There’s reason to be hopeful that we may achieve gender equity in tech, but it probably won’t happen soon.
AnitaB.org today announced the results of the organization’s annual Top Companies for Women Technologists program that measured a tech workforce of more than 572,000 professionals. Companies across industries and of all sizes from GrubHub, Quora, and Airbnb, to Allstate, Macy’s, Accenture, IBM, and Amazon, agreed to participate by providing measures of their technical workforce according to a standardized definition.
The analysis revealed that 2019 was the first time these 76 companies had a combined representation of 29.8% women at entry level, although numbers remained flat at other levels of the organizations.
At this current rate of overall growth, 1.1% is too slow to reach the goal of 50/50 by 2025. However, this does represent thousands of jobs currently held by female technologists and could be close to a tipping point. Research from Catalyst indicates that organizations achieving 30% representation of any minority group experience a culture change and acceleration of equity. Medium-sized companies in this group have reached 28.1% representation, which is higher than the average for all participating companies.
However, the report revealed another concern. In 2019, 9.3% of women voluntarily left organizations vs. 8.9% of their male colleagues. This is up from 6.1% vs. 5.5% men last year. The biggest losses were logged at small companies which saw 3.1% of women leave their workforces. The encouraging news for small companies was that they have overall the highest representation of executive women, the greatest success at hiring women, the best promotion rates for women versus men.
You can read the full report with detailed stats here.
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