The dimension of gender inequality I was most interested in was the representation of women in the field of software engineering. This is a particularly important area for me, as I studied computer science in college and worked as a software engineer at an education software company during my third year. When I was hired, I was told “congratulations, you’re number four!”, alluding to the fact that I was the fourth woman to be hired as a software engineer in the over ten years of the company’s existence. The company was a local company, servicing most school districts in Florida (and Texas, for some reason), so the scale at which they hire is much smaller than a traditional tech company, like Google; however, the trend of a lack of representation of women in software continues at the largest scales, as well. 

For example, when you navigate to Google’s “Diversity” site, found through the following link: https://diversity.google/annual-report/, you can see that they have congratulated themselves on diversifying their teams, but there is still a disparity between the representation of women in tech and non-tech positions (22.9% tech, 47.9% non-tech, globally in 2018); this can probably be linked to the tendency of companies to tell women applying for tech positions that they can “work their way up” from a non-tech to a tech position, eventually being able to be hired into the original tech position for which they applied.  The disparity looks even worse when you look into the representation of other groups, particularly non-white women. Of all tech employees hired at Google (in the United States) in 2018, only 0.8% are Black+ women, 1.4% are Latinx+ women, and 0.3% are Native American+ women; the women with the most representation are Asian+ and White+ women at 15.9% and 10.3%, respectively. 

However, this is just one company, and the diversity statistics they release are quite opaque: it would be highly valuable to access information about how long women stay in these tech positions once they are hired, as well as which positions they are actually filling; thus, in keeping their data broad, Google is able to report a greater diversity percentage than might actually exist. I tried finding data specifically related to software engineering globally, but it seems that this data is hard to find, and this makes sense, as I’m sure most tech companies do not want the lack of representation on their software engineering teams to be made public in an easily accessible way. I did find some global data breaking down the representation of women with software engineering skills in different sectors of tech, found here. The data is taken from LinkedIn, which does limit the scope of the data, as it assumes that the representation of employment on LinkedIn parallels that which is found in reality, which it likely does not; however, I still found it interesting, as it was one of the only resources I could find that attempts to show the amount of women in different employment sectors related to software engineering. Moreover, the data is from 2013, so it is a little bit dated, especially considering the growth of tech jobs as a whole in the years since. 

I have chosen to focus on software engineering in particular, as it is a job role that is found at most tech companies and interestingly enough was pioneered by women, when the task of punching code cards was looked at as lesser than the work that men were doing in hardware. I was not surprised to find a general lack of information, especially as it is something that is rarely spoken about in the field, and when it is spoken about, companies and management tend to get defensive when faced with the task of explaining why there are more men named Matt than women who are software engineers in their company. Many will argue that this is due to a lack of women in computer science departments, or women who are even interested in software engineering (you do not need to have a computer science degree to be a software engineer), but this is related to further problems with the rhetoric of tech as a whole. So, it might be interesting to also look at the representation of women in computer science departments, as well as whether these women, once they have graduated, stay or leave the field. The data I could find relating to computer science was limited to the United States, where women make up 18% of computer science bachelor’s degrees. It is often the case that computer science/software engineering/tech can be hostile environments to women due to the existing composition of the fields, so even if a woman works in one of these spaces, how long they stay can be highly dependent upon the workplace experience (though, this can be said for many fields). Overall, it seems that it is hard to find gender disparity data related to specific careers, though it would be highly useful to see the actual composition of tech jobs within companies, not just a broad view that allows an aggregate of positions to represent a higher, though still low, amount of gender diversity.