There are some challenges and struggles that women face working in tech. Women experience gender inequality, not fitting in to male-dominated roles, and lack of understanding. This article provides the opportunity to dive into what working in tech is like for women, the types of jobs, specific women working in tech, and much more.

As the number of women working in tech roles has almost doubled in the last decade. You may be wondering, what type of jobs are considered to be tech jobs for women?

Here are the type of jobs that women take on working in tech:

Women in Tech Jobs

While these roles for women working in tech have increased, they still face daily struggles of working in technology. The top 10 jobs for women in the tech industry are:

  1. software developer
  2. sales representative
  3. project manager
  4. IT administrator
  5. customer service specialist
  6. digital marketer
  7. IT support/help desk
  8. data analyst
  9. financial analyst
  10. graphic designer

But, the roles of women in tech differ. There are programmers, cybersecurity, data to capture and user experience. It’s important to understand these jobs to know what the description entails, so here are the top 10 jobs in-depth:

Top 10 Jobs Explained

A software developer identifies and corrects errors that exist in software to allow it to function better. They also help a company in figuring out how much the fix will cost and how long it will take.

A sales representative helps a business sell the merchandise or products to customers.

A project manager plans and manages projects for a company. They plan out the tasks, events and work towards the completion of the project.

An IT administrator supports multi-user computers and makes sure they continually perform well. The roles in this job can vary, but they act as support systems.

A customer service specialist helps communicate important information about the company and their products to their customers. This job requires people to respond to customer’s questions, help them when making a purchase and make recommendations.

A digital marketer builds brand awareness and advertises through channels that are digital.

An IT support or help desk helps customers understand how to fix their technology from knowledge given by experts.

A data analyst helps analyze problems related to data and the relationship between the data.

A financial analyst determines a companies performance by evaluating business, projects, budgets and financial transactions.

A graphic designer uses visuals to give a message to an audience. This is very creative work.

As you read, these jobs have many different descriptions as to what the job entails. Now that we know what these jobs are, let’s dive into the struggles of women working in these jobs and tech.

The Struggles of Women in Tech

As discussed earlier, that the three main challenges women face while working in tech are gender inequality, not fitting in and a lack of understanding. It is evident that typically there are more men in the tech roles than women, and it could be because of these struggles. Some experts think that certain expectations can cause the gender divide while pushing women to take on other careers. Even if a women performs better than a male in a certain job or task, they can still be treated unfairly.

Some companies have ensures equality by creating policies that are inclusive and ensure equal treatment for men and women. While some companies have done this, not all of them have still causing inequalities.

Experiences of Women in Tech

Women working in tech positions experience inequality. For example, a male may get a networking opportunity over a female. Also, the promotions in the company may go to males over females causing them to make more money. It’s found that employees at a company wonder if women eve are capable of doing certain jobs.

Women also experience not fitting in causing them to not have as much confidence and feel inferior. Especially in a work place where the majority of employees are male. It’s also known that women in tech even repot sexual harassment due to working with a male-dominated company. This causes women to feel unsafe in their workplace. Another reason for a possible skill gap between men and women could be due to women finding it difficult to stay updated to the newest trends in technology. Women can perform just as well as men do in these position, it is just important to develop and maintain skills.

Female employees also feel as though they aren’t supported by their coworkers. This doesn’t happen just in the workplace though, as women can feel like they don’t have support with their families and friends either. This can be discouraging to them with having many other things to worry about.

Improvements to Make Women Feel Included

Workplaces need to make sure that they respect all employees. Policies can be created to protect women if they become victims of sexual harassment and discrimination. Companies altogether need to get rid of gender employment issues.

If these prejudices against gender go away, more women will want a career in tech. Women should not feel as though their gender is holding them back from a job and shouldn’t think of it as a negative thing.

What it is Like Being a Women in Tech

According to a YouTube channel by the name of harshibar, she shared some of her experiences of working in tech. The video starts off with her going through different outfits to wear to work and shows the struggles of picking one. Depending on what outfit is chosen, can depend how people treat her in the workplace, which is sad. Harshibar even stated how she didn’t even expect to have to worry about what she wore, but it is a factor because she was worried that people would judge her working skill based on what she wore. She then went on to even categorize different outfits like; tech bro, girly girl and business snake, and what people would think of her if she wore them.

Harshibar states that it is important to address fears like worrying about what to wear early on because it can lead you to be a more confident worker and not have to worry about outside factors.

Statistics of Women in Tech

Another YouTube video by IDG TECHtalk provides information about the “hard truths” of women working in tech. They explain that women are underrepresented, underpaid and discriminated against.

