If you think the number of women in IT is just a problem with the hiring funnel, you haven’t looked carefully

According to a Harvard Business Review study, 41% of women in IT end up leaving the field (compared to 17% of men), and I understand why…

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.

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