Bridging the women in tech gap pt 1

There are multiple angles to try to bridge the women in tech gap. In this article series, I'd like to focus on the maybe most initial one: getting women to choose tech.

I know it is easy to only talk about this subject from a more junior perspective, getting young women to choose a career within tech, but I'd like to write about this from another angle. I think it is important to talk about older women that are able to end up in tech. Either through studying a masters later in life, slowly transitioning through role choices at work, or taking a shorter, vocational, education.

I'm not going to vouch for any over the other in terms of how you end up in tech. Of course I would love for more women to chose tech early in life. But to change the current trend we also need more women to find their place in tech even though they've had another previous career trajectory.

A equivalent that I want to challenge is that talent = youth.

But research has shown that already at 35, you're seen as "old" and not forward thinking within the tech industry.

From my point of view, everybody talks about diversity. Yet things are moving so slow. Yet we're seeing a huge gap in the market in terms of developers. Yet I see many people in Facebook groups anonymously saying that they're scared to jump onto a 2 year Java program, and leave their current job and safety behind.

We desperately need to change the current status of women in tech in Sweden, and we need to diversify our industry. For example, looking at Sweden and a European context, we know that (as 0f 2023)👇

I also want to make a note that when I researched for this article, it didn't take me long to get search results leading to Flashback forums on the topic of "help I am attracted to older women". So little do we talk about this subject.

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Getting more senior women into tech

I stumbled over this article, which I think point to something very important;

Just broadening the pipeline, diversifying our ways of looking at talent, won't change the problem in itself.

Making your offering age-friendly

Karen Blake gave in her article some tips and tricks to make your workplace more age friendly, such as offering grandparental leave, phased retirement, and adapted wellbeing initiatives.

Diversify events

Something I've thought about myself in a company that's now "growing up", is that arranging only events after the workday might become excluding if you're not offering something else. Or these "offsites" for weeks that certain companies have, that also can make it hard for someone to join if they, for example, have kids. If those are the only few events everybody gather around, you're not diverse in the way you do events.

Raising role models

We need to lift more role models that choose tech later in life. People such as Gabrielle Kamph (that studied to become a frontend developer during her parental leave) or Anna-Karin Edstedt Bonamy, the doctor that became tech-CEO.

It's good for business

Getting a diverse set of eyes on your product, understanding that a mom with a newborn baby won't be able to fill in that form you're building on your website because it is just too long, will revolutionize any product as well as our digitalized society as a whole.

Skills vs skills

Even though someone that has gone a 2 year long Java program, if they've worked for multiple years prior, they probably have many skills and experiences that someone super fresh from university might not. Taking that into account in a recruitment process, that a person might be well experienced within the problem area without having worked within development before, is also to respect their skills.

I'd like to end this article with this quote 👇