Here are the challenges women face:

The Employment Gap

In general, women make up about 47% of employed adults in the United States. However, women only make up about 25% of computing roles. If you break up the percentage even more, it is found that Asian, Black and Hispanic women make up a very small number of it.

The National Center for Women and Data Technology provided these statistics.

The Degree Gap

It is found that the number of women earning STEM degrees is increasing a lot. Also, they are reaching men in the number of bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering. Although, the number of women earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science was one 19%.

The National Science Foundation provided this information.

The Retention Gap

It is known that out of women who majored in computer science, only 38% are actually working in the field, but the number for men is at 53%. Due to this, the gap could be caused by women feeling as though they aren’t fit for the position from stereotypes given.

The National Science Foundation provided this information.

Workplace Culture Gap

It was found in a 2017 poll that 50% of women said that at work they experienced gender discrimination while only 19% of men reported it. For women working in computer jobs they reported that they experienced gender discrimination 62% and women working in male-dominated workplace experienced 78%.

Many men don’t pay attention to gender diversity in a workplace. While many women feel that they have to prove themselves and they are good at their job.

The Pew Research Center provided these statistics.

The Founder Gap

Businesses are created by women about 1 in 4 times. It has also been found that a businesses founder has a direct impact on the overall gender diversity of the workplace. Also, female founders of a business find it difficult to receiving funding and is a component of them not being treated equally.

The Silicon Valley Bank provided this information.

The Pay Gap

Women have been underpaid in over 25 years. Women are only paid about 87% of what men make. For Black women in STEM though, they only make about 62% of what men make.

IT Leadership

There has been a small increase in women working in leadership positions. This is a great start because having women in the leadership positions can have female employee engagement impacted. Overall, women feel more comfortable and have a higher satisfaction for the job.

IDC provided this information.

Historical Influential Women in Tech

Hearing about stories of women working in technology can influence other women to also take on the job. It’s important to hear positive experiences to get passed the bad ones.

Women can also make great achievements in tech and here are 10 of those women and what they accomplished:

Ada Lovelace

Ada was the worlds first computer programmer. Ada’s notes on the engine of the computer helped Alan Turner. Alan used her notes for inspiration on building the first modern computer in the 1940’s.

Grace Hopper

Grace is known as the most famous tech in the world. Grace’s hard work developed COBOL. COBOL is something we still use today but was an early programming language. Grace also found the worlds first computer big in 1947. Her famous phrase, “it is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission,” came to be.

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy was an inventor and film actress who was self taught. Her ‘secret communication system’ earned her a patent in 1942. During war, the frequency was made by Hedy as a way to set off course these radio-guided torpedos. The idea of that then led to the thought of WI-FI, GPS, and Bluetooth technology we use greatly today.

Annie Easley

Annie was known for being a rocket scientist for NASA. She also was a main part of advocation for gender and racial diversity in STEM. Annie was only one of four black employees the the Lab when she was first hired. She put a lot of her own ideas into programs while being a computer scientist.

Mary Wilkes

Mary worked in computer programming and logic designing. She is widely known for designing the first home computer and the software for LINC. Her work is being talked about and displayed at The National Museum of Computing.

Adele Goldberg

Adele helped develop the programming language Smalltalk-80, which led to the first Apple computer. She made the decision to show Steve Jobs her development. The concepts set in motion by Adele and her team became the basics for graphical user interfaces.

Radia Perlman

Radia is known as the ‘mother of the internet’ because she helped the internet come to be with her invention of the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol. Her hard work helped networks to be able to move and self-organize data. She has delivered many influential speeches around the world. Radia is also currently still a computer programmer and an engineer for Dell EMC.

Katherine Johnson

Katherine was known as the NASA mathematician. Her work was crucial for the first space flight. She completed complex calculations that also helped future missions in space. Katherine even helped assist John Glenn with her work! John Glenn requested that Kateine would run the numbers programmed into the computer. She was awarded the Presidential Medal fo Freedom by President Obama. That is the highest civilian honor.

Karen Sparck-Jones

Karen is known as the pioneer in information science. Her work is also known to be cited very often in her field. She developed the Inverse Document Frequency (IDF). The IDF is a factor that evaluates the importance a word is in a document. This is now a standard method used in search engines on the web which helps determine a document’s relevance. Karen also received the Lovelace Medal in 2007.

