I’ve been thinking about women in tech again recently. Or rather the lack of women in tech / digital.
It’s something that makes it way to the front of the thought queue every couple of weeks but got a boost a few days ago when I was sent the infographic below off the back of my post about women and ambition.
The infographic shows that girls are smarter than boys but perform worse when asked to actively think about their gender. Some of the figures are pretty shocking although no surprise.
Even in the non-techy bits of digital I tend to see there are definitely more men than women (although it’s an unfair representation of society in a number of other ways as well.
Putting aside the ratio of men to women for a moment what about this stat: “One fifth of female computer science students questioned whether they belonged there”. If it’s something you’re interested in, good at and have chosen should you ever have to question whether you should do something based on gender?
Created by: Engineering Degree
There’s been a couple of other interesting conversations I’ve seen this week about women in tech. One about sexism in tech being one of the reasons women don’t go into the field or stay there. The discussion came off the back of this piece.
And then today I noticed a conversation on Twitter between LouLouK, Adrian Short and Phil Rumens about whether Wired UK is too male-focused or whether it is that way because their readership is predominantly male.
The conversation covered some interesting points in a short number of tweets including what ‘geek’ actually means now. Is it a label which is being corrupted by advertisers? Who identifies with this term?
Aside from recognising the issues here what is / could be done in a practical sense to move forward? Even if the number of women working or attracted to the many disciplines in the tech field grows slowly how can we help the women already working their feel they belong?