
The “I look like an engineer” campaign that swept across social media recently reminded me of an old adage: talk is cheap. After all, society has been talking about gender equality across all professions for decades. And while a great deal of progress has been made, it is an inescapable truth that we are yet to achieve gender equality, both in terms of career paths and pay, in a range of sectors, particularly STEM.
We now find ourselves in 2015 with the topic trending on Twitter, as a result of some raised eyebrows at a woman featuring in an advert for an engineering company. It’s a wake-up call for us all, that the time has come to stop just talking about gender balance and actually start taking action. The IT sector as a whole needs to put greater parity between the genders at the top of its priority list. Key to this, in my experience however, is to break the cycle of stereotypical thinking that many organisations sleepwalk into. A prime example of this are the concerns about maternity and child rearing that many businesses hold when it comes to employing, or giving parity to, female workers. The misconception here, setting aside why the stereotype is morally questionable, is that by employing women, organisations expose themselves to a greater risk of losing staff to maternity leave, and have a less committed, less reliable staff member to deal with further down the line.- Nobel Laureate apologises for comments about the “trouble with girls” in labs
- Infinity and beyond: A look into the lives of the historic space heroines reveals unchanged gender bias
- HS2 reaches out to female students to help girls into engineering careers
Changing perspectives
Breaking, or turning these prevailing stereotypes upside down is only one part of the puzzle for the IT sector in achieving greater gender parity. Perhaps more importantly the industry must begin to change perspectives of careers in the sector for female professionals. For whatever reason, IT has always been associated with men. Building computers, gathering data and writing code have typically been identified as “men’s work”. At the same time there has been a distinct lack of female representation in the sector, creating an absence of role models to inspire women as they start shaping their careers during their teenaged years. As a result the lack of women, IT has become a self-perpetuating cycle that still remains unbroken.Share this story