Listen: Next in Tech | Episode 63: Women in Technology Study results

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Eric Hanselman

Welcome to Next in Tech, an S&P Global Market Intelligence podcast where the world of emerging tech lives. I'm your host, Eric Hanselman, Principal Research Analyst for the 451 Research arm of S&P Global Market Intelligence. And today, we'll be discussing the results of the Women in Technology study with Research Directors, Katie Darden and Melanie Posey, who are also returning podcast guests. So Katie and Melanie, welcome back to the podcast.

Katie Darden

Thanks, Eric.

Melanie Posey

Thanks, Eric. Always happy to be on the podcast.

Eric Hanselman

And happy to have you on, especially when we've got groundbreaking research like this. The Women in Tech project covers aspects that are far reaching. And I want to dig into the background, and really, what are its goals?

Katie Darden

Yes, Eric. Well, the project arose from conversations that go back many years, in some cases, with colleagues and others working in the tech space about what it means to be a woman in tech, where the opportunities are, and honestly, what some of the challenges are.

Early last year, we started digging deeper on these questions in collaboration with the California Technology Council and WE Global Studios.

So the CTC is an industry organization that works with tech innovators across sectors in California, and WE Global Studios is an innovation venture studio and digital start-up platform that works with women entrepreneurs all over the world. And we all started comparing notes on what we've been hearing anecdotally and through some previous survey work from talented, innovative women and from companies, honestly, that are trying to hire and retain those women. And we came out with some driving questions that evolved over the course of the study, but we really wanted to understand some of the structural and cultural factors that either enable women to achieve their full potential as technology industry leaders and innovators or prevent them from doing that.

And we also wanted to recommend some steps that tech companies and companies in other sectors can take to really optimize the benefits that come from a diverse talent pool. And so to answer those questions in a meaningful way, we decided to take them straight to women and conduct a survey, which we did in the fourth quarter of 2021. And as part of that survey, we got responses and heard directly from more than 600 women operating -- working across sectors.

Eric Hanselman

Well, we've had perspectives on diversity, the -- in tech that we've been looking at potentially in a number of different places. Melanie, those are things that you've been managing in the 451 side, but it seems like this is a big step up in terms of what we've been looking at.

Melanie Posey

Absolutely, Eric. And we actually, at 451 Research, started looking at this whole issue of diversity in technology quite a few years ago. And that deep-dive look was occasioned by some of the bad behavior over the years that we've seen various Silicon Valley companies in the late 2000 teens. So it made us take a look at what is it about tech companies and also about technology functions across the board that makes it seem a bit inhospitable to women. So we decided to take a deep dive on this whole issue of workforce diversity in tech.

One reason was because the folks developing all the applications, laying out the digital strategy, designing the UI, training the machine learning algorithms, these all need to be a diverse group of people and representing society at large because our economy is becoming increasingly digital, and this was only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that really jump-started the digitization of our economy.

So that got us to thinking, well, the broad base of folks out there who buy things, who partner with various other companies that are also digitizing their businesses, they want the largest customer base and audience possible. So shouldn't the people developing the technology who enable that also reflect the largest possible tranche of the population at large.

Eric Hanselman

Well, and you raised an interesting point, which is that there ought to be this reflection throughout the technology that's actually supporting this. Sheryl Kingstone was on a couple of episodes ago talking about consumer attitudes about ESG. And it was interesting to see some of those perspectives that as long as they were aligned with consumers' personal experiences or personal situations, there seem to be some very tight binding there. But this is really looking at the inside-out perspective of within technology environments and really looking at attitudes and experiences that have really come from half of that tech workforce.

I mean the challenge, I think, we see in technology, there's that sort of expectation that tech ought to be a discipline that's results-driven but that's clearly not the case. It's not all hard metrics. There are a lot more complex dynamics that are out there. What are those aspects that the project is exploring?

