The percentage of women working in IT is picking up speed!

There are more US women working in IT roles than last year: The percentage of women in IT rose 0.37% compared to 2018, reaching 24.93%. That may not exactly be rapid growth, but it's six times faster than 2018 when the number was up only 0.06%. Although it would be nice to see it jumping by two or three percent annually, that's not likely to happen, for reasons I will explain below.

I authored a Deloitte TMT Prediction on the abysmally low percentage of women in IT globally back in 2016. The gist of that Prediction was that there were too few women working in tech roles (not just at tech companies, but IT roles at companies in all industries) and that despite a lot of effort, the numbers were not about to improve rapidly.

Sadly, that Prediction remains broadly accurate. Using updated 2019 data from the US Department of Labor, I produced the chart above.

The reason the percentage isn't growing faster (despite some fairly genuine efforts by a lot of companies to increase the percentage of women) is the large base of IT workers: There were about 5.534 million IT workers in the US in 2018, and 5.747 million in 2019. There is some turnover: IT workers retire (mainly men, given the profession has historically skewed male), IT workers leave the profession (a mix, but women are over-represented, since they are twice as likely as men to leave the industry) and then there is job growth.

And that's where I see real progress being made. In 2019 there were 213,000 more Americans in IT jobs than the year before: 139,148 men and 73,852 women...meaning that women represented 34.7% of all the growth in positions over the last year.

More than one in three new IT jobs

went to a woman in 2019!

That will likely go even higher as ever more women choose to study, apply, work (and stay) in IT as the industry becomes more gender balanced.