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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