Why Don’t Women Go Into Tech?
Why Don’t Women Go Into Tech?
Written by Dominika Gorgosz , Emma Harrison , Agne M. , Jiyoung Suh , Kamilla Aliakhmet and Zakiya Salemahomed
Why don’t women go into tech? Unfortunately, there is no single or easy answer to this question. For some, it‘s the lack of representation in the workplace, or no encouragement to pursue it at school (and in some cases, being actively dissuaded from it). Every woman has a different experience — and we have decided to talk about our experiences and why we all initially started our career journeys away from tech.
The “we” in question is a group of women who joined Dunelm from a funded coding bootcamp run by?Code First Girls?(CFG). CFG run short courses and bootcamps for women and non-binary individuals in the UK to encourage them into tech. We have focused on the experiences and representation of women compared to men, largely because of the way that statistics are reported and because we all identify as women.
In our conversations exploring this topic, we noticed a number of recurring themes across our experiences, outlining how these issues start early and persist as young girls grow up, study, and join the workforce.
School
To have women in STEM, we need to have girls in STEM, and many studies have shown that girls are much less likely to choose Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) subjects at school. When there are fewer girls being encouraged to study STEM, there will inevitably be a smaller talent pool of women to move into tech roles. A study by the Department for Education in February 2019 on subjects chosen at KS4 explored why boys and girls make different choices at school.
The study showed that 60% of male students thought their best subject was a STEM subject, which was nearly double the number of girls (33%) who chose this answer. Interestingly, actual GCSE results show that girls slightly outperform their male counterparts in maths and science, with 68% of girls achieving grades A*-C vs 65% of boys. Girls were also more likely to think that science qualifications would gain them the highest salary (39% of girls gave this answer vs 31% of boys), but this clearly wasn’t a strong enough motivator to overcome other factors (such as their self-perceived lack of skills in the area).
When Code First Girls asked its community of women about their experience at school, only 9% of respondents said they were encouraged to go into technology because of good IT teaching and curriculum. Three-quarters of those polled weren’t encouraged to pursue a career in technology at all. That figure was slightly higher among those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and 82% of those who identify as neurodiverse. Those from working-class backgrounds said a lack of female role models in the sector and seeing STEM as more suitable for boys were factors that put them off technology. But just as prevalent were internal pressures, such as not believing they had the right skills (14.85%), and not being confident enough in STEM subjects at school (15.15%).
Emma:?When I was at school, 2/4 of my A-Level subjects were STEM subjects, but I went on to study English at university (English was also the subject that most girls in that study thought they were best at and would go on to study, even though both girls and boys regarded it as a subject that would not lead to a high salary). For a lot of girls, we are barely even made aware that we can excel at STEM subjects. My teachers encouraged my interest in literature and history, but I was dissuaded from choosing subjects I was also interested in like woodwork and ICT (and when I did choose ICT, I was one of a few girls in that class at GCSE). All of my teachers in ICT were men, and only one of my science teachers was a woman. Representation matters, and when you can’t see yourself in any adults you know, it is hard to envision it as a future for yourself — you can’t be what you can’t see (or at least, it can feel that way as a young teen).
Zakiya:?For me personally, the IT curriculum we studied at school was completely uninspiring. I would hope this has changed in more recent years, with an increased focus on teaching coding and other more useful/up-to-date skills, but having spent my IT GCSE using Microsoft Office I wasn’t excited or enthused by the content of that course to pursue a career in IT/tech. Additionally, there was little information provided about the range of careers within tech.
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University
The gender gap in tech is already in motion by the time young adults enter university. The lack of girls choosing STEM subjects at schools leads to undergraduate cohorts where the majority of tech students are men.?Office for Students’ data?shows that, in 2020–21, female students made up 57% of undergraduate entrants, but in the same year, 83% of entrants for engineering, technology, and computing were men.
Dom:?I studied Psychology with Criminology, and yet I decided to pursue a career in Tech. It’s not an obvious choice, and it certainly wasn’t my first choice. I never considered choosing the tech industry or coding, mostly because it wasn’t something I was exposed to, or encouraged to do. Even though statistics and data analysis were at the core of my degree, the studied material was vastly theoretical and the practical application of learnt concepts involved R Studio (an alternative to SPSS), which quite frequently left us, students, nothing but confused, and discouraged me from learning how to code further. Additionally, because of the covid-19 pandemic every submitted question was answered usually within 3–5 days working days, which unfortunately wasn’t helpful, and often led to more confusion. Funnily enough, even though social sciences in academia is dominated by women (~80%), the statistics module was only ever taught by men. If it hadn’t been for Code First Girls’ collaboration with my university, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to explore programming languages where the material, syntax, and the course were beginner friendly, and the community was welcoming and helpful.
Kamilla:?I studied for a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at university. Although the curriculum was challenging, I think what made getting through those years especially difficult was the feeling of being “out of place”. There were very few, if any, female professors in the department. I did not have any role models in similar fields, who I could look up to or ask for career advice. Only after graduating from university, working in the industry for a couple of years, and actively expanding my professional network to include other women in the field with similar experiences, have I learnt to embrace my uniqueness as a woman in tech.
Agne:?At university, I chose to study social sciences, which led me to go into PR. I hated PR however, and a friend of mine got me a social analytics job, which then grew into web and data analytics, slowly exposing me to more tech-heavy tasks which organically got me to start looking at coding languages such as SQL. An organic, gentle start to real-life applications of coding demonstrated that it is not in fact an unobtainable skill to me, that it can make sense and that the only aspect holding me back from entering the field was my self-perception. It may have taken 15 years to go from “I don’t have the brain for this” to applying for a CFG course, but I am very happy to see where it got me.
Conclusions
It’s pretty clear that we need to tackle the issue of the lack of representation of women in tech from a young age. Girls who are exposed to technology and allowed to explore and play with it will have a positive relationship with tech and hopefully, consider it as a career option in the future. However, one other huge factor we need to encourage women into tech is representation. The majority of engineers in tech are men, and even though women are increasingly taking up senior roles in tech, they are still very much under-represented in these positions. Young girls need positive role models — successful women in tech — to look up to.
Only 4% of CEOs in the FTSE 350 are women.
So what can be done to tackle these issues and get more women into tech? Initiatives like CodeFirstGirls are providing women with free or low-cost ways to get practical training. They help women who want to switch careers, or even women who are still studying at university, to gain practical tech skills. This should mean we have a larger talent pool of women in the future, which will mean more women getting into senior roles, and therefore acting as role models for young girls interested in STEM.
A key part of fostering early career starters is having supportive companies, such as Dunelm. Dunelm sponsored our places on CFG’s bootcamp, and has provided all of us with lots of support and guidance since we started in June. This especially applies to each of our teams, who have welcomed us into Dunelm and have encouraged us to learn and develop. We want to say a huge thank you to CodeFirstGirls, Dunelm, and our amazing colleagues who are all helping to contribute to changing the landscape of tech!
And to everyone else in the tech industry, are there similar opportunities you could create at your company?