Following up on the last post about why women leave tech, I decided to take a look at my network and see if the leaky pipeline theory holds. That is - are women who are studying engineering and taking jobs in the field dropping out at a significantly higher rate than men? I looked at women and men with degrees in either Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) or Computer Science (CS) from my alma mater. The results?- 30% of the women left the tech world, while 8% of the men did.
- Among those still in the tech world, the men who work at the staff are 50% more likely to have a "senior" title (66%) than the women (42%).
- The men are also 50% more likely to make it to management roles - of the women still in the tech world, only 25% are in management at any level, while 36% of the men are.
- While four of the men founded startups, none of the women did.
- The only place I see parity is that women who stay in tech have essentially the same likelihood of landing a senior management role at a company they didn't found (12.5%) as the men (12%). But those women took larger steps outside of their field than the men did to get them.
More details and an info-graphic after the jump:
Who is in the dataset?
I included those who graduated a few years before or a few years after I did - roughly 1999-2005. So we're talking about people who have been in industry for 9-15 years. With the help of a friend, I was able to find LinkedIn profiles for 23 women in this category. I'd like to emphasize that this is a very small dataset and it's skewed by virtue of the fact that my primary source of information is LinkedIn, but I think there are some interesting inferences that can be drawn from it anyway.
Who left engineering? What are they doing now?
The good news is that of the 23 women, 16 (70%) are still engaged full-time in the tech industry. So while there are some leaks, it's much better than the TechCrunch article suggested. Further, of the remaining seven, two are medical doctors, two are patent lawyers, one is a librarian who writes a lot of code, two have has elected to be stay-at-home mothers (although at least one does some web development consulting on the side), and one is a massage therapist. So even among these seven who have left engineering, most are using their technical backgrounds today. While the men are significantly more likely to have stayed in engineering (92%) and the men who left engineering are all in senior professional roles, this is still pretty good.
Of those who stayed in engineering, what are they doing now?
For each profile, I looked at the last title and tried to place it into one of 5 categories: staff, senior staff, manager, senior manager, and founder. There are some judgment calls on the boundaries of these categories, but I tried to be as consistent and fair as I could.
Of the 16 women in full-time technical roles:
- 7 (44%) have staff titles (such as "software engineer" or "test engineer")
- 5 (31%) have titles that suggest a senior status (such as "principal engineer" or "lead software developer")
- 2 (13%) have "manager" titles
- 2 (13%) have senior management titles (one is Director of Engineering, one is CTO)
Among the 59 men in full-time technical roles :
- 13 (22%) have "staff" titles (such as "systems engineer" and "research scientist")
- 25 (42%) have titles that suggest a senior status (such as "sr. research engineer" or "data solutions architect")
- 10 (17%) have "manager" titles (including a few on the manager/sr manager line such as "senior technical program manager" and "chief scientist")
- 7 (12%) have senior management titles (including a CTO, a VP of Product Development, a Director of Software Development, and an Engineering Director)
- 4 (7%) are the founder/CEOs of startups (one of whom is also a professor of computer science)
I was promised an info-graphic.
So you were:
Some additional observations
One more fact I noticed as I looked over the profiles of those who have progressed to management and senior management is that the men seem more likely to have progressed in the same company they started in, while the women who achieved senior management titles seem to have made fairy large moves to get there. The woman who is Director of Engineering spent some time at a big consulting company and in program management before returning to a more technical role; the CTO worked her way up the technical food chain in the financial services industry rather than the tech world. Several of the men with senior management tiles are at the same companies they joined immediately after leaving school, as are many of the men with manager titles.
Maybe there are some additional considerations. I didn't control for advanced degrees and I think more of the men have PhDs, so that could be a factor. Compared to the men, more of the women are married or in long-term relationships, so it's possible the women were more likely to hold themselves back due to the "two-body problem" compared to the men. But it's not kids - very few of the women have kids, and a lot more of the men do.
I'd love to hear from readers about what the stats look like in your networks.
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