The demand for digital talent is currently very high and growing rapidly, so much so that companies are embarking on a desperate race to recruit the best talent. However, they are missing a huge opportunity by not reaching out to women more effectively. Women make up 36% of college graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, but account for only 25% of the STEM workforce and only 9% of leadership profiles in companies recruiting STEM profiles.
Adding more women to the digital workforce will do more than just meet a growing need for talent. BCG research has shown that there are real benefits, both operational and financial, in creating more gender-balanced work teams and leadership teams. Companies where women are equally represented are more innovative, and the women who work in them have higher levels of engagement.
As part of the Boston Consulting Group's research, reflected in the article Winning the Race for Women in Digital, a framework for analysing gender diversity issues has been developed that looks at different stages of the career path: recruitment, retention, promotion and representation of women in leadership positions. These four stages are interrelated: companies are unlikely to hire more women for digital roles if they cannot retain and promote those already in the organisation. In addition, it will be more difficult to retain talent if there are no female roles in leadership positions within companies. Therefore, companies need an approach that addresses all four stages, starting with a clear statement of intent that gender diversity is a priority.
The good news is that digital technology is at an inflection point in terms of growth, which means there is time for companies to catch up. Those companies that actively seek out the right talent and launch targeted initiatives to attract those candidates will improve the company's talent pipeline. And those that manage to retain and promote women to more senior positions will actually win the race for digital talent.
WOMEN, VITAL IN THE DIGITAL SPHERE
Digitalisation is transforming businesses across all industries, and companies are investing heavily to implement new systems and tools. However, talent remains a limiting factor for many organisations. The US Department of Labor estimates that there will be more than 1.1 million tech-related job openings in the US by 2024, but more than two-thirds of these positions could be unfilled given the insufficient number of college graduates with tech-related degrees.
Women could help meet this demand, but cultural and social influences have kept them out of STEM-related jobs in the past. Given the smaller pool of female graduates in this field, it is not surprising that they are under-represented in companies.
Some of the women who have the necessary education often choose to work outside traditional companies. Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, CEO and editor of MIT Technology Review, says: "Even when women graduate with a technology-related degree, they are more likely to go into research or apply their skills to a personal project.
In addition, women who are hired in companies often do not stay. They are few in number and have no role models in the companies, so they often feel isolated. For this reason, simply focusing on recruiting does not work.
"Many large tech companies focus on diversity in hiring women, but once they're inside the company, the culture is still set in a male-privileged way," says Ryan Clarke, director of research and evaluation at Girls Who Code, an organisation that teaches programming to school-age girls. Cultures are hard to change, he says, and they have a disproportionate impact because they not only affect current employees, but also affect a company's reputation with potential candidates. Women who hear about these corporate cultures simply choose to leave and look for work elsewhere.
In essence, all companies will soon be technology companies, there is a greater variety of end products and services that incorporate digital, which means women have a vital perspective to offer. Companies need programmers and designers who think about different types of offerings, from online shopping to web development to mobile apps to personalised healthcare. Companies also need diverse perspectives on how to channel and use artificial intelligence and big data in a fair and equitable way, rather than simply perpetuating existing biases.
HOW TO WIN: ADDRESSING THE WHOLE EMPLOYEE CYCLE
For companies to win the competition for women in digital, they must not only recruit more effectively, but also address the entire employee lifecycle, including retention and promotion.
Seeking Talent
First of all, companies must ensure that they are looking for as many talented women as possible.
- Identify potential candidates. Not enough women study STEM-related subjects, but at the very least, companies should try to reach out to as many women as possible in that category.
To that end, companies create advertising and marketing campaigns with the message that they are actively seeking candidates. LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media platforms are valuable tools for launching more targeted outreach. There is a strong network effect among millennial women in tech. "When you find one, you find many, because they all follow each other on social media," says Bramson-Boudreau of MIT Technology Review. Companies can also target women-only colleges or organisations. When using head-hunters for positions, short lists of candidates are required to include equal proportions of men and women.
Companies that cannot find enough skilled female candidates can expand the pool by offering training programmes on the skills they need. For example, craft site Etsy could not find enough programming candidates through traditional channels, so it launched a 12-week programme with free courses on open source software and coding. The company ended up hiring more than a third of the first group of attendees.