Elizabeth Feinler

Elizabeth helped discover the original search engine. Between the years of 1972 – 1989, she ran the Network Information Center. The NIC is known as a ‘pre-historic Google’. The Network Information Center was the first place where resources and directories were published on the internet. Which could be known as white pages and yellow pages. Lastly, Elizabeth’s group that she was associated with came up with the naming of .com, .edu, .net and others.

Women Influential in The Tech Community Today

We discussed women who were very influential back in the day, some of those women are also currently still working in the tech industry. Now we will discuss very influential women in the tech world today!

Here are the top 10 women in the tech world today:

Reshma Saujani

Reshma is the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code. Also, she is a New York Times bestselling author. Reshma gave the famous TED Talk titled, “Teach girls bravery, not perfection,” which is very influential to women. She graduated from Harvard University and Yale Law School. After that, she also created a big step in 2010 when she became the first Indian-American woman to run for Congress.

Susan Wojcicki

Susan is a CEO of YouTube and she tops the lists of every female tech CEO’s. She was also Google’s 16th employee and original marketing manager. Susan helped develop Google Images and AdSense. She is the one to suggest the idea of YouTube then becoming the CEO in 2014.

Ellen K. Pao

Ellen is a co-founder and CEO of Project Include. Also, she is the CEO of Reddit after being apart of the founding of Project Include. Project Include is a non profit organization which focuses on bettering the diversity in the tech industry. In Silicon Valley she frequently speaks on issues revolving around sexism. In 2012, Ellen entered the public eye after filling a $16 million lawsuit against one of her former employer because of gender discrimination. Although she lost the case, it brought up a serious subject and presented to people that gender discrimination is not tolerated.

Danah Boyd

Danah is the founder and president of Data and Society. She founded her institute for research to go over ethical and legal implications of technologies coming to be. Also, she currently works as a researcher for Microsoft. In high Schoo she went through a situation of a student telling her that “girls can’t do science” which caused her to strive to prove him wrong.

Kimberly Bryant

Kimberly is the founder and CEO of Black Girls Code. She used her 401k to begin Black Girls Code in 2011. The inspiration of the Black Girls Code nonprofit came from the struggle to find a diverse computer programming course. The mission of Black Girls Code is to teach a million girls of color what coding is about by 2040. Kimberly was named a Champion of Change by the White House leading her to receive the Ingenuity Award in Social Progress from the Smithsonian Institute.

Kate Crawford

Kate is a co-founder of the Al Now Institute. She is also an Australian author and leader of thinking of the social impacts of Al and machine learning. She has an argument to ban the use of facial recognition technology. Lastly, Kate serves as a senior researcher at Microsoft.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li

Dr. Fei-Fei is a co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered Al Institute. She has a pretty good following on Twitter allowing her to reach a good number of people. She is known as one of the most influential women in technology. Dr. Fei-Fei is widely known for her project on ImageNet. ImageNet is a database that has ever 15 million images. The database helped the first computer understand the components of a picture.

Katie Moussouris

Katie is the founder and CEO of Luta Security. When Katie was a child, she spent her free time learning how to program on an Commodore 64. She was also the first female in her school to take AP Computer Science. Around that time, Katie found she had an interest for hacking. She used her hacking techniques for good and became a pioneer of cybersecurity. Katie currently helps different businesses and government agencies protect themselves against threats online. She has also done work for the U.S. Department of Defense and Microsoft. Therefore, her overall goal is to make the internet a safer place for everyone.

Cathy Hackl

Cathy is the host of the Future Insiders podcast. She is known for being one of LinkedIn’s Top Tech Voices. In the podcast she hosts, she keeps her listeners informed about new technologies that could impact the world. Cathy keeps her Twitter followers informed about tech things and focuses on augmented and virtual reality. She also was behind the creation of the first holographic press release. With her focus on AR and VR, she has worked with companies like UPS and HTC.

Joanna Stern

Joanna is a senior tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal. She has won awards for journalism based on consumer technology. Joanna was one of the original founding members of The Verge, a product review program. Recently, she has been known for discussing tech news on CNBC. She gives very helpful information, that other people wouldn’t be brave enough to say. Her speeches give the reality of certain tech applications, like Google Chrome.

Why Women in Tech

As you can see, there have been some very influential women in tech. In conclusion, if the women were historical figures or current ones, they showed how women can be successful in a job that would be considered more “male-dominated”. We learned, not only were they successful, but they achieved accomplishments while enduring the hardships that women do in tech. The got passed that to become the influential people they are. This can definitely show other women that it is possible and women can be just as good as men in tech.

For information on tech must-haves, check out The 4 Cute Keyboards for Your Home Office.