At the end of the week, I’ll announce the results of our Q2 IT Diversity Report. Leading up to that, I will highlight other data each day. June 23 marks International Women in Engineering Day, and here’s some data. IT teams are frequently imbalanced in terms of gender representation. More than one-third of women in tech said men outnumber them at work at least 4 to 1, data from Skillsoft’s annual Women in Tech report shows. That margin is an increase of 23 percentage points since last year.
And related to my earlier story about remote work, the new American Time Use Survey released last week shows that broadly, in 2022, 34 percent of workers over age 15 reported working at home vs. 69 percent in the workplace, dipping slightly from the previous year. (It’s more than 100%, as some said both on the same day). Employees spent an average of 5.4 hours per day working at home.
On days they worked, employed women were more likely than employed men to do some or all of their work at home–41 percent of women, compared with 28 percent of men. Pre-pandemic, 26.2 percent of women worked from home in 2019, which increased to 49.3 percent in 2020 and dipped to 41 percent last year.
I won’t ignore the education difference – the at-home work percentage is very low for those with only a high school diploma.
Why do we care?
And each day, you get data on why you care. Companies with greater gender diversity perform 15% to 20% better than companies with little or no gender diversity.
I rather like outperforming. In a landscape of difficult hiring, expand your pool of applicants by actively ensuring you are welcoming as it relates to gender. Remember, it’s an active process that does not happen accidentally.