importantly, a sense of humor come to the fore. And these qualities do not depend on belonging to a particular sex and are individual in every person.

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Information technology is one of the most dynamic and promising industries, so it’s no surprise that these days it seems so attractive to anyone, regardless of their gender or age. Besides, world history knows great female programmers.

Among them is Ada Lovelace, the daughter of a poet, who was expected to love literature from childhood, but was interested in mathematics. Growing up, she wrote Bernoulli’s algorithm for calculating numbers and became the world’s first programmer. Betty Holburton worked on the electronic numerical integrator and calculator ENIAC, which became the first general-purpose digital computer. Erna Schneider Hoover gave the world a data processing system with an installed program that allowed the computer to automatically adjust the speed at which telephone calls were received.

Not to be forgotten is Karen Spark Jones, who developed search and retrieval technology that allowed users to work with computers using ordinary words instead of equations and codes. And Radia Perlman, who created the symbolic tree protocol, has been called the mother of the Internet. But all of these examples, from a historical perspective, are rather exceptions. For decades, information technology was considered to be a strictly male domain.

Why is this the case?

According to the 2016 Education at a Glance report, the gender disparity in IT is a result of the education system. The authors of the study concluded: due to social prerequisites, it is mostly boys who go into technical professions, so it turns out that there are more men in the profession. But according to Microsoft study among Russian girls aged 11-18 years old interest in the exact sciences is much higher than in Europe. We have a future profession with the exact sciences link more than 50% of girls, in European countries – only 40%. Of the 29 employees of the Department of High Performance Computing at ITMO University, nine are women, and in two key IT-related metafacultures of the university, about the same third of girls study. Thus, we have a gender gap in IT education, but it can hardly be called grandiose.

At the same time, a study of programmers platform Stack Overflow found that 92% of the developers of the world are men. The number of women in this industry has really been falling in recent years. According to Head Hunter, in Russia there are three women for every ten male IT specialists.

We can connect this fact with a more global phenomenon: in our country only 2% of fathers go on maternity leave. In the vast majority of cases women have to give up building a career and devote themselves to the family – including the fact that men on average receive a third more. A working father brings home more money than a working mother. However, experts say that the situation in our IT-sector is not so deplorable.

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I learned to program at 16, and now I’m in my 30s. I got my PhD in math from Duke University. I still remember my pride in the “horse move” algorithm I wrote in C++ in high school; the awesome puzzle interpreter interpreting itself (my first semester college course Scheme); my fascination with different types of matrix decompositions in C in grad school; and my excitement for relational databases and web scrapers at my first job.

Ten years after I learned to program, I still loved algorithms, but felt alone and overwhelmed in the IT culture. While working at a particularly ill-suited company, I was so unhappy that I hired a career counselor to discuss alternative career paths. Leaving IT would have been killer, but it wasn’t easy to stay either.

I’m not the stereotypical male programmer in my early 20s who wants to “work hard, get off hard.” I work a lot, but I’d rather get up earlier than leave later, and I was already planning ahead for how my husband and I would coordinate our schedules with daycare. Beer taps and ping-pong tables don’t appeal to me. I’m not aggressive enough to thrive in a competitive environment. And talking to other women in the industry, I realized I wasn’t alone in my frustration.

When researcher Kieran Snyder interviewed 716 women who left IT after an average of 7 years, almost all said they liked the work but were unhappy in the work environment. In a study for the National Science Foundation, Nadia Fouad interviewed 5,300 women with engineering degrees over the past 50 years, and 38% of them are no longer working as engineers. Fouad summarized her findings about why they left with the phrase, “It’s the climate, dummies!”

It’s a huge, unnecessary and expensive loss of talent in an industry supposedly understaffed. Given that IT is now one of the main drivers of the U.S. economy, it affects everyone. Any technology company that has difficulty hiring and retaining enough employees should be especially concerned about solving this problem.

Your company is NOT a meritocracy and you are NOT “gender-neutral.”

No one wants to think of themselves as sexist. However, several studies show that identical resumes are viewed differently depending on whether they are labeled male or female. When a man and a woman read the same text of a business pitch or a request for a raise, they are evaluated differently. Both men and women are prone to this kind of bias. The bias arises subconsciously without malice.

Here are just a few studies on subconscious gender bias:

• Investors prefer entrepreneurial pitches by men to identical pitches by women by a ratio of 68% to 32% in a Harvard, Wharton and MIT School of Management study. “Pitches delivered by a male voice were rated as more persuasive, logical and fact-based compared to the same pitches delivered by a female voice.”
• In a randomized, double-blind study from Yale University, science departments at 6 major institutions evaluated candidates for lab manager. Candidates with randomly assigned male names were rated as more competent and employable, and were offered a larger starting salary and career mentorship compared to identical candidates with female names.
• When men and women negotiated hires by reading the same text, the Harvard and Carnegie-Mellon study rated women who asked for a larger salary as difficult to work with and less pleasant, but men were not perceived negatively for bargaining.
• Psychology faculty were sent resumes of candidates (with randomly assigned male and female names), and men and women were significantly more likely to hire a man rather than a woman with the same track record.
• In 248 performance reviews of the best employees in IT, negative personality criticism (harshness, shrillness, irrationality) was present in 85% of women and only 2% of men in the reviews. It would be ridiculous to assume that 85% of women and only 2% of men have problems.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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IT-professions, where you need to program