Katie Darden

Yes. I mean it's interesting, Eric, you say it should be results-driven. And I guess it depends on what you mean by results. As I said, our study surveyed women across sectors from the actual technology companies and media and telecom space to financials to health care, to consumer companies and others. And all of these industries have their own operating metrics, of course, but there are definitely some common threads. Everybody needs revenue and to make a profit. Everybody, as Melanie was saying, has to innovate and compete in this increasingly digital market. Everyone needs to practice smart human capital management.

And as we've been hearing almost constantly in recent months, we are in a very competitive labor market. So at least in the short term, companies want to minimize employee turnover, which can be very costly, and they want to fill their open roles with the best talent as quickly as they can. But longer term, we know people of all genders have been restructuring and really deeply rethinking their personal and professional lives, especially over the last 2-plus pandemic years.

And so longer term, as the reshaping continues, companies want to be in their best position to attract the people who have great ideas, who are extremely innovative and talented and experienced or have great potential. So as you said, we came at this from the inside in and tried to ask directly, particularly women, what they want to see from their employer, what is important to them and what will keep them happy and productive and doing their best work.

Eric Hanselman

So let's dive into the study results. What does it show? And really, what were the indications that we're getting out of the study?

Melanie Posey

I think the most important indication was that almost 60% of the women we surveyed identified flexible work hours and remote work and issues related to work-life balance as a key driver of job satisfaction. And this finding is important because, once again, of the effect of the pandemic and the changes that occasioned, which kind of looked like they're about to become the new normal right now.

So in that respect, some of the outcomes of COVID-19, things that happened by necessity rather than necessarily by choice, have turned out to be quite interesting and quite helpful in boosting overall job satisfaction in the sense that the workplace is just a lot more flexible overall, which makes for a better overall environment and experience as women working in tech.

Eric Hanselman

So it sounds like that was a significant aspect of what the survey respondents were identifying as what was valuable. What were the other aspects that they saw as important in their workplace or their environments?

Katie Darden

Well, the only other -- so Melanie mentioned that nearly 60% of our respondents identified flexible work hours, working from home as a top factor influencing their career satisfaction. The only other factor that we asked about that was identified by a majority of women was seeing women role models in senior leadership positions.

I think as Melanie can elaborate on a bit, we've seen some progress here over the last few years, definitely perceptions of progress from women in this and other surveys. So I think it's -- to the extent that we continue to see more women working in tech and especially in senior positions in tech and in other parts of businesses, we could potentially have a virtuous cycle where if somebody sees someone who looks like them at the most basic level in a senior position, they can envision a path for themselves at that company and a really great road to success, and will be more likely to want to stay with that organization and deliver their best work there as opposed to moving to a competitor or potentially becoming a competitor themselves.

Melanie Posey

Yes. And that's a really important factor, especially for younger women. One interesting aspect of the study that we came up with when we looked at women who were 45 and older versus those who were 45 and younger, what we found is that the younger women tend to be more optimistic about changes on the horizon and think that conditions for women in tech roles had improved over the previous year and would, in fact, continue to improve.

So what Katie says is a very key thing here, that being able to see people who look like you, having more women in senior IT positions in organizations that are rapidly digitizing is really important because it has a normalizing effect overall and kind of bakes into tech, the whole idea that diversity is ultimately important, not just because it's the right thing to do, but it's also something that increases an organization's chances of being successful in their digitization efforts. And digital business actually require the broadest base of customers and partners possible, and having a diverse base of people feeding into their strategies, feeding into those operations is a key thing for success. So it's kind of that saying, doing well by doing good is the motivating factor here.

Eric Hanselman

Well, and it seems like that echoes what we see broadly, which is that representation helps to fuel additional diversity and something that, to Katie's point, it does create that virtuous cycle in terms of identifying that as an organization that they are supporting a broad range of viewpoints, a broad range of people in the roles that are actually running the organization.

