When Tech in Motion hosted a panel discussion in Cambridge about women in technology earlier this month, it took a while to get to the elephant in the room.
The panel was made up of women who are accomplished in the fields of technology and/or startup companies who had a lot of advice and encouragement to share about their work and education experiences.
Swati Vakharia is senior director of technology and development at ESPN. Christina Luconi is chief people officer at Rapid7. Dana Artz is the executive director of Intelligent.ly. Susan Buck is a co-founder of Web Start Women and Codagogy, which is now known as the Women's Coding Collective. Annette Arabasz is a creative technologist at Mad*Pow and chapter leader at Girl Develop It.
The panel also took place against the backdrop of a number of positive developments for women in technology and business. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has launched a movement with her book “Lean In.” Under the leadership of CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo has increased its stock price and, by some measures, surpassed Google in terms of web traffic. General Motors just named its first female CEO in Mary Barra.
During the question and answer period, a member of the audience asked the panelists how they square their optimism about the place that women have carved out for themselves in the technology and research that paints a far grimmer picture.
The National Center for Women & Information Technology published a compilation of statistics that seek to quantify how women have progressed in the field. Here are some selected excerpts:
- Women currently hold more than 51% of all professional occupations in the U.S., and approximately 26% of the 3,816,000 computing-related occupations. (Department of Labor Current Population Survey, 2012)
- In 1991, women held 37% of all computing-related occupations. (NCWIT, 2010)
- Among the tech companies within the Fortune 100, only four have female CEOs. (Fortune, 2012)
- Women hold 11% of executive technical roles at privately held, venture-backedcompanies. (Dow Jones VentureSource, 2012)
- Women comprise 7% of tech company founders (Kauffman Foundation, 2010)
- More than half (56%) of women in technology leave their employers at the mid-level point in their careers (10-20 years). Of the women who leave, 24% take a non-technical job in a different company; 22% become self-employed in a technical field; 20% take time out of the workforce; 17% take a government or non-profit technical job; 10% go to a startup company; and 7% take a non-technical job within the same company. (The Athena Factor via The Facts, 2010)
So this is where the rubber meets the road. There was some debate over whether women in technology are benefiting from a boom or, more modestly, finally getting the traction they need to make progress. But overall the panelists’ tenor was a positive one. What gives?
The answer may be just as simple as this: They all love what they are doing. They are passionate about their work, they know their worth and how to communicate it, and if they stopped enjoying what they do, they’d probably move on and find something else.
Speaking personally, I know what it feels like to crave concrete advice that guarantees some measure of a positive outcome. Be confident. Don’t be afraid to negotiate. Volunteer for projects. Speak up.
All good advice, but going through a checklist of career pointers isn’t going to get you the work life you desire unless you do what you love and know what you want. If you can get yourself into a place where those two criteria are fulfilled, work won’t feel so much like work. Obstacles won’t seem so daunting. Statistics will be just another set of another numbers.
For me, that was the takeaway message for the panel. So ask yourself those two questions: What do I want and what do I love to do? You may want to write down your response to get it on the record for yourself so there’s no ambiguity.
Use that as your foundation, and then perhaps, the semantics surrounding where women stand in any given field won’t matter or have a role to play in determining whether you prosper.