There is no denying that finding a women working in the field of information technology is a rare occurrence. At my current client, I have only seen 1 women in a sea of male developers; it was a similar story at my previous client. Luckily for me and my kind, ThoughtWorks wants to change this.
I find that a few people still have to be convinced that it is a good thing for women to be in technology. Why should we actively seek to improve the number of women in technology? Various people have answers which a supported by research and their findings, like Innovation is enabled best in teams which are 50:50 [1] and the fact that there is no difference in the abilities between males and females except for certain physical tasks like throwing a ball. But these are not my reasons why we should strive to get equal numbers of women and men in technology (although, they do help to convince those out there who say there is no problem).
Want to know my number one answer to why the number of men and women should be equal?
Why not.
Unfortunately, not everyone likes the idea of actively recruiting more women. The most common outcry that I hear to that statement is “we want hire good people, not just hire someone because they are a women”. I am quite amazed at the number of times this statement arises. However, I agree with it. I don’t want women in my organisation just because they are female. But do these nay-sayers really believe that we would hire any just girl off the street without regard to their qualifications.
Increasing the number of women recruited is not about hiring any women who acts for a job; nor is it about discounting a potential hire because they are male. It’s about finding new ways to reach out to the technologists so the target audience has a higher percentage of women.
My final imparting note, for now, is to look around your workplace and answer these 3 small questions.
How many women do you work with?
Do you think that it’s acceptable?
What are you going to do about it?