Katie Darden

Yes. I would say that virtuous cycle certainly does not create itself. You can often hear companies or even -- and leaders across -- in various forms promoting at least the perception that there are not enough women and other candidates of underrepresented groups for leadership positions, but we have to create and nurture that pipeline from the very beginning, especially among the younger folks that Melanie was mentioning. Nurture -- that optimism is there, let's nurture it and ensure that women -- that every employee has positive experiences in the workplace.

Our survey results were not all sunny by far. We found far too many reports of women who had experienced things like sexual harassment and bullying and inequitable pay and opportunities for advancement. And so there's a lot of work to do there, and we need to make sure that the work to improve to make cultures more healthy across businesses doesn't stagnate, that it continues so that fewer and fewer women and others experience these negative, really detrimental and morale-killing experiences in the workplace.

Eric Hanselman

Yes. The numbers there were troubling, especially harassment numbers. Was it 1 in 3, something on that order?

Katie Darden

That's right. Yes, 1 in 3 women in our study had experienced sexual harassment at some point. 1 in 3 women had experienced bullying. And then maybe less talked about, but still very troubling, are the everyday microaggressions, and 1 in 2 women had reported having experienced everyday microaggressions which can range from being talked down to or having someone take credit for your ideas to all sorts of other things that really are counterproductive to what all of these employees and their larger businesses are trying to achieve.

Eric Hanselman

Yes. I'm a big fan of Ibram Kendi's thought on the term microaggressions, and that you should just actually be identifying them as just aggressions. But it does seem like there are some reasonable rays of light on the positive side for this as well.

Melanie Posey

Absolutely, there are things that you should point out and celebrate that are going in the right direction. And in this survey, we found that the respondents estimated that women hold, on average, 40% of the IT roles in their organizations. And one thing to point out here is that the whole idea of what a tech role is in an organization actually does go beyond just simply IT. A lot of it has to do with things around, say, digital strategy or e-commerce, which always have a tech component, but it's really important that as products, services, strategies are delivered and executed via digital means that you have women in the IT roles and also in the business strategy roles that are shaping what that IT looks like.

So as I mentioned, on average, women are holding about 40% of IT roles in their organizations. And this compares to 27%, which we found in a 451 Research study about 3 years ago. So we're seeing an increase in women's representation in these IT roles, which is undoubtedly a good thing for some of the reasons we talked about with regard to representation in an increasingly diverse digital economy.

And another ray of hope here was just the kind of roles that women specifically in IT positions tend to hold. So historically, when you thought of IT, what you thought of is kind of men in a data center, clustered around the mainframe, dealing with kind of big iron pieces of technology and servers and storage arrays and all of that. And there, women have not been well represented, but the really interesting finding, and I just love this that we found this in the survey was that women are increasingly in transformational IT roles, things like software development, engineering, data and application management rather than in the nontransformational IT roles like infrastructure operations and end-user help desk.

So this is a really positive development that a lot of the forward-looking types of IT roles, women are better represented there. And I think this is a factor related to younger women coming into technology roles, having a technology background from college or from high school who are able to step into these digital specific software-centric kind of roles, which are new to the world in a lot of ways. And so there's still those big iron IT roles out there, but as we're seeing with the advance of the digital economy, adoption of cloud technologies, those become somewhat of a smaller part of the overall IT function.

Eric Hanselman

And having women in roles in which they're setting strategy, doing design visioning, a lot of those pieces have direct impacts on customer experience, on user interfaces, on all of those aspects that also are important to reflect a diverse perspective in terms of the audience that they're trying to engage.

Melanie Posey

Absolutely, Eric. And I think that most important when you start talking about the machine learning algorithms, the way that the models are trained, having representation there is highly important. Again, not just to have a diversity of perspectives and viewpoints and like experience reflected, but also so that companies can actually get digital business right.

Katie Darden

Yes. And I think that, obviously, gender is really just one piece of the picture here. This is a study on women in technology, so that's where we focused. But obviously, there are many lenses to look through here. And even within our study, we found some more potentially troubling views such as we found that white respondents were more likely than women of other races to say that men and women were paid equally. And so to the extent that we're seeing progress on the gender front, we need to make sure that we look as well at other aspects of people's identity so that we really do have that true holistic diversity of perspectives. And as Melanie was saying, make sure the stuff is working right, working for everyone.

