Are Women Being Left Behind in Tech?

In December 2019, The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville hosted a distinguished lecture by Reshma Saujani, CEO and founder of Girls Who Code (a non-profit that offers learning opportunities in computer science skills and helps girls in grades 6-12 build confidence, create career pathways, and have a support system). Saujani is an advocate for education and gender equality in the workplace, specifically tech fields.

In the lecture, Saujani tells the story of her inspiration behind Girls Who Code. When running for Congress in 2010, she noticed when campaigning at schools that there was a severe lack of girls in the robotics, computer science, and technology classes. She states one of the reasons she particularly likes coding is that “coding is telling a computer what to do […] It’s an endless process of trial and error. It requires perseverance, it requires imperfection.”

Society is “at a moment where technology is changing everything about the way we live and work,” Saujani says. Today, 43% of family breadwinners are women. Saujani believes that as more and more jobs are being replaced with technology, there is a need now more than ever for women to integrate into the tech field. As she states in her TED Talk, “for an economy to grow and truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half our population.”

As mentioned in her lecture, the technology workforce was 37% female in 1995. Today, it is now 25%. It is projected to be at 22% by 2025. 7500 women graduated in Computer Science in 2015.

 “We don’t have enough people graduating in Computer Science or Software Programming to fill the [open] jobs.” Saujani states there are currently 500,000 open jobs in computing and technology and that “women are being left behind, and it means our economy is being left behind on all the innovation and problems women would solve if they were socialized to be brave instead of socialized to be perfect.”

Saujani suggests the biggest cause of this inequality is the cultural portrayal of those who work in the technology field. As anecdotal evidence, she says “In the 1970’s, less than 30% of doctors and lawyers were women… 54% of those who were graduating in my law school class were women… How did we go from the less than 30[%] to over 55[%]? Culture. Ally McBeal, Grey’s Anatomy, L.A. Law, Kelly McGillis. We inundated television, culture, magazines with these fabulous doctors and lawyers that were women and little girls say, ‘you know what? Me too. Sign me up.’ The opposite thing has happened in technology.” We follow what culture tells us to do.

During her lecture, she points out that in 2012, 20 girls in the entire state of Arkansas took the AP Computer Science exam. In 2018, 3000 girls took the exam. There are plans in place to close the gender gap in the tech field by 2027. When Girls Who Code launched in 2012, there were 20 enrolled members throughout the United States. This year, there are 185,000. There are currently 90 Girls Who Code clubs in the state of Arkansas.

Girls Who Code: https://girlswhocode.com/

Saujani’s TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/reshma_saujani_teach_girls_bravery_not_perfection?language=en