Initiative for Women In Business – Rotman School of Management
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Initiatives to encourage girls and women to pursue technical careers haven’t translated into the realities of the workplace
Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren
This is an exciting time for women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) industries. However, there are still lots of challenges to overcome before true systemic change results in women being treated equally. What is the current status of women in STEM in Canada? What are the challenges and solutions? And what can be done to change the status quo?
Overview of the status of women in STEM in Canada
In the tech industry, the quit rate for women is more than twice as high as it is for men.
While there have been many initiatives designed to encourage girls and young women to pursue technical careers, as well as programs and organizations that advocate for women leaders, research from the Center for Creative Leadership shows that those investments don’t translate into the realities of the workplace, where very few women are actually retained and promoted to senior roles in STEM[i]. Across the board, the quit rate is higher for women than for men in STEM[ii]; this is especially true in the tech industry, where the quit rate for women (41%) is more than twice as high as it is for men (17%).[iii] Furthermore, instead of progressing into more senior engineering and leadership roles as they gain experience, many women end up moving into project management and marketing positions. This is a loss for STEM industries that must be addressed.
Where’s the Dial Now?, a 2017 study by Toronto-based organization #MovetheDial, MaRS and PwC Canada that surveyed over 900 Canadian tech firms, confirmed that gender inequality exists in the industry. Only 5% of Canadian tech companies had a solo female CEO and only 13% of executive team members were women; 53% of tech companies had no female executives; and women accounted for an average of 8% of director roles. Additionally, 73% of firms had no women on their boards; 70% of Canadian venture capital firms that finance young tech firms had no female partners; and only 12% of all partners were women. Although this study was tech-specific, the trends are unfortunately similar for all STEM fields. According to a PEW Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, for instance, women make up 75% of health-care practitioners and technicians, but only 25% of computer professionals and only 14% of engineering professionals[iv].
Overview of the challenges faced by women in STEM
In recent years, different studies have been conducted in order to determine why the figures on female retention and promotion in STEM fields are so dire, with the hope that companies can try to address the root of the problem. Research shows that several factors play a role in women leaving their jobs or being unable to access leadership positions.
Some of the most common issues with regard to the corporate culture are pay inequality, a lack of mentorship and coaching, implicit gender bias, unpaid maternity leave and a lack of flexibility around outside commitments, especially family[v]. Ultimately, many women switch companies to move up the corporate ladder or end up leaving their fields altogether. Companies need to be more proactive about fostering an inclusive, collaborative work environment where women feel safe (and supported) to brainstorm, try out new ideas and put them into practice.
Solutions for increasing women’s retention and access to leadership in STEM
The issues connected to why STEM women leave their jobs and/or are unable to rise to the ranks of upper management are complex and interrelated, as are the solutions. However, there are several straightforward steps that companies can take to improve the workplace culture for women and help buck these trends.
In the office, employers can provide opportunities for mentorship and peer coaching to their female employees – recognizing their talent and potential by investing in their professional development[vi]. Both mentoring and peer coaching offer a safe environment for developmental feedback to be exchanged and mutual learning to occur, which helps not only the women, but the company[vii].
… instead of progressing into more senior engineering and leadership roles as they gain experience, many women end up moving into project management and marketing positions. This is a loss for STEM industries that must be addressed.
Outside of work, women often place a high premium on flexibility, so that they can pursue personal interests and/or have more time with their families. If women have children, an employer can invest in their future at the company by providing paid maternity leave as well as better (and more) childcare options to relieve the financial strain, while also giving the employee more time and energy to focus on her career[viii].
YES, a non-profit organization that is committed to career and business development for Quebecers, has developed a variety of initiatives over the past seven years to promote the recruitment, retention and advancement of women in STEM. Its Women in Tech project (2012-2015) focused on supporting and encouraging women to break into the tech industry, with a coaching series, mentorships, internships and workshops.
Currently, YES is running a project called Systemic Change: Advancing Women in STEM, which aims to increase the understanding of systems and institutional practices that affect women in STEM; provide access to strategies, tools and frameworks to help with the promotion and retention of women in STEM; and promote internal initiatives that will support female employees and influence their organizations to counteract gender bias. The project’s findings as well as a library of tools, resources, policy recommendations, and research will be available at www.YESAdvanceWomen.com in the coming weeks.
These initiatives are just a couple examples of how YES is working to engage employees and management across Canada to advance the status of women in STEM.