Eric Hanselman

Well, to identify how things ought to be working, what do you see as the most important aspects of the project that organizations should be keeping in mind, both as they're looking to build advocacy as well as planning for growth.

Katie Darden

And one thing that struck Melanie and me over and over again as we were analyzing these survey results, is that women are not a monolith here. There isn't one set of company policies or one type of company culture that's going to work for all women, much less for all employees. And so we found it very interesting to dig into some of the more specific aspects of this data and find these key distinctions in terms of women of different age groups, women in different roles.

There were some surprises there. So for example, we mentioned earlier that, by far, the most important driver of career satisfaction for the -- our respondents was that workplace flexibility and the ability to work from home. Here is what we found. One of our surprises, we might have thought that women with children at home would be more likely to value that flexibility, in fact, it was on the opposite, we found that women without children at home were significantly more likely to see workplace flexibility, remote work as a key driver of job satisfaction. So if there's a lesson there, I think it's to interrogate your assumptions about what matters and what matters to whom because you might find that tweaks or changes to your workplace setup or culture can have some surprising effects where you might not have expected it.

Eric Hanselman

Well, I mean this is an area where we've got to work to overcome what is that natural human tendency to pigeonhole, to stereotype and it's really easy to sort of say, "Oh, women's issues are x or these are the kinds of representational issues that you've got to deal with," when in fact, we're dealing with humans. We're dealing with a population that is highly varied. And we've got to ensure that we're working to include aspects of that, but also understand that there's a lot of variability. And Katie, to your point, you may encounter some surprising aspects, but this is something where, I guess, organizations should be looking for those things that could be surprising.

Melanie Posey

Absolutely. To the point you made earlier, Eric, about women are not a monolith. Employees, in general, are not a monolith. There are lots of ways that organizations can retain existing tech talent and attract new tech talent. Obviously, work-life balance is important for all of us across the board, but some other factors we found that influence the plans to remain with the current employer have to do with respect from colleagues and customers. So that speaks to company culture.

Also the point about women role models that we made earlier. So women working alongside you as well as women in senior leadership positions tends to have a virtual cycle effect. And also the issue of being able to participate in innovative, creative, strategic projects and assignments. I think that's going to be, longer term, one of the key factors of career satisfaction for women in tech and organizations' ability to recruit and hold on to tech talent.

As again, I keep repeating this, but it can't be overstated that as our economy becomes more and more digital, having women in tech roles go up the ranks of various companies and start being able to influence and implement strategies is going to be a key component of maintaining and even expanding the satisfaction of women in tech roles and also accelerating and pushing forward companies' success at their own digitization.

Eric Hanselman

It gets back to this, to the idea of continuing that virtuous cycle, making sure that women are represented in key projects, and those are the things that are going to lead to additional responsibilities, elevated roles. It's all one big picture. Now these are great and important perspectives. So thank you both for being back on the podcast, especially with such great data.

Melanie Posey

Happy to join, Eric, and happy for this opportunity to talk about these very important findings and to present this sort of nuanced picture of things that things are getting better, but there are still problems ahead. Women in technology will become, hopefully at some point, unremarkable.

Katie Darden

Couldn't have said it better myself. We are happy to have had this opportunity to talk about the results of the study and looking forward to the further work ahead, both for us and for everybody in the space.

Eric Hanselman

Well, many thanks. And that is it for this episode of Next in Tech. Thank you to our audience for staying with us. And thanks to our production team, including [ Caroline Wright, Caterina Iacoviello, Ethan Zimman ] and the marketing events teams and our studio lead, [ Kyle Cangialosi ].

I hope you'll join us for our next episode where we'll be talking about digital infrastructure, the integration of cell towers and data centers and the potential for what that holds. I hope you'll join us then because there is always something next in tech.