On a broader scale, they can become advocates for attracting more school-age girls to STEM programmes, and possibly even sponsor or fund such programmes.
- Rethinking candidate events. In addition to organising traditional job forums, companies should organise women-focused recruiting events. These can be low-key, informal events where participants are encouraged to bring a friend (research shows that because there are so few women in science and technology fields, many feel isolated and lack strong professional networks).
- Consider candidates from non-STEM and STEM-related fields. Tapping into alumni networks of top engineering and computer science programmes is critical. But companies should also consider women in adjacent fields at the collegiate level who have similar skills and the ability to learn the more difficult digital and analytical skills. In making a recruiting function focused on women already in the workforce, companies should not ignore people who may have a technical background in place but are currently working in adjacent fields. For example, women entrepreneurs who founded technology start-ups may not have done any actual software coding, but they know how to manage projects and talent in that field, which makes them attractive for hiring.
- Make fair job offers. A central challenge in gender diversity is that many women still do not receive the same salary as men in an equivalent role, and the tech field is no different. A 2017 study of 120,000 job offers by Hired, a tech job portal, indicates that two-thirds of job offers for women have lower salary levels than offers for men, for the same position at the same company. Another study found that women in tech jobs are paid between 18% and 22% less than men. This represents a problem, but also an opportunity: by ensuring that salary levels are fair (for existing positions and in particular for new hires) companies can differentiate themselves and be more attractive to female candidates.
- Use technology to eliminate bias. The majority of managers making hiring decisions for digital and analytics jobs are men. Research shows that virtually all people are victims of unconscious biases that make them favour job applicants who share their background, meaning that qualified women may be overlooked.
To combat this tendency, software is available to help eliminate bias in job postings. Screen candidates by looking at CVs where names and other identifying details have been removed so that all candidates can be evaluated based on merit alone. Conduct first-round interviews using AI software AND use gamification, asking candidates to play a series of neuroscience-related games and applying the results through Deep Learning algorithms for candidates to apply to offers.
Retention and promotion
All the recruiting initiatives in the world will not help if companies cannot keep women once they are hired. Consequently, once women are in the company, leaders must implement the right measures to retain them and give them the same fair chance for promotion as men. These measures must be data-driven. In particular, companies should focus on the following initiatives.
- Establish women's leadership roles. It is important to showcase women leaders in the company at every opportunity. Intel has used this approach successfully. The company set a goal in 2015 that 40% of all new hires would be women or minorities. To support this programme, the company organised events where women or those already at Intel could meet with recruits of their own gender or race and hire them on the spot. The company achieved its goal within a year; 43% of new candidates in 2016 were women or minorities. Female role models are even more critical in leadership roles, says MIT Technology Review's Bramson-Boudreau: "Right now, it's a little embarrassing to have an all-male leadership team."
- Promoted talent. Sponsoring men and women with senior profiles is effective in supporting mid-level women to develop a career in which they move up the ranks in a company, rather than simply taking a job there. Sponsors often offer career counselling to help high-potential women navigate the turning points in their careers and push for promotions and key assignments. In particular, this sponsorship should be seen as an opportunity for both men and women.
- Labour flexibility. One clear measure for creating an inclusive culture is flexible working arrangements. In research conducted by BCG and other organisations, women consistently rank flexible working among the most effective measures in terms of increasing gender diversity and increasing retention. 58% of women workers cited flexibility as the most effective intervention for increasing gender diversity across all industries worldwide. In addition, flexible working aligns with the ethos of technology functions, whose employees are generally young people who do not have standard hours and do not care about outdated concepts such as "face time".
- Suppress affinity bias. As in recruitment, bias is present at key decisions and promotion points. Affinity bias in a predominantly male culture will naturally favour men at key moments: decisions about who should be promoted, who should attend key meetings, who should have the opportunity to lead high-demand projects. Companies must ensure that metrics are used at every decision point and that decision-making panels are diverse.
The challenges facing women in the workplace are more openly discussed than in the past. At the same time, technology is becoming prevalent in all industries. These two aspects are creating an imperative for companies to hire more women in digital roles and create the kind of equitable corporate culture that allows women to thrive and advance.