Why women give STEM companies a competitive edge
A diverse workplace reflects the diverse world we live in. Women are themselves customers and bring a unique and diverse perspective to any project – not to mention that female-led teams tend to have greater precision and attention to detail[ix], which means that they are more efficient and productive. In short, hiring and retaining women in STEM is not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do, for all Canadian STEM companies.
Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren is a writer, translator and editor. She earned her BA from the University of Michigan and her MFA from Columbia University. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she is now based out of Montreal.
The words of my doctor from earlier that morning were still ringing in my ears when I found myself slamming the brakes of my car to avoid a nasty collision. An incompetent driver was cutting across two lanes at a roundabout just in front of me. Still perspiring somewhat I carried on to drop off my screaming child with the nanny. It was a hectic morning.
Now let’s stop to take a breath and ponder on this story. Was the doctor you imagined male? Was the bad driver female? And what of the nanny and the narrator? Females too? If so, you have just experienced unconscious gender bias. You are not alone. Even the almighty Google image search “thinks” 75% of doctors are male but in reality women make up just over half of GPs in the UK. In fact Google has been accused of unconscious bias in its own operations as over 79% of its managers and engineers are male. Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo are not far behind.
What exactly is unconscious gender bias and why do we have it? Unconscious, or implicit, bias happens outside of our control and awareness. It’s automatic and reflects the associations we acquire as we socialise into the culture we grow up in. You can test your own implicit biases more scientifically by taking this Implicit Association Test. The test was designed to capture the brain’s learnt automatic associations. Since it is based on time reactions it can bypass our social desirability concerns and tap into unconscious biases. As such it is reportedly superior to self-report measures of prejudice in predicting behaviours.
Implicit bias is a result of our mind developing mental shortcuts to navigate the complexities of reality efficiently. It is often evolutionarily adaptive. For example, we automatically favour flowers over insects, which protects us from being stung by something that might harm us – a spider for example. This is both a normal preference for most people but has also been seen in implicit association tests. However, implicit association studies also show that we favour the young over the old, the white over the black and heterosexuals over homosexuals. But what about unconscious gender biases?
Wonderful people
Women are wonderful, or are they? You may be surprised to learn that research reports that we consistently prefer women over men and mothers over fathers implicitly. This is akin to the WAW (“women-are-wonderful”) effect – women being perceived positively on the whole as they are stereotyped as supportive, nice and gentile.
This effect, however, disappears, and even reverses, the moment women step in to the “male domain” or otherwise challenge stereotypical expectations. For example, people implicitly (and explicitly)prefer male to female authority figures, male to female leaders and non-feminist women to feminists. My own research shows that female students implicitly prefer housewives over businesswomen. The implicit pro-female preference also reverses in men when they expect to interact with a superior woman as opposed to an equal or subordinate one.
We only need to look to the recent American presidential election to see some real life examples of this effect. Donald Trump himself claimed that “nobody respects women more than I do” just three months before a record of his boastful groping account was revealed.
Turns out most of us are more comfortable with male businessmen than female ones. OPOLJA
So what about implicit bias towards men? Are they wonderful too? Again, it depends. Women implicitly prefer an egalitarian to a sexist or “typical” man, while men prefer that same egalitarian male less. Male public and private sector workers in my samples show slight implicit preference for a househusband over a businessman male type – perhaps due to the homely men’s greater likeability. Still, when compared to women, traditional males – such as those in authority or leadership roles – are preferred.
What can we do about it?
Why does this matter and what can we do about it? Unconscious bias is particularly problematic in the world of work and education. Even in a supposedly objective academic setting male applicants for lab manager position in one experiment were hired more often and offered more money when their name was John as opposed to Jennifer – despite identical CVs. When professional women become mothers they suddenly are perceived as less competent – a trade-off which does not affect men when they become fathers.
Unconscious bias limits, among others, people’s occupational prospects. The first step to deal with this is an awareness of the problem. The nature of our cognition and thinking processes means that all of us are vulnerable to various unconscious biases and all of us may be subjected to them. For example, one study showed that men under-performed on social sensitivity tests (for example decoding nonverbal cues) when they were told that the test assessed social sensitivity and produced better scores for women than men. Men who were told that the test assessed information processing did not under-perform.
Being aware of our own unconscious bias can help. However, prevention requires motivation. Therefore, anonymised recruitment processes, mentorship, carefully managed collaborative work environment and training can also help.
However, since unconscious bias has its roots in the social world we live – where we learn associations from the gender roles we see around us – the surest way to diminish it is to provide alternative associations.
