Why So Few Women In Tech?

6 min readJun 1, 2019

Tech is a male-dominated world. Let’s not deny it.

Enter the classic tech start up and count the ratio of women versus men, make anyone feel uncomfortable?

If there are women in a tech workspace, look out for the Human Resources department, and some admin, hiring and firing.

OK, clearly these are flippant generalisations and the situation is not as bad as it was however, there remains a significant imbalance so, why are there so few women in tech?

The Problem Starts Early, Social Conditioning Anyone?

For hundreds of years, we’ve been conditioned by society expectations …

– men are workers, women serve.
– boys wear blue, girls pink.
– boys play with cars, girls with dolls.
– Men wear the pants (trousers), women the skirts and the decorum
– Men are more logical and reasonable, women more emotional (obviously)
– Men have more commitment to work, women have to juggle career, motherhood, and wifehood.

These mindsets are instilled in children from nursery and before.

While there are girls excelling in STEM subjects, peer pressure has traditionally compelled them to choose careers that are “more suitable” for women, or abandon a career all together. If they study, the liberal arts is often the go-to for education.

Whilst attitudes are changing, these are hard traditions to break.

It provides some background to why women are only slowly embracing careers in tech, driven by campaigns about equality, more visible role models and legislation.

But still there aren’t visibly enough women taking key positions.

There remain significant barriers coming down from a male dominated level of top management, from those that have “traditional” mindsets” about work, gender and women.

There remain too many male and institutional gatekeepers who view promoting women in senior positions, and women in tech more generally, as akin to pushing round circles into square holes.

Women Are Subtly Not Welcome In The Tech World

While there are less women attracted or enabled into STEM courses, women can also find themselves made to feel unwelcome when tech companies go hiring, recruiters and companies creating more subtle barriers, sometimes based on deep prejudice, rather than obvious anti-women manoeuvres.

According to Stanford research conducted by Alison Winn and professor Shelley Correll and a team of researchers at tech recruitment drives, women in tech companies was often more about usherettes to an event handing out raffle tickets, career flyers, and other recruitment perks, whereas the men showcased the tech expertise. There were rarely women speakers to answer tech related questions.

Furthermore, recruitment ads and presentations were dominated by images of men and if there were women, it often involved sexual innuendos aimed at selling products.

There Is Less Career Support For Women

Managing corporate politics is often a significant challenge women in the tech world, where incumbents and predecessors are primarily men, working within networks, of men.

Start to see the challenge?

According to a recent Harvey Nash survey about women in tech, only 31% of women are being offered career development programs.

Mentorship for career progression is sometimes offered to men instead of women; thus, giving women blurred career trajectories and advancements in the companies they work for.

The inevitable result? Women leaving their posts for another tech career, or abandoning tech all together and shifting careers.

Abuse of women in this male dominated environment is also remarkably prevalent, ranging from office bullying to requesting sexual favours for career advancement.

The #MeToo movement made women more vocal and sparked awareness about their career struggles, particularly when faced with men in power.

The movement made the tech environment more welcoming and more accepting of women according to 49% of Harvey Nash USA’s responders. Though that lopsided legacy of power, means that significant barriers to equal opportunities are still in place.

Maternity Issues

There has been significant progress, particularly within European countries, about protecting maternity (and paternity) rights. Maternity leave can go as long as 59 weeks paid leave in Bulgaria!

For countries with shorter leave like in the United States, 14 weeks is rarely enough time for physical recovery and child care, especially for a single mother.

While some companies offer daycare incentives for working mothers, the pressure of balancing motherhood and career, can become oppressive for many returning to work.

In the Philippines, there has been an increase of mothers leaving their careers in the office for online freelance jobs just to stay closer to their families. A fantastic benefit of the modern, freelance culture.

Whether you are in a country with progressive legislation for protecting new mothers return to work or not, the challenge for an individual returning to work, particularly within the fast paced tech environment, is the need to get back to speed and potentially re-train and re-learn.

It’s because of this break that many employers will use (unofficially) to justify NOT selecting women in the first place, or putting women who return from maternity leave under pressure and/or into lesser jobs.

Significant bullying often takes place for women returning to work, and is often a reason why many decide to quit soon after returning from maternity leave.

Stop The Denial, Recognise the Bias

One way to remedy this imbalance is for tech companies to recognise that gender bias is very real, is damaging and they need to take action for it to stop.

They need to recognise that men often have an unfair advantage over women in negotiating their careers and if necessary, find pro-active ways to address this imbalance.

Top management of tech companies should initiate regular assessments of their equal opportunity policies and programmes for staff, to ensure that women are not being prejudiced against during key business decisions.

Enable women to negotiate these barriers, to share their thoughts and ideas on how to improve the workplace and that workplace will almost certainly become a better place.

Providing clear support for grievances to be aired and to avoid exploitation in the workplace should be established to ensure that they feel safe and secure to report any such activity during their tenure.

Maternity perks should be crafted into your employment contracts, and to ensure the work environment is appealing for new mothers… and fathers … to return!

Recruitment policies should go above and beyond the normal.

Don’t sit back and say you couldn’t find enough women, extend the recruitment period, pro-actively seek balanced range of applicants. If you haven’t found women good enough to apply, you’re not looking hard enough.

Women As Role Models

The surest way to remedy this is to rally women top-guns as role models. Women should be allowed to speak — in high school as well as in university career drives. Women should also be encouraged to flaunt their expertise (not their legs) in recruitment drives that attract more women applicants. This breaks the stigma among young girls and boys that women don’t belong in tech.

Here at CTO Academy, we believe that tradition is simply peer pressure from the past.

We have to address inequality and restrictive traditions, particularly those that are harmful in nature, such as sexism across the business and the tech world.

Tech is exciting because it’s new.
Tech is inspiring because it’s about improvement.

Why then have we so easily inherited old barriers and prejudices?
Why do we continue to enable stunted recruitment policies and a lack of equal opportunity?
Why have we so quickly installed a culture of “it’s the way things are done round here” with recruitment, pay, funding etc.?

Diversity breeds greater talent.
Diversity breeds greater profitability.

Make sure your company is doing things differently and that no barriers exist for anyone with the talent to succeed.

And we’d love to hear from any women who aspire to become top guns in the tech industry, but feel their progress has/is being restricted.

Be great to hear from you, if anything in this article chimes with your own experiences.

Article written by Kat Marasigan, CTO Academy