Gender and tech employment: Women’s perspectives on IT industry opportunities

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic includes an accelerated shift to digital technologies that disrupted many German workplaces and even industries. As news reports have documented widely, women have borne a disproportionate portion of job losses and care-related job stresses due to the pandemic. After various phases of 2020 COVID lockdowns, work-reductions and re-openings, FrauenLoop examined the personal drivers and expectations of resident, migrant, and refugee women pursuing a career change into the IT sector.

08. November 2021 by Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer

The shift to digital education, digital health, digital payment and telecommuting accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a sea change in Germany, particularly with respect to the labor market. Not only were the travel, retail, and care industries (that traditionally have a higher representation of women) heavily hit, but many companies faced the challenge of needing to move work online without the necessary tools. From hotel, café, and customer-service workers relegated to cleaning tasks and obliged to continue with in-person work during the pandemic, women reported limited flexibility as a major factor in their desire to change careers. 

Background

As one indication of the impact of the pandemic on FrauenLoop’s applicant pool, consider the following:

In 2019, 51% of the women applying to FrauenLoop were employed full- or part-time, 36% were unemployed, and 13% were university students or post-doctoral researchers.

By 2020, just 34% of women applying to FrauenLoop were employed full-time, 49% were unemployed, and 17% were university students or post-doctoral researchers.

For non-German women, commitment to career re-training was often time-boxed by pressure to participate in a state-sponsored workforce programs as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits. Few applicants could identify reasons why one technical specialty (e.g., web development or test automation or machine learning) would be a more stable job path than a non-technical role: instead, women pointed to remote work opportunities in IT and wanting jobs that would not be “eaten away” by digitalization as a privilege common to all tech specialties.

Seeking Flexibility, Globalization, and Security

FrauenLoop’s 2020 study was comprised of 122 women applicants between the ages of 21 and 45, of which 30% were EU citizens, and 70% were from non-EU countries. 13% of the total applicants were eligible for asylum, and 13% of the total applicant pool held German nationality. Most women who applied to the program learned about it from either social media or from word-of-mouth. However, interest in IT skills training was not limited to women already in the workforce: 17% of all applicants had completed a MINT or ICT university degree or a STEM doctoral-study program.

While the FrauenLoop program offers professional IT training in a variety of areas to women, applicants’ familiarity with different IT career specialties was low. Many requested additional information about the tech job outlook and prospects associated with one specialty over another, and a majority cited reports of data science as a highly-demanded skill-set as their reason for applying to learn data science. Confirming that hype around the data science profession, in particular, has reached non-practitioners, the following assumptions were repeated frequently by FrauenLoop applicants in 2020: 

• IT sector jobs do not underpay women in the way that non-tech jobs do

• IT jobs offer work-at-home and schedule flexibility as baseline job perks

• IT skills guarantee employability much more than non-technical skills do

• IT sector jobs are global and do not require German language, as most non-tech jobs in Germany do

• IT sector jobs recruit a global workforce, and welcome diversity, more than non-IT jobs do

Many women stated that they wished to contribute to changing the face of the IT industry, and that they were confident that tech jobs would be more accommodating to women than was the case in non-tech sectors.

Tech as the Promised Land

From the start of the pandemic, many women applicants cited job losses or limited contracts ending as a trigger for their interest in getting into tech work. Most referred to the tech industry as a destination for which women needed specialised training in order to access. Paired with this was concern about what knowledge was needed to navigate the online job application process, in order to get into dialogue directly with humans responsible for tech hiring.

Concern about the future viability of non-tech jobs came up repeatedly in comments from women of all backgrounds. However, few women connected their lack of success in applying to tech roles with their knowledge of online application processes or with their online professional presence. Technical job roles were de facto considered to be more stable than non-technical roles. 

Women reported that they faced an unpredictable landscape of job cuts and dire predictions of industry demise. At the same time as a “new normal” of remote working and public health tracking apps occurred, a split between digitally-savvy haves and have-nots was taking shape. A majority of FrauenLoop applicants said that they felt technically unprepared for the future of work.