This could be achieved by encouraging equal participation of men and women across traditionally gendered social roles. Once all doctors, drivers, nannies and world leaders are split fairly between male and female – and we see this represented across the media and elsewhere – over time we can move towards equal implicit associations. In the meantime we need to at least make the unconscious conscious so that it is less likely to play a trick on us.
Cynthia Enloe, a prominent scholar in the area of gender, challenges us to ask “Where are the women?” When we ask this question, Enloe argues, we become aware of the attitudes and behaviours that sustain inequality, aggression, poverty, gender based violence, and much more. We begin to see that sustainable solutions that benefit all peoples economically and socially come from elevating the status of women in all spheres of decision making.
Women represent half of all professional jobs today, but only 4% of CEOs in the S&P 500 are held by women.
Surprisingly, that percentage hasn’t really changed much in the last ten years.
The authors of a new book, The Influence Effect: A New Path to Power for Women Leaders, argue that what works for men on the job doesn’t work for women and share more about their extensive research and experience in the area of women in leadership.
Isis H. Settles, PhD, is associate professor in the department of psychology at Michigan State University (MSU) in the social-personality interest group. Her research on this topic examines women’s attrition in STEM (specifically within the natural sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics) by focusing on two broad aspects of their experiences:
Challenges women face.
Protective factors that can ameliorate the negative impact of such experiences.
In this Science Brief, she reviews her work in these areas, focusing primarily on the experiences of women as undergraduate and graduate students and as faculty members in university settings.
Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press Published Wednesday, November 29, 2017
In the basement of McGill University’s engineering building, Elizabeth O’Meara punches the word “engineer” into a Google Image search and watches the screen fill with pictures of men in construction helmets.
“It’s kind of disgraceful,” O’Meara tells her audience, a group of Grade 11 students she’s hoping to encourage to pursue her own field of study. “Not everyone wears hard hats in engineering.
“And also, they’re all dudes. They’re also all white.”
O’Meara, a 19-year old first-year bioengineering student, is well aware she doesn’t represent the face of most engineering hopefuls.
Her presentation is part of a wider effort to change the fact that women remain vastly under-represented in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, despite sustained efforts to close the gap.
More than four in 10 Canadian women aged 25 to 34 had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2016, compared with less than 33 per cent in 2006, according to the latest batch of census numbers released Wednesday by Statistics Canada.
However, of those women with an earned doctorate, only about one-quarter opted for architecture, engineering and related technologies, the numbers show. And among those younger Canadians with bachelor’s degrees or higher, five times as many men as women opted to follow a path towards science, technology, engineering or math.
Considering the fact that overall, fewer than 20 per cent of working-age Canadians with post-secondary degrees, men and women alike, chose the STEM path, the female ranks are small indeed
As demand for STEM-related jobs increases, the lack of women in such high-paying fields could have serious economic consequences, a report released earlier this year by TD Economics suggests.
“It will be difficult to close, or possibly even further narrow, the overall gender wage gap if women fail to make stronger inroads,” it read.
The gender divide persists, despite years of efforts by advocacy groups, universities and individuals to tackle systemic gender bias and promote the importance of STEM.
These efforts range from pink-coloured building blocks for toddlers and science camps geared towards girls to a governmental threat to strip funding from research universities that fail to address diversity issues.
“It’s really upsetting, and it’s something we’re thinking about a lot,” said Ketra Schmitt, a professor at Concordia University’s Centre for Engineering in Society.
Experts struggle to explain why women continue to flock to fields such as education and health sciences — women accounted for 92.7 per cent of young nursing graduates with bachelor’s degrees in 2016 — while more men choose engineering.
Studies suggest the reasons are multiple and complex, including systemic gender bias, a tendency for girls to underestimate their own math abilities and a lack of role models at the top levels.
The TD Economics report found that even after graduation, women disproportionately end up in lower-paying technical roles than higher paid professional ones.
Schmitt said researchers often sum up the problem using the metaphor of a “leaky pipeline” that sees girls and women drop out at every step, beginning in elementary school and continuing into their professional lives.
The student group O’Meara represents, called Promoting Opportunities for Women in Engineering (POWE), is trying to create a supportive community for female students that also offers mentorship and networking opportunities to help them break into the field.
They also do outreach work with local elementary schools, high schools and junior colleges, including O’Meara’s recent presentation and workshop.
Part of the group’s mission is to look at the lack of female role models found at every level of the profession.
“When you don’t have role models, that affects everybody further down on the chain,” said Taylor Lynn Curtis, a second-year software engineering student who co-presented with O’Meara.
They’re hoping to make a difference to girls like 16-year-old Maya Esar, who attended the presentation with the rest of her class.
