Communications of the ACM
Fixing the Gender Gap in Tech
The tech gap begins at home, where boys get their first computers and video game consoles at a younger age than girls.
Credit: Minneapolis Star Tribune
Women continue to lag behind men in computer science, where their share of the workforce has actually declined over the past 25 years. Today, women hold 27 percent of all computer science jobs, down from 30 percent a decade ago, and account for just 20 percent of undergraduate computer majors, down from 36 percent in 1986.
The effects of this gender gap reach far beyond whether women are building video games or coding Web apps. Over the past 10 years, three times as many jobs have been created in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — than in non-STEM fields. Women who work in STEM also earn more than other female workers. The wage gap between the genders is also smaller in STEM fields.
Economists expect those trends to continue. And if American women can't step up to meet the growing demand, our foreign competitors will. Brazil, India and Malaysia are among the rising powers that have much more successfully prepared girls to enter computer science.
From Minneapolis Star Tribune
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