IT Skills to Stay Afloat in Turbulent Workplaces 

The precariousness of work and workplaces that have been re-organized by the COVID-19 crisis has left many women in Germany feeling the need to actively seek out opportunities to work with data or digitalization in some direct, hands-on way. The consensus among FrauenLoop applicants was that lack of market-relevant computer skills has kept them in less-flexible workplaces and unsustainable jobs. Many women pointed out that they were limited by the need to use only role-specific customised software in their current jobs, or that they were isolated from technical departments and activities in their current or former companies, with no way to up-skill towards these types of jobs. 

Given the high proportion of women in the applicant pool who were either unexpectedly unemployed due to the pandemic, on limited work arrangements (Kurzarbeit), freelancers or under-employed with contracts ending before the year was over, there were five reasons given for needing tech skills re-training:

• Industry collapse: women working as translators, in customer-support roles and in the travel industry were particularly concerned with the loss or imminent loss of work opportunities, along with having a lack of transferable skills and little access to training.

• Outdated tech exposure: women working with Word, Excel and custom tools for their specific companies felt that they were at a disadvantage when applying for work elsewhere. The process of locating a new job felt significantly challenging for those who had not had the opportunity to work with popular cross-functional tools in a productive way (e.g., HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SAP, Salesforce, JavaScript, etc)

• Family obligations: women with children referred to working flexibility in repeated examples which referenced the potential to work around child pick-ups in less insecure positions. For many women, care obligations tied them to under-employment in 30h per week jobs or shift work, and this work was shortened or eliminated by the pandemic.

• Impenetrable market: women working in academic research as well as in assisting jobs in industry struggled to make contact with recruiters and hiring managers for roles in tech. The difficulty of obtaining positive feedback made many women feel it necessary to pre-emptively up-skill themselves or risk failing to enter the professional full-time jobs market.

• Cultural currency: women who were not yet comfortable using German for business purposes pointed to the linguistic aspect of computer languages as a motivation for learning. Since programming languages are native to no one and must be learned, some women suggested that they preferred to start anew with programming than to pursue jobs in a language in which they lacked mastery.

Summary

At a minimum, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the gap between women who want to work full-time in flexible, international tech-driven workplaces and those who possess the skills needed to successfully obtain tech work. Beyond the need for relevant IT jobs orientation, women from resident, migrant, and refugee backgrounds who seek to up-skill themselves in computer programming also lack an understanding of how the online application process may differ between applying to international tech companies and applying to traditional German employers.

Digitalisation and globalization have shifted the tools and techniques for hiring and managing a distributed workforce. However, in 2020, little clear or actionable data about the realities of online hiring processes was accessible to many women. Neither employers, employment agencies, nor unemployment counsellors deliver such information. Many women in tech-adjacent roles want more applied technology skills training but lack direction in terms of what skills to learn to move into technical positions.

The positive image that a majority of FrauenLoop applicants described about the tech industry were based, in part, on expectations of greater job stability and higher pay than outside of the IT sector. Women frequently referenced the experience of male partners and friends as the basis for these conclusions. This signals that the annual StackOverflow, GitHub and Honeypot salary surveys that break down tech salaries along gender lines may not be not familiar reference points for women in Germany. It also suggests that men’s experience of the IT industry, in terms of average salary, benefits, and job stability often provides the model for what women expect from working in IT.

Suggestions to help women develop tech skills to pandemic-proof their employment prospects

• Incentivize employers to provide professional development budgets to all hires, to cover tech skills training.

• Publicize tech industry salary surveys that detail gender-based data and detail average salaries by role and technology in use.

• Develop financial incentives for start-up companies to hire and train women in junior technical roles.

• Ensure that ESG impact of publicly-funded tech training programs have documented outcomes for women in terms of employment, earning ability, and career sustainability.

• Require tech training programs that receive government funds to demonstrate 50% female participation in junior-level training.
  
  Many thanks to the Interchain Foundation and to HubSpot for their generous support of this research report.