Dec

Untapp the Talent

This picture is a part of a larger infographic from the Socialcast Blog titled “Hail To The Female: Untapped Tech Talent,” which I found on Women 2.0.

It highlights the following statistics:

-Women hold more than half of all professional occupations in the U.S., but make up just 24 percent of the high-tech workforce

-For every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will achieve the same

-Despite making up the bulk of the workforce, women are still occupying proportionally fewer positions in technology-based professions

Electrical & electronics engineering: 7.7% of women compared to 92.3% of men
Computer hardware engineers: 19.4% of women compared to 80.6% of men
Engineering managers: 6.3% of women compared to 93.7% of men
Computer & information systems: 27.2% of women compared to 72.8% of men

-The National Center for Education Statistics has tracked the number of BS degrees awarded in CS, the discipline that prepares students for the information tech sector. Even though it shows some growth, their data shows that women are still underrepresented when compared to men

-TechCrunch analyzed the backgrounds of 652 startup founders in the tech industry and found that male and female tech startup founders go through many of the same obstacles and share many of the same motivations

-According to the Center for Women’s Business Research, women own 40% of private business in the U.S.; however, they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start ups, and receive less than 10 percent of venture capitalist funding

531 days ago Short URL Comments

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Nov

Rebekah Cox of Quora.com on Women in Tech

Rebekah Cox, head desinger at Quora.com, explains what it’s like to be a women in the Tech Industry in this Huffpost article. She presents the “unfortunately reality,” that women are raised differently than men and so when they enter the industry and are “verbally hit,” they aren’t always prepared. The success of their career is a reflection of how they react, those that brush it off and keep their heads high end up having the most successful careers. Since many women chose to retreat from the tech industry (perhaps for this very reason), the women that stay often feel alone. Rebecca also presents the “fortunate reality,” that women in tech aren’t alone, and if you stick it out long enough you’ll find yourself surrounded by passionate, confident women and will have multiple opportunities thrown your way. Rebekah encourages women to build, learn, and publish; she explains that you must start with the building blocks and that eventually, your hard work will pay off. She points out that “the barriers to entry are pretty low and inexpensive” and that being a women is a competitive advantage – so shoot for the stars!

Oct

Women, Both Young and Old, Need Tech Role Models

This week, we had Meebo CTO and co-founder Sandy Jen come into the VentureBeat studio to talk about women and tech.

We’ve featured a few strong and opinionated women CEOs and CTOs in our videos lately, because we think it’s important to show the female faces and voices in the tech industry. And in this interview, Jen said that’s one of the most important things for encouraging more female entrepreneurship.

After we chatted about Jen’s background (not one but both parents were engineers) and the importance of diversity in startup teams, she went on to say that she and many women like her are hesitant to leave companies and step into co-founder roles simply because they don’t see many precedents for that kind of behavior. The young, male entrepreneur/hacker is pretty well glorified by our society, but what Jen wants to see is more visibility for the women who do so.

While we talk a lot about the need for role models and tech education for young girls, not enough is said about the need to encourage grown women to pursue new goals in technology. This includes learning a programming language, starting a company and taking on leadership roles within the community. But as Jen noted in our talk, the biggest encouragement can simply be seeing someone like you doing something you’ve always wanted to do but never tried.

We’re glad to be engineering a small part of that visibility here at VentureBeat, and we hope you find Jen’s words interesting and inspiring.

-Jolie O’Dell, Venture Beat

583 days ago Short URL Comments

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Aug