CIO Essentials: What women want
Despite years of progress, tech is still far from equality
We champion diversity of all types here at Computing: ethnic, faith, cultural, neuro, age and - of course - gender.
That's why we treat International Women's Day as a special day every year - and yet, every year, we write the same stories about the lack of progress towards truly equal opportunities.
It's a depressing state of affairs, especially when the companies underpaying their female staff are also the ones who shout about progress - see our coverage of the Gender Pay Gap Bot, which this week has run rampant across Twitter once again.
Even having a female CEO is not necessarily a guarantee of pay equality: Oracle (CEO: Safra Catz) reported a mean average pay gap of nearly 25% in 2021, for example.
In case you were wondering, Catz is one of only two female tech firm CEOs in the Fortune 500. The other is Lisa Su of AMD, which has a gender split of 76% men to 24% women (even worse at executive level and in engineering roles).
That's not out of the ordinary; in fact, AMD and Oracle are the outliers. According to the United Nations, only about a third of managers and executives are women worldwide, and at the current pace of change we won't reach gender parity for another 140 years.
We must face facts: the issue is one of systemic sexism. How else are we to explain why women are - to quote Laura Bates' Fix the System, Not the Women - "desperately underrepresented across the sectors currently making the decisions and creating the technology that will shape our lives in the near future"?
All of that is not to gloss over the good work being done. As we report this week from Tajikistan and Africa, the developing world is coming on in leaps and bounds thanks to organisations like the Alif Academy, Tek Experts and Elev8, which are helping train women for technical roles.
Similar great progress is being made in the UK, which is why this week we have launched the 2023 editions of the Women in Tech Festival and Women in Tech Awards - two of the biggest events in our calendar.
What women want from tech is not difficult: equal pay, equal opportunities and safety from harassment. Men manage it every day - so what's the hold up for women?
You may also like
/feature/4334521/tech-isnt-meritocratic
Leadership
Tech isn't as meritocratic as you think
And relying on graduates to fill vacancies isn’t working
/feature/4331535/long-reads-women-experience-imposter-syndrome
Leadership
Long reads: Why do so many women experience imposter syndrome?
And is it always a bad thing?
/news/4324634/dei-profit-tech-talent-charter-close
Careers and Skills
DEI non-profit Tech Talent Charter to close
After a decade of driving diversity and inclusion across the tech sector