I no longer trust the stats that companies publish on the gender equality in their tech roles
I am really not sure if this topic belongs in ~tech or ~society or ~talk but I trust the moderators to re-assign accordingly.
So, this is the layout of the "development" team of my companies.
there are 4 "development" teams which reports to the development manager who also occasionally codes.
There is one team, that's the one I am on. 7 people, 6 males.
there is another team, 4 people, 3 males.
there is another team, 5 people, 4 males.
The last team, I don't really consider "development" team. its a team of 4 females. What they are best suited for is QA in the sense of manually testing the product to ensure the experience is sufficient for push to PROD, But because of budget restrictions, they are being forced to learn code and testing suites so they can be the people to develop our testing structure. They are great people and excellent Manual QAers but they really are not developers.
All our tech managers and team leads are men with the exception of the team lead for QA (obviously).
And just to be clear, the culture is friendly and respectful and no complaints. It's just the gender ratio is pathetic.
So our tech gender ratio is really 17 people and 3 women which is 17%.
If you want to consider the QA team a dev team to bump up the numbers, you get 21 with 7, that's still only 33%.
At a recent company meeting, they were talking about how diverse our workforce is and blah blah blah (I tune out most of that stuff as we are fully remote and I spend most of my time coding), but then they showed a slide that claimed our gender ratio for tech roles was like 50% or something.....
I message a colleague at work, being like "where on earth did they get that number??", he was like ":shrug: maybe they are counting the people who use the product we are making?"
To clarify that, the product we work on is rarely used by external customers. Instead we have employees who know how to use our product and correspond on our behalf with external customers. So all these employees are doing is using a webapp the real tech employees develop.
So long story short, my company pulled a number out of nowhere to claim we have gender equity in the tech roles and now I dont know how to trust any stats a company puts out about how equal the gender roles are in their "tech" departments.
In my personal experience, I've found that if a company boasts about their gender ratio but does not follow it up with an actual number or only give a round number with no followup, that they're over exaggerated almost all of the time.
There's only one company in my field that boasts about their gender numbers that I do actually trust, because 1) I used to work for them so I knew the real numbers lol, and 2) they have entire internal groups dedicated to making sure enough women are in leadership roles etc.
They also always include non-cis numbers now btw, which is almost never done, they're proud to mention the exact % of 'other', which isn't a perfect way to go about it but for a company of 8000 people it's something.
But that company literally has equality as one of their pillars so... Yeah.
I have your same experience in that if they give a number, it's a number that does NOT match reality at all.
I always ask for a number when interviewing, because I work in a male dominated field (data management/governance, so lots of devs and engineers) and my interviewers are always (100% of the time) male so I like throwing that question at them to check if they at least think about their gender ratios.
On one hand, I agree.
On the other hand, this was a futile problem to solve at the job level. You don't get a graduating class of, say, 25% women in CS (I don't know the modern statistics) and expect 50% makeup in tech. Not without something horribly wrong occurring.
Any company that really cares about this needs to be doing outreach to high schools, not posting company statistics.
100% this.
I work for a pretty diverse company that mostly tries to get equalization gender-wise, but most STEM female types don't get into power generation. There are a few of us, but even the departments that have a higher percentage are corporate and more "office" jobs, not [power] plant-type.
For example, where I work there are 32 people. Three are women, and I am one of those women. I'm the engineer. The other two are the business manager and office admin - so the jobs we typically are "used" to seeing women in. I know our HR rep stops in 2-3 times a year to visit local schools for recruiting and always pushes for increasing diversity (of those 32 people, 31 are "standard" white American; the one other is from Spain), but even when I was going for my degree in a very racial-diverse environment, females were not the majority. There were a decent amount, but not equally based on what a general representation of the population could suggest.
You have to start deeper. I am lucky, I suppose, as my parents were fine with me wanting to do what I chose (even if it took WAY too long to figure that out), and my dad did encourage me quite a bit, but not in a corralling way. But the hard fact is that most females do not gravitate towards STEM. [And I'm using that simply because that's where I work, that's what I see.] My sister was a firefighter for years before she had a few kids and settled down. My other sister's only daughter is doing some nursing type stuff for her education, but she has a side job working with a local business that builds custom motorcycles. I know we (that is, us as a society) are slowly breaking the mold, and that's where it has to start to succeed.
This is true if we're talking about the whole industry, but for an individual company, they can do things to establish a pipeline that improves their diversity, such as sponsoring events with the Society of Women engineers and similar groups.
But I also agree with your point that STEM education needs to be improved for younger ages too.
I think those stats were always virtue signaling. If I see no diversity during my interview process with a company I assume they’re not diverse.
Tech companies love to boast about anything they can, whether or not it matters.
Software engineering is engineering. But middle-management and sales teams drive the world, so we'll always be beholden to what they think is important, and how they think they can sell the product.
Whatever. So long as the bridge doesnt' fall down.