Duchess
Globally Connecting Women in Java Technology

This article is the second part of a three-part series on Women in IT that I wrote after presenting the information at a Devoxx BOF. The first part of this series talked about challenges for women entering and pursuing a career in IT, followed by this article on reasons why more women should be in IT. The series ends with strategies to tackle the issues. This series of articles aims to make visible and raise the awareness of the challenges, reasons, and strategies for women in IT.

Shortage of Qualified IT professionals
In a press release for International Women’s Day (March 8, 2008), Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, calls for more women in Europe’s ICT. In Europe, there is a current shortage of around 300,000 qualified IT staff. On average world-wide, women consists of around 25% or less of the IT workforce with the exception of countries from the former Soviet block, which pulls the average up for the entire Europe to 28%. In general, the percentage of women obtaining a computer science degree have decreased in recent years. Despite the uncertainties of the current global financial climate, I believe that more women should still join the IT profession. With the introduction of a global economy, companies and countries have to redefine themselves in terms of core competencies. Women can contribute to the success of IT because diversity leads to innovation, which in turn, is the basis for economic growth.

Communications and Languages Skills
It is widely accepted that communication is essential to the success of a project, especially in the global world with outsourcing and distributed teams. In an article about why more women should consider a career in computer programming, the author argues that women can contribute a lot to the field because of their intrinsic language and communications skills. He even goes one step further to say that linguistic skill is even more important than mathematical skill in computer programming, because programming languages are after all, languages. People with better language skill produce better code because the code would be more readable. This would in turn lead to lower development and maintenance costs. As Martin Fowler once said, “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand, but only good programmers write code that humans can understand.” A team must understand each other to produce the software together. Another related article was called “Men write code from Mars, Women write more helpful code from Venus”. In it, the author states that women want to write clear and concise code, because they think about the people who will use the code later. I, myself, have encountered guys who think they’re clever when they write cryptic code that no one understands. But this type of attitude is detrimental to a company. A funny quote that I’ve come across about this is: “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Martin Golding. Coding is not only about communicating with the computer, but it is one of the ways that you communicate with your team.

Women’s Increasing Purchase Power
In a study by McKinsey, an international management and consultancy firm, Women Matter: Gender Diversity, a Corporate Performance Driver, women are the driving force behind more than 70% of all household purchasing decisions and are 47% of PC users in Europe. In the US, women are central to 94% of home furnishing purchases, 91% of home purchases, 60% of vehicle purchases and 50% of business travel purchases. In Japan, women influence 60% of new car purchases. In the Business Case for Gender Diversity, while women influence more than 80% of consumer spending decisions, 90% of technology products and services are designed by men. Including women in the design process of technology means more competitive products in the market. Women, being half of the population, are paramount to user-driven innovation and can bring new markets and open up new lines of business. Some companies have started to take notice of the purchasing power of women. For example, in the US, Best Buy, through the leadership of Julie Gilbert and her WOLF program, increased female market share by more than $3.6 billion, increased the number of female job applicants by 37 percent, and reduced female employee turnover by 5.7 percent.

Diversity Leads to Innovation
The Business Case for Gender Diversity states that diversity makes for better decision-making at all organizational levels. Diversity is especially important for problem solving and innovation, both extremely relevant for IT. In the article Diversity Powers Innovation, the author writes that diverse teams find more innovative solutions, get stuck less often, and are able to find a solution faster because they have different perspectives within the team. In fact, diverse teams even outperform teams of experts, as experts are often trained to think in the same way. In other words, diversity trumps ability. Diversity leads to better innovation, which is the seed of economic growth.

Women Leadership Shows Better Performance
In the same study on gender diversity as a corporate performance driver mentioned above, companies in Europe, America, and Asia, across a spectrum of industries from energy to financial institutions were rated on nine criteria:

• leadership
• direction
• accountability
• coordination and control
• innovation
• external orientation
• capability, motivation
• work environment and values

What they found was that the companies with a higher proportion of women in top management performed higher on average in all nine criteria. After this study that noted a positive impact of women at the top on operational excellence, a second study compared 89 European listed companies with a stock market capitalization of over €150 million and a high proportion of women in the board and in top management with other companies in their sectors. The results of this second study shows that companies with women in top management also performed better financially: on return of equity, operating results, and stock price growth. Although McKinsey was quick to point out that correlation is not necessarily cause, the result can only be argued in favor of gender diversity.

Also in this series:

• Part 1: Challenges for Women Entering and Pursuing a Career in IT
• Part 3: Strategies to Tackle the Issues

References