Women@Work:
A Work in Progress
Amelia Elverson
Choose Your Own Adventure:
Career Edition
Every technical person comes to a point in their career where they have to make a major decision: to pursue a senior technical role, or move into management.
Technical Path: They progress to senior and then principal engineering roles, perhaps becoming a VP of Engineering or Chief Technology Officer. This is a depth over breadth career choice - this person must become an expert in their field and will be required to continually make critical research, product, and development decisions. This choice demands quantitative skill sets, and potentially more education; PhDs are common at the top of this ladder.
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Management Path: This person will move into an engineering management position, or perhaps broaden scope to finance, marketing, sales, or business development. This is a breadth choice; to succeed on this path they must become a "jack of all trades". People skills are top priority. MBAs are extremely common choices for people to make this switch.
The Talent Pipeline
Women receive approximately half of business degrees. In the engineering fields, women are receiving more and more of the degrees every year. Since the 1980s, we've seen growth in women pursuing engineering and business careers. The talent pipeline is strong and growing - and yet, there are relatively few women at the top of both fields. You probably already knew that, though.
So, what's your point?
I'm not arguing the inequality in the technical pipeline isn't a problem - it definitely is. What I want to dig into is a deeper problem facing technical women, not just women in tech.
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Let me clarify. A woman in tech is a woman who who works at a tech company in a non-technical roles. For example, an HR rep or salesperson at a big tech firm probably isn't a technical woman - she may have business degrees, and spend most of her day focusing on people skills and the business over quantitative work.
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This is different from a technical woman. She is someone with a technical education and career - an engineer, a scientist, a researcher. These are the women who code, run experiments, and do analysis. They are who I'm talking about.
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I have been in both of these positions. I was a technical woman, I studied engineering in undergrad and worked as a software developer at a big tech firm. Now, I'm in grad school pursuing an MS in Engineering and an MBA, with the intent to return to big tech. I am straddling this decision - to continue as a technical woman or become a woman in tech. I began this project as a way to understand how this choice will affect my career in the long term.
There are few senior technical women.
Within technical roles, there is a serious promotional problem. Yes, there are fewer women starting out in these roles, but also looking higher in the org chart, women hold fewer and fewer roles.
Where are the women at the top?
As you can see, the more senior the role, the smaller portion of women. Even more interesting is examining the distribution of each gender over roles. We see a similar % of the population in the "new grad" role, and even a relatively close "entry-level" portion of the population. There is a huge jump to the senior developer role though - more than a quarter of male respondents report a senior developer position, while only 14% of women report the same role.
The "why" behind this is more difficult. There are many ideas floating around - work/family choices, cultural promotion problems, lack of mentorship opportunities, perception of women in power... but more research is needed to really dig into this. Either way, it's hard to pursue a path without any representation that looks like you. I certainly faced this - on a team where I was the only young person and the only woman, I didn't know what I would face if and when I moved up the ladder, or if what it would be like to have a kid as a technical women. I wondered - how are women in business faring?
Entering the C-Suite
Let's look at women at the very top.
Here's where it gets really interesting. When looking at how women in chief executive positions are distributed, I find myself... frustrated. We see that there is only one predominantly female chief executive role - Chief Human Resources Officer. Other top scorers include communications, marketing, administrative, and legal. We also see that the top roles that men hold are the three most powerful - CEO, CFO, and COO.
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I want to dig deeper into those technical roles I mentioned earlier. How are our technical women doing? Chief Technology Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, arguably the most technical roles on a senior leadership team, all are less than 15% female. Yikes. What does that mean if I dream of becoming a CTO?
What now?
We're making progress, but we're not anywhere near done yet.
My first question was: why is this happening? My theory is that the business roles like HR, marketing, and legal focus on the soft skills - leadership, communication, and general people skills. All of these traits are stereotypically feminine. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of research done about teams with mixed gender. Specifically, it has been shown that having a female leader can benefit both the men and women below her (Hoogendoorn). In fact, companies with female CEOs have better returns for their shareholders as well (Sandberg). There is obviously something significant that needs to change in the decision making behind promotions and the perception of technical women at work. I have chosen my next role to sit right in between business and engineering: product management. But when it comes to that choice of moving to management or staying an individual contributor? Ladies and gentlemen, we have some work to do.
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Hoogendoorn, Sander, Hessel Oosterbeek, and Mirjam Van Praag. "The impact of gender diversity on the performance of business teams: Evidence from a field experiment." Management Science 59, no. 7 (2013): 1514-1528. https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/impact-gender-diversity-performance-business-teams-evidence-field-experiment
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Sandberg, Daniel J. “When Women Lead, Firms Win.” S&P Global, October 16, 2019. https://www.spglobal.com/_division_assets/images/special-editorial/iif-2019/whenwomenlead_.pdf.
Amelia Elverson
Amelia Elverson is pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School and an MS at Harvard School of Engineering. She is passionate about product, data, and women in tech. This project was part of a course in her final semester at school. After graduation in May 2020, she will be joining Google as a Product Manager. She resides in Boston with her girlfriend and enjoys baking and running.