Celebrating the (unfairly paid) Women of Tech
It's International Women's Day! Let's celebrate the women in STEM that are doing great things, and remember that a 'full stack' effort is needed to make the future brighter.
One of the most powerful voices of 2023 did not belong to a woman. It didn’t belong to a man. It belonged to a bot on Twitter: Gender Pay Gap Bot.
This bot, developed by Francesca Lawson and Ali Fensome (website), spoke truth to power. For every company or brand tweeting proudly on Twitter about how much they were getting behind International Women's Day, it replied with any available data from the Gender Pay Gap Service (There is a legal requirement in the UK for any employer with 250 or more employees to publish their data comparing men and women’s average pay).
The results were always interesting:
Verdict went into this in some detail back in 2022: Analysis then showed that 91.1% of companies in the tech industry pay men more. Men’s median hourly pay was 16% higher than women - above the national average of 11.6%.
Sadly, the Good Bot doesn’t seem to be operational in 2024.
History of women
This pay gap difference is unfair and a terrible shame considering the impact that women have had, are having, and will continue to have in Tech.
This post started with an image of Margaret Hamilton. Margaret and her team created the on-board flight software for that enabled humans to land on the Moon in 1969. That’s impactful. For those curious, the source code itself is now available on GitHub (There are even 78 Pull Requests open to suggest changes to the code, some 55 years later!)
We can go back further than 1969. How about Ada Lovelace, who was born in 1815?
Ada, among other things, developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching. She had a mindset of ‘poetical science’ that led her to ask questions about the Analytical Engine, examining how individuals and society relate to technology as a collaborative tool. In present day, her name was used as the codename of Nvidia’s new GPU architecture, as featured in their RTX 4000 series. GPUs are a particular hot topic right now, given their importance in allowing Generative AI to work in the first place.
How about the ‘Mother of the Internet’? Radia Perlman invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). This protocol, published by the IEEE as the 802.1D standard, is fundamental to the operation of network bridges. No network bridges, no Internet. Any algorithm that can be expressed as an Algorhyme deserves a special mention in my book.
Algorhyme I think that I shall never see A graph more lovely than a tree. A tree whose crucial property Is loop-free connectivity. A tree which must be sure to span So packets can reach every LAN. First the root must be selected. By ID it is elected. Least cost paths from root are traced. In the tree these paths are placed. A mesh is made by folks like me Then bridges find a spanning tree.
Present day
Things are improving. Slowly. More women are getting involved in Tech roles. Seniority is increasing. The pay gap, agonisingly slowly, seems to be closing.
I get to work alongside inspiring Women in Tech every single day. Going further afield than my present company, I’m going to recognise Molly Sheets. Currently Director of Engineering, Kubernetes at Zynga, I consider her a role model in general within the games industry. She has achieved great things in the past and is continuing to do so now, and her voice is always opinionated (THIS IS A GOOD THING) and insisting on the highest standards. “Be more Molly” would be good advice for anyone.
Reshma Saujani is the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code. The organisation, founded in 2012, has taught computing skills and inspired over 40,000 girls across America. There’s even an inspirational book, including real-life stories of girls and women working at places like Pixar and NASA.
The future
As a father (one boy, two girls), I’m going to have a biased view of wanting to ensure that fair opportunities are out there for my children.
This is why a ‘full stack’ approach is needed. The Tech companies need to be doing everything they can to make things fair. And, right at the other end, parents and educators need to be showing the possibilities of a career in Tech. And, yes, definitely moving away from having ‘boy toys’ and ‘girl toys’. Judith Elaine Blakemore, Professor of Psychology, said: “If you want to develop children's physical, cognitive, academic, musical, and artistic skills, toys that are not strongly gender-typed are more likely to do this.”
There are plenty of ways for women to be inspired in Tech careers. One example is the STEM Ambassadors. “More than 90% of teachers said engaging with STEM Ambassadors has improved their students’ awareness and ambitions in STEM.”. The Raspbery Pi Foundation published Six women doing excellent things with Raspberry Pi as part of their own highlights, including Dr Lucy Rogers and her Raspberry Pi controlled robot dinosaurs.
Closing the loop
In 2023, Samsung did some research. Only 14% of 18-25 year-old women could correctly identify Ada Lovelace. Promisingly though, two thirds of them saw a future career in Tech, BUT 38% v 29% of them thought the route in was through non-tech roles!
In 2023, Samsung were paying women 25.2% lower than men.
We have work to do.
Celebrate women's achievement. Raise awareness about discrimination. Take action to drive gender parity.
These are from the International Women’s Day website. How are YOU going to help? Not just today, but EVERY day?