• Software / QA-engineer tests and verifies the correctness of the development at all stages (sometimes these specialists are called testers). The profession requires patience and full concentration, so it is ideal for diligent, goal-oriented girls.
• The Internet of Things (IoT) is smart homes, phones, smart watches, and drones that make people’s lives easier. To create even more smart gadgets, IoT programmers work hard and get a good salary. If a girl likes generating ideas and creating unique things, she’ll love this job.
• Specialists in big data have learned to process and store trillions of gigabytes of information. This is one of the most in-demand professions nowadays, it is divided into segments: architect, analyst, engineer, researcher, and database manager. It requires patience and perseverance, so the work is suitable for women who can sit in one place for a long time and do the same kind of work.
• Since hackers do not doze off, the demand for information security specialists is growing. The main task of such a specialist is to prevent hacks and manage security systems. One of the areas of IT security is pentesting (system penetration testing). Pentesting initiates hacker attacks in order to identify weaknesses in programs and install protection. Do you want to act as an Internet beta man? Welcome to IT security!
• A DevOps engineer oversees the work of developers and technicians to ensure that they perform quality software releases. The profession is in demand and well paid, perfect for girls with a mathematical mindset.

IT professions that do not require programming

• Business Analyst – is the link between developers and the customer. This is a very in-demand profession, because as a rule technicians do not understand business processes, and customers are usually ignorant of programming. Therefore, a business analyst first of all listens to the customer’s wishes, and then sets a task for the technical specialists to solve the problem. The profession is suitable for communicative women with knowledge of IT and business.
• The modern world of information technology offers a huge amount of computer technology that only a specialist can understand. That is why even large companies ask for IT consulting. The specialist will help to make a strategy and transform business with the help of modern technologies, for example, to scale the database or to attract new clients. There is always a place in this field for women with an analytical mindset.
• A project manager is another important team member who helps set up team processes. This is the person who makes sure that all the work is done on time and that the customer gets what they want. The manager is responsible for the project plan, which specifies the amount of work, deadlines, budget, and necessary resources. To get a job as a project manager, you need to have knowledge in different fields: programming, web development, business processes, management.
• Marketer. Programmers and developers also need someone who will sell their products and services. Therefore, the IT field has a constant need for experienced marketers. Copywriters, SEO specialists, SMM specialists are needed to build the company’s sales funnel.
• Any girl can find a suitable profession for herself, and you can learn it not at university, but on courses online: it’s faster and more useful.

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Also work in IT sphere allows independent and independent planning of own life, everyday life, personal development and achieving financial and career goals. If it seems difficult to find yourself as a performer, you can try to become a creator of some product and start a technological startup.

About stereotypes

Almost every girl who wants to connect to build a career in digital faces stereotypes that poison life and kill the desire to move in their direction. Here are some of them:

1. Only people with a mathematical mindset work in IT.
   In fact, in addition to programming, there are many specializations that will suit girls: you can manage projects, test applications, engage in game design and so on.
2. There are a lot of men in IT, which creates a tense environment for the few girls in the team.
   In fact, there are men in IT who are gender neutral.
3. Studying in the IT stream at a university, a girl will not be able to achieve anything, because it is a male world.
   Yes, a girl will experience difficulties, but a proactive mindset will help her overcome the unpleasant moments.
4. Girls are inherently more likely to major in the humanities, not IT.
   This is a myth – aptitudes are not gender dependent.
5. No matter what the proportion of girls in the learning environment, it does not affect the outcome of the educational process.
   That’s not true. It very much does: girls who don’t get support often leave the profession.

Tips for girls who want to start a career in IT

Understand what you already know and what you want

Think about what style of life suits you, what do you want more – to be a free bird or to work in big corporations? If you don’t know yet, just try it, there is no better way to figure out your desires and preferences.

Monitor job openings and internships regularly

Go to your potential employer’s website under “jobs/careers.” Send in your resume with the note, “I like your company’s values and am ready to grow and develop.” Don’t be discouraged to try different positions even without relevant experience.

Don’t be disappointed in your career choice right away

It’s not at all necessary that the first three professions in IT that you try out will be perfect for you. Patience and proactive action will help.
There is a library of useful videos on the community site, you may be interested in girls’ stories and their perspective on their careers

Regularly participate in IT events

Not only Russian communities, but also similar foreign ones. Meet new people and make connections. The easiest way to find such offline and online events is on Facebook.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

There are a huge number of bloggers and career counselors on any of the social networks who can provide basic advice on finding yourself in IT for free.

Find yourself a mentor

A girl who will agree to support you for free, for a fee or by barter (she gives you her experience, you give her all possible assistance on the project/area of your competence), to give tips, to help with advice. Many of today’s IT girls are open to networking – find someone whose success story inspires you, get to know that girl in the Girls do IT community, or even post on Facebook and ask her for coffee and mentorship. Most will respond! Yes, it’s exactly that simple:)

Master the growth mindset technique.

Read about what a growth mindset is: learn to think bigger, develop your abilities and master new ones, be resourceful and flexible.

Google

For example, type “how to make a career in IT”, you will find a lot of tips from experienced people and experts. If you come across an obscure word, you can google it and broaden your horizons.
Is it necessary to have a degree in programming, or is it easier to finish courses and move in your own direction?

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