Esar hopes to go on to study computer science, eventually translating her interest in programming and art into a successful career designing websites or video games.
Despite being the only girl in her school’s coding club, the teen says it’s never occurred to her to think of programming as just a “guy thing.”
Valerie Davidson, Victoria Kaspi and Shohini Ghose were among the female academics interviewed by journalist Harriet Eisenkraft for the feature on roadblocks for women academics in science. They had particularly pertinent things to say about their career paths, and not everything made it into the final article.
Women face particular obstacles when it comes to fair treatment and career opportunities in Information Technology, just as they do in other male-dominated fields. Yet there is hope but a lot of efforts has to be made as well to recruit and retain women in IT. First of all, we must understand why they remain an “under-exploited” talent pool in IT in Quebec and elsewhere.
Carol-Anne Gauthier
I’ve been told that when the tech industry started growing, employment scholars were optimistic that this new sector would be free from gender stereotypes and occupational segregation because it had no historically-rooted “justifications” like physical strength or competencies in care for them. This optimism, however, did not last as numerous studies have shown that women face particular obstacles when it comes to fair treatment and career opportunities in IT (Information Technology)—just as they do in other male-dominated fields.
A male-dominated field
Many studies have taken an in-depth look at the low proportion of women and girls choosing to study in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) including IT [1]; some have found that stereotypes about programmers as well as negative experiences in the classroom are some of the factors that explain this phenomenon [2], [3]. Nevertheless, some women do enter and stay in the IT industry, and there is a growing body of work examining their experiences. International studies paint a relatively dire portrait of the realities of women in tech.
They show how the field’s masculine culture and gender bias create a host of problems for women, including harassment and hostile work environments, leading many of them to leave the industry [4]. They also show how women move more slowly up the corporate ladder and are rare at the top—which is true of many industries and has been studied extensively in management studies [5]. In Canada, women represent roughly 25% of workers in the tech industry, 19% of workers in technological occupations and roughly 20% of people in management positions in the Information and Communications Technologies sector (Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey, 2016, cited by a Women in Communications and Technology report in 2017). Research on women in IT in Canada has yielded results similar to those in other developed nations [6].
A seemingly different Quebec
In Quebec, women’s representation in IT is similar to Canada’s. In 2015, the Chaire Claire-Bonenfant – Femmes, savoirs et sociétés (Université Laval) teamed up with TECHNOCompétences and began working on a project funded by Status of Women Canada. One of its goals was to document and understand the realities of women in the IT sector in Quebec. The research team from the Chaire is composed of two researchers specialized in IT (with many years’ experience in the industry) and two researchers specialized in women’s studies and employment equity. We conducted semi-structured interviews with managers and high-potential women in three large organizations (software development, IT consulting and video games).
We found many similarities but also some seemingly notable differences between the industry in Quebec and in the rest of Canada (see first results). These revolved mainly around two themes.
One difference is that the women we met felt they were generally well accepted in the industry and did not feel that it was particularly harsh or unfair to them as women—although some occurrences of unfair treatment and harassment were found. They did, however, recognize that it was a predominantly masculine field which meant they had to adhere to certain norms.
Another difference concerns parental leave and work-life balance. Quebec has a generous program for maternity, parental and paternal leave, that IT workers—especially those currently in their thirties—take seriously. Organizations and work teams were generally respectful of employees and managers that take these leaves. However, many agreed that temporarily leaving work, for whatever reason, often meant leaving behind influential networks and sacrificing career advancement in the short and intermediate term.
Where there are true efforts, there is optimism
The “good” news is that IT companies and IT-intensive industries (e.g. finance, online retail, etc.) face challenges in recruiting and retaining talent, which makes it a prime industry in which to see the “business case” for diversity in action. “Women in IT” is a hot topic, and business leaders generally recognize that women are an “under-exploited” talent pool. Of course, this doesn’t always go smoothly, as recent events at Google illustrate.
Recruiting and retaining women means more than just getting girls interested in pursuing studies in IT and offering flexible schedules permitting work-life balance.
In the end, what employers must understand is that recruiting and retaining women means more than just getting girls interested in pursuing studies in IT (that’s not to say that this isn’t a great place to start!), and offering flexible schedules permitting work-life balance (although these are much appreciated by employees and managers alike). These practices, although useful, hide another reality, namely, that work-life balance usually means working extra hours from home [7]. It also means taking a hard look at the masculine culture present in these high-performance jobs, as well as the subtle ways in which organizational practices and gender bias can pose obstacles to women pursuing careers in IT.
