Leaky pipeline, photo by Seth Sawyers (Flickr)
The “leaky pipeline problem” is a commonly-used metaphor for the way women disappear from tech careers. The metaphor is that if you pour water (young girls) into a pipe, and it leaks along its length (girls and women exit the area at various times), very little water (professional women leaders) will emerge at the end of the pipeline.
A lot of the focus on “the pipeline problem” has been on the front — getting girls interested in tech, educating them, and making sure that by the time they get to college, they aren’t already behind the boys. And in fact, until recently, the pipeline wasn’t understood to be leaky at all — many people focused entirely on the entry point and assumed that once in, women would progress forward in the same way as men. This focus on young girls is worthwhile, but there are several things we can start doing immediately that would make enormous strides towards plugging leaks later in the pipeline.
1. Make it easy for women to choose computer science degrees.
In 2010-2011, fewer than 12% of college degrees were issued to women in computer science, down from 37.1% in 1984. However, when engineering coursework is described as learning skills that help solve society’s problems, the classes skew remarkably female — in some instances, 70% of the enrolled students were women. There’s a sidebar here about how women are over-socialized to be helpers, but we can tackle that later. For now, universities need to make it clear that there is socially valuable work available in tech today. Tactically, colleges should rewrite their computer science class descriptions to relate them to having a purpose other than just pure technology.
2. Kill the rockstar programmer myth.
There’s a myth of two classes of people in tech: “the 10% rock star programmer” and “people who suck” — it’s not accurate, it’s actively toxic, and it discourages women from even starting in the field at all. Jacob Kaplan-Moss has an absolutely amazing PythonCon keynote video about this and is worth every minute of the 35 minutes.
That cool new project at Apple, Facebook, or the latest start-up doesn’t need “rockstars” on it. It needs people with certain skills who know how to work with others and lean in as a team to finish the job. The more we can recognize this and drop the rhetoric about “rockstars” or “tech geniuses”, the more women are going to be interested in joining. Our cultural image of “rockstars” or “geniuses” is overwhelmingly male, and it matters when we use that language.
3. Stop blocking women at the hiring line.
It’s well known that we prefer to hire people who are attractive, who are white, and who are male. The way to fix this is to redo our interviewing process to be blind to that.
4. Fix the mid-career drop out rate by removing the “pregnancy tax”.
There are many factors for women dropping out mid-career, but one common reason for the mid-career leak is motherhood — approximately 50% of the women in the US will have a child in their lifetime. However, if I look around at senior women, a very large proportion of them are childless. This isn’t by accident — the times I’ve most thought about leaving were times where I was simply thinking of becoming a mother. In academia:
Women with advanced degrees in math-intensive academic fields drop out of fast-track research careers primarily because they want children […] Even just the plan to have children in the future is associated with women exiting the research fast-track at a rate twice that of men. (Source)
This is tricky to think about, because we often suggest longer maternity leaves for mothers to solve this problem. But rational men and women quickly realize that having a baby puts women at a disadvantage with the men who have children — if I have a child and take six months of maternity leave, and the man takes merely a week or two, my coldly economic brain would rather hire him than me. After all, things move quickly in the tech world, and he’ll have six months of additional skills and experience while I’ll have learned a skill (child rearing) that isn’t obviously valuable to my company. Multiply that by more than one child, and the gap grows. And this issue may affect more than mid-career drop out; it may be one of the reasons women have a harder time being hired.
Fortunately, the solution is still simple: Grant equal amounts of paternity and maternity leave, and create a culture where the men are expected (or even required) to take their leave. That is, do not allow your company to be like sports radio and Daniel Murphy. Murphy took his full three day paternity leave allowed by MLB, only to have the men of sports radio skewer him for his choice.
Sweden offers equal maternity and paternity leave, and has one of the highest percentages of women participating in the labor force today. Japan is significantly lower, has far fewer women working, and a proposal to lengthen their maternity leave policies to 3 years seems likely to make it even worse.
And that’s it. None of these fixes are particularly difficult, although some of them require bureaucratic or cultural change within companies and academia. But they’re things we can start doing today to plug up an otherwise very leaky pipeline.
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