Women In Tech

Recently, there seems to be more of a push to encourage women to apply for tech roles through means of tech conferences. I was thinking though, that surely the types of people that know about tech conferences – are the people that are already in the industry.

It probably makes sense to target the promotion directly at schools. Back in my day, if you knew programming, it was because you taught yourself, or went onto further education to study it. I have heard that these days, it is taught more at schools, so over time, I think the new generation will naturally enter the industry. It’s at that age you really need to get people interested. Otherwise, they will go and get a degree in some other field and the tech industry probably has a lower chance of getting someone to switch.

I think my employer has a lot of females in the managerial side of the department, but are severely lacking in terms of female developers. There’s a better representation of testers though, although still male dominated. I firmly believe this is purely a case of the representation of applicants, rather than any gender bias of offering roles. If anything, females have a better chance of landing jobs (LinkedIn even state this here https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/diversity/2019/how-women-find-jobs-gender-report).

Recently at one of these “Women In Tech” events, one female manager, Jackie goes to it. She surely has been in the industry for 30+ years, she joined the company in a high managerial position within the department, and has had promotions since. Surely her experiences of being a woman in tech hasn’t been negative. Therefore, I think she isn’t really the sort of person that could benefit from the event. Maybe a good candidate for actually doing a talk though.

If the talks involve how to tailor job advertisements to encourage female applications, then it’s probably a great event for HR to attend. It’s also ideal for women not currently in the industry, but they need to know the event is on, and be encouraged to go to it. This poses a question of where to advertise, and how to advertise.

So on to the actual criticism. Jackie comes back and reports on the event. One of the “facts” caught my attention. It said:

“Women apply to jobs when they meet 100% of the job listing. Men apply when they meet 60%.”

Now, I’m always sceptical of “facts” and severely doubted this one. Surely you can easily disprove it by simply assuming it is true. Sounds odd, but bear with me. A female reads this “fact”, then applies for a job when she meets 60% of the criteria. Fact disproved. Any fact that claims it applies to all people surely cannot be accurate.

As it turns out, with a bit of Googling, I found a more accurate quote, although I couldn’t find the actual source.

“Women working at HP applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements.”

So the quote was from Hewlett-Packard, observing their staff applying for promotions. So it’s a very small sample size to base the statement on, and it is for internal staff rather than external applicants. So women and men already in the tech industry. Interestingly enough, the LinkedIn study I mentioned early verified that women did apply to roles differently to men.

I was thinking about job advertisements and thought there is no way I’d ever would have had a job if I only applied to jobs when I met 100% of the criteria. Most of them do contain irrelevant technologies just to sound more exciting (maybe they use C# but they will say C#/Java/C++). They often ask for degrees, or experience as a “Full-Stack” developer when it’s not actually required. Maybe they specify things you use rather than things you need to know the inner workings of (virtual machines). Maybe they even ramble on about generic stuff like “enthusiasm for technology”, “passion for quality”. The more things you list, and the more jargon you list – the more chance people are put off because they don’t feel qualified.