What is it about girls and IT?

What is it about girls and IT?
By Jessica Twentyman


A middle-class home in 1980s Dublin, and a young girl with an aptitude for maths and sciences has just eagerly announced to her engineer father that she intends to follow in his footsteps. His response: “I’d never hire a woman as an engineer.”

Emma McGrattan did not take that paternal guidance to heart. Today, she is senior vice-president of engineering at Ingres, an open source database company, responsible for the development and integration of the company’s flagship database and associated products.

Recognised as a leading authority in her field, with a reputation for balancing a keen intelligence with refreshing Irish humour and frankness, it is no surprise that she is sometimes referred to as a “firecracker” by colleagues.

“At the time, I thought my dad was just using some kind of reverse psychology to spur me on,” she recalls. “Now that I’m more cynical, I suspect he simply didn’t see a place for women in the field of engineering.

“But times and attitudes have changed and, either way, I’ve had a fabulous time in my chosen profession. My work is incredibly rewarding to me and I hate to think that talented young women might be missing out on that.”

Ms McGrattan’s passion is widely echoed by other women who have succeeded in what remains an overwhelmingly male-dominated business.

“I’m always urging my human resources department to get me more resumés from women and encouraging my managers to bring their daughters into work,” says Siki Giunta, president and CEO of Managed Objects, the business service management software company. “We need to make young women understand the scope of this business and the excellent pay and promotion opportunities it has to offer, regardless of gender,” she says.

Some, it seems, are taking direct action. “If I see a man and a woman candidate who are equally qualified to take a role in my organisation, I’ll pick the woman every time,” says Daphna Steinmetz, chief innovation officer at Comverse, the telecommunications software company. “Because I want to extend the opportunities I’ve enjoyed to other women.”

But despite glowing reports from those at the top of the profession, the message appears not to be getting through to their potential successors. Only one in five members of the global IT workforce is female and research suggests that figure has taken a downturn in recent years.

“I find news of such declines very sobering in light of the increasing influence of technology in all our lives and the fact that women make up half the working population. There’s a growing disconnect between who’s using technology and who’s delivering it and that needs to be addressed,” says Charmaine Eggberry, vice-president and managing director for EMEA at Research in Motion (RIM), developer and manufacturer of the BlackBerry.

The situation could get worse before it gets better, she warns. In a recent survey commissioned by her company, 90 per cent of young people of both sexes aged between 11 and 16 said they thought using technology was “cool” and regularly chatted with their friends about technology. Yet only 28 per cent of girls had considered a career in technology, compared with more than 52 per cent of boys.

“There’s clearly a gap between the playground and the careers centre,” Ms Eggberry says. “My belief is that we need to be far more upfront about how we showcase the success stories and present young women with role models who give them something to aim for.” That, she adds, is the aim of the BlackBerry Women and Technology Awards, which the company has organised in the UK since 2005.

Role models notwithstanding, what is also needed is a clarification of the skills and qualifications the IT industry is looking for in new recruits, says Rikke Helms, vice-president and managing director for Europe at mobile workforce software provider Dexterra.

“The industry is not driven entirely by engineers,” she points out. “I started out as a management trainee in a hotel in Denmark, before progressing to do a business administration degree at the University of Copenhagen. My background isn’t technical at all – yet I was still IBM’s first female vice-president in EMEA,” she says.

In fact, says Jacqueline de Rojas, managing director for Novell in the UK and Ireland, outdated “geeky” stereotypes obscure the reality of business technology jobs today: “Technology organisations are crying out for candidates from a broad range of disciplines who can analyse how businesses run and who can manage teams and projects effectively,” she says.

Much of the work under way at such companies, she adds, capitalises on women’s greatest perceived strengths – communication, collaboration and problem-solving.

This is controversial territory, but like Ms de Rojas, most senior female IT professionals broadly acknowledge vital general differences in the ways that men and women in their industry approach their work – allowing, of course for exceptions.

Take Ms McGrattan at Ingres: if shown pieces of code, she believes she could guess whether it was written by a man or a woman, and be right “at least 80 per cent of the time”.

“In general, code written by women is more straightforward and more practical – it’s clear what problem the functions are meant to solve and why. Male programmers are more likely to hide clever tricks behind complicated code and incorporate functions for the sake of it,” she says.

These differences, she adds, can be complementary if blended correctly. “Where men and women work on technology projects together, you tend to get a far better, more balanced result,” she says. This rule, she adds, applies to numerous projects and tasks that go on within the IT industry.

So is the industry missing out on a valuable “talent bank” of skills by failing to attract more women? Analysts at IT market research company Gartner think so. Last year, Gartner analyst Kathy Harris was lead author on a report that set out to explore the issue, drawing on extensive biological, psychological and behavioural research.

“Our review of the summary literature on gender studies revealed that a small subset of general characteristics of men versus women have been demonstrated so often that they have become de facto,” she says.

Women, she found, tend to demonstrate better bilateral brain involvement in listening – in combining left-brain thinking (logic, analysis and a concern for accuracy) with right-brain thinking (aesthetics, feeling and creativity) simultaneously. This ability, she says, is highly prized by the IT sector in roles such as business analyst and team leader.

Women are generally held to be better at language skills, such as verbal fluency, giving them an advantage in human discourse and writing activities. They also score better on social skills and understanding other people’s viewpoints, valuable in team building and negotiation.

Men, by contrast, score higher at complex mental visualisation and pattern-spotting tasks, which has important implications for certain aspects of engineering. They are also inclined to be more aggressive and risk-taking, which can contribute to innovation and competitiveness in a dynamic industry.

The IT industry cannot continue to ignore or underplay such differences, Ms Harris contends. “Traits that are typically female, such as language skills, empathy, social orientation and listening, will contribute to helping organisations understand, interpret and design the right attributes into technology products and services. Male traits, such as spatial visualisation, and behaviours, including their focus on features and risk taking, will contribute to overall design and to pushing the envelope on functionality.”

Had the IT industry acknowledged and embraced these differences earlier on in its development, it might be a very different place today, says Karyn Mashima, senior vice-president of strategy and technology at telecommunications supplier Avaya.

“I think we’d have seen greater interoperability between products and the development of industry standards far sooner,” she says. “There would have been more partnerships, more focus on customer problems and less focus on what competitors were doing.”

With the IT industry facing a worsening shortfall in skills, companies will need to work harder and look wider in order to find the candidates that they need to prosper, says Blanca Trevino, president and CEO of Softtek, the software development company.

“The real winners will not be the companies that simply master bits and bytes, but those that are able to combine technology expertise with the human side of technology,” she argues. “In terms of humanising technology, women are well-equipped by nature.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008