Where are the women in tech?

I worked with a tech company with the wisdom to realize their engineering workforce was not as diverse as they wanted. Their issue was a lack of women applicants for engineering positions. It is difficult to hire women if they are not even applying.

Many organizations would easily explain the problem away by saying that not enough women have the education or skills. This organization was willing to dig digger with my help and as a result, made an immediate impact.

The truth is that more and more women are seeking engineering education, in particular master's degrees. According to the American Society for Engineering Education (Yoder, 2014), 19.5 percent of engineering bachelor's degrees and 24.2 percent of master's degrees were obtained by women.

With master’s degrees, women in engineering focused more on environmental (43.9 percent), biological & agricultural (42.2 percent) and biomedical (40.4 percent) which was the same trend with bachelor’s degrees. This trend brought me to ask why women are drawn to these engineering fields over others?

Women Seek Meaningful Work

The trending of women’s educational interests in engineering warranted a deeper look into what these engineering fields had in common and the overall correlation to career motivation. The literature pointed to a conclusion it would be pertinent for any organization wanting to recruit women to 1) market how their organization contributes to the greater good and 2) embed societal thinking into the organizational culture to affect the retention of women in the organization.

Words Matter

Women are more influenced by the language in job descriptions than men, so eliminating gender-biased language is important (Technische Universität München 2014).

After providing multiple strategies to recruit and retain women in their workforce, this organization decided to focus on three:

Incorporate diversity and inclusion into the organization's strategic plan along with measurements.
Update their career page and website overall to be more inviting to women.
Modify their job descriptions to eliminate gender-biased language (Petrone, 2015)

Within six weeks of making these changes, the organization hired three female engineers and one female intern. So women engineers are out there. Organizations need to be savvier to attract and retain them.

If your tech organization is struggling with a similar issue, contact us to learn more!

References

Petrone, P. (2015, July 24). Finally, an app that determines if your job descriptions are sexist. Retrieved November 8, 2015, from https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/2015/07/finally-an-app-that-determines-if-your-job-descriptions-are-sexist

Technische Universität München. (2014, April 3). Women do not apply to 'male-sounding' job

postings. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 16, 2015 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140403095421.htm

Yoder, B. L. (2014). Engineering by the numbers. American Society for Engineering Education, 12-20.

Retrieved March 7, 2016, from https://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/14_11-47.pdf