Women aren't even landing many entry-level jobs in the tech industry, per a new report -- but proceed with caution before chalking it up to a problem with the talent pool.
According to the report, from McKinsey, women in the tech industry hold only 37% of entry-level jobs. That number is significantly lower than the 47% of women who, on average, are offered entry-level positions in other industries.
Those numbers get smaller as positions get more prestigious. Women in tech hold 30% of the managerial positions, 25% of the senior manager or director roles, 20% of the vice president titles, and 15% of roles in the c-suite.
McKinsey attributed the disparities to the tech industry's "pipeline problem," or that the tech industry doesn't have enough women with relevant college degrees in its talent pool.
But others have long contended that chalking up tech's diversity woes to a leaky pipeline oversimplifies the problem, which is that the industry has unresolved issues with sexism that keep women away. That would seem to be borne out by the data showing progressively dwindling numbers of women in advanced roles at tech firms.
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The McKinsey report, which is based on data collected in 2015 from 30,000 employees at 118 North American companies, focused on pinpointing just where women leak out of the talent pipeline in nine industries.
The automative and energy industries joined tech in the report's categories of industries where women aren't getting in the door in very large numbers.
In finance, as well as the retail and media industries, women exit before they are promoted to executive-level jobs.
Finance — an industry that, like tech, is often chastised for its treatment of women — women hold only about 22% of executive-level positions. Those numbers are a bit healthier earlier on in the pipeline: women hold 52% of hold entry-level positions, 47% of manager positions, and 38% of the senior manager positions.
And yes, the percentage of women serving as senior managers in finance is higher than the percentage of women even getting entry-level jobs in tech.
Yet the report says that few women are getting hired in the tech industry because of "recruiting challenges or pre-pipeline problems, particularly the low graduation rates of women in industry feeder programs" like STEM.
McKinsey praised organizations like Girls Who Code for helping to get younger girls interested in tech.
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The report does touch on the tech industry's issues with sexism and gender discrimination, however. It cites data that shows 38% of women think their gender will make it difficult for them to advance in their career and that 60% of women don't want to be a top exec because of stress and pressure.
"Because of the high attrition rate for women working in tech, teaching more girls and women to code is not enough to solve this problem," Rachel Thomas, a software engineer, wrote in a Medium post in July 2015. "Because of the ... well-documented differences in how men and women are perceived, training women to negotiate better and be more assertive is also not enough to solve this problem.
"If tech culture is going to change, everyone needs to change, especially men and most especially leaders," Thomas wrote.
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Regardless of the root of the problem, what is clear is that, when it comes to diversity, the tech industry still has plenty of work to do.
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