IT professionals in all sectors: broaden your horizons and communicate!

On Monday 12/11, I have the great honor of sitting on a panel when Unionen awards its annual gender equality prize, Guldnappen, to the most parent-friendly workplace. This year, the award has been expanded to include the Golden Ladder, for gender balance among managers, and the Golden Money, for equal pay.

With the challenges the IT industry has with gender balance, it is kind of the Union not to disqualify me from the start. Or maybe that's precisely why I was invited.

However, those who are concerned about the lack of women in IT should be fully aware that the companies in the industry are very aware of this and that a lot is actually being done to address it. In addition to the efforts made by individual companies, there are a number of overall initiatives that work in various ways to broaden the recruitment base for the industry, with a focus on women. At IT&Telekomföretagen, we have been running the Womentor mentoring and leadership program for over ten years, where around 25 companies annually match junior female managers with mentors and at the same time make a commitment to promote gender equality in general in the companies. Other initiatives with similar ambitions include Women in Tech, Tjejer kodar and Pink programming.

If we broaden the perspective to attract women to technology professions in general, and to young people in general (both boys and girls), the list is long: Pepp, Womengineer, Introduce a Girl to Engineering day, Tekniksprånget, Hello World! And again: many companies have their own initiatives.

Efforts of this kind have been going on for decades, and while valuable female talent has been captured in this way, the overall picture has not fundamentally changed. A clear indicator that is painfully reminiscent of this is the number of applications for IT courses in higher education. Here the picture has been basically the same year after year: the more systems and user-oriented courses (systems science, media technology, human-computer interaction) have 20-30% of female applicants, while the more technology-oriented ones (IT/computer technology) have just over 10%. The law program at Stockholm University has three times more first-time female applicants than the approximately 30 computer/IT engineering programs in the whole country combined.

No matter how gender-equal IT companies are, there will be no real change unless the numbers of women entering IT education change.

If there is anything new and wise to be said on this issue, which I will raise at the Union on Monday, it is this:

1. the IT industry and the IT professions need to be put on the mental map in general.

In most cases, women's lack of interest in IT as a career choice is not about any explicit resistance, but simply not imagining that it could be relevant to them. Kind of like being a strong sports fan and being asked why you don't play cricket or lacrosse. As far as I know, there is no strong opposition to these sports, but rather they are not even considered as options ("What is lacrosse?").

When I talk to study and career counselors about all the opportunities for exciting, developing and both people- and society-oriented professions that open up with an IT education in the background, I usually compare with law school. Everyone "knows" that those who have studied law sit in a basement with like-minded people and read legal texts for the rest of their lives. Or do they? Hardly. Most girls who apply to law programs probably have an idea that there is a wide range of professions to pursue afterwards: Sitting in court, working as a criminal lawyer, corporate lawyer, etc., plus you can also become something completely different: civil servant, politician, etc. But when it comes to IT programs? Well, then that image of sitting in a basement coding for the rest of your life sticks. IT professions such as project manager, UX designer, business developer and IT architect are usually completely unknown.

2. Work harder to remove "negative ambient belonging"

IT companies that do PR for themselves tend to emphasize something like what I say to the SYVs, about how exciting and challenging the professions are. Yet women are not flocking to IT programs. The shoe pinches somewhere, and a clue may be found in the phenomenon identified by Robin Hauser Reynolds, the woman behind the documentary film Code: Debugging the gender gap: "Negative ambient belonging". What this alludes to is that there is something unspoken, yet very evident in the environment that discourages women who are not initially interested in technology. Unfortunately, this applies even more to IT training - which has to be passed through to get into the industry anyway - than to IT companies as such: the training rooms breathe computers, computer terms and men, men, men, both students and teachers, who, however friendly they are, all exude a specific tech culture. No wonder "non-techy" women don't feel like they belong.

3. Meet with those you want to influence

What I keep telling the member companies of the IT&Telecom companies I am in contact with is that they must meet the young people so that they can see and feel all the exciting things the companies do (and then preferably have done a thorough check beforehand that they do not unknowingly contribute to "negative ambient belonging"). It is a difficult dilemma that companies, which are generally overburdened precisely because of the lack of both women and skills, must also set aside time to meet young people. But there is no way around it. You don't have to create your own projects, you can join the many initiatives that already exist, just click on some of the links above. You need to be seen for real!