I negotiated 12 unpaid weeks off when my son was born. Only it wasn’t really time off. I didn’t have to go to the office every day, but I was expected to maintain regular beeper duties and respond within 15 minutes any time there was a problem. I’d be nursing my screaming baby and freaking out that I was going to get fired if I didn’t answer the beeping thing right away. Many women said that it wasn’t motherhood alone that did in their careers. Rather, it was the lack of flexible work arrangements, the unsupportive work environment, or a salary that was inadequate to pay for childcare. As Rebecca, a former motion graphics designer, put it, “Motherhood was just the amplifier. It made all the problems that I’d been putting up with forever actually intolerable.” A whopping 625 [of 716] women say they have no plans to return to tech. Only 22—that’s 3%—say they would definitely like to. Elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley now report that about 50% of their introductory computer science students are women. Yet just last year, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that men are employed in STEM occupations at about twice the rate of women with the same qualifications. There may be work to do on the pipeline, but the pipeline isn’t the problem. Women are leaving tech because they’re unhappy with the work environment, not because they have lost interest in the work. As cultural issues go, this is an incredibly expensive problem. Like my friend Sandhya, these women are educated, highly trained, and weren’t planning to quit. We’re losing them anyway. And once we’ve lost them, we almost never get them back. fortune/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 10:04:48 +0000
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