Bridging the gender gap with Girls in Tech

Attracting more women to work in technology is one of the biggest opportunities to address the technology skills gap globally. According to Huffington Post, women only hold 26% of all tech jobs in the states. For reasons like this, Networkers has formed a partnership with Girls in Tech Dallas to address the underrepresentation of women and to raise the profile of gender diversity within organizations. Together, we recently hosted an event titled ‘Bridging the gender gap’.

Richard Carter, Regional Director - Dallas, Networkers summarises his key takeaways from the event.

Chaired by Girl in Tech’s Rachel Tang in Dallas, the event brought tech industry partners together to address the subject of how we can help to bridge the Gender Gap. We had a great turnout of around 80 attendees including attendants from Ericsson, ATOS, Microsoft, Texas Instruments and Amazon to name a few. It was also great to see  attendees from our parent company Gattaca including CEO Brian Wilkinson and Matt Evelt, Regional Managing Director for the Americas region as well as many more Networkers staff from our Dallas office.

We opened the event with a snapshot of how gender diversity looks today, using many statistics and findings from Networkers Voice of the Workforce report. This gave the event a good platform as to how we can address the significant gender gap that exists in Technology.

Steve Zimmel, VP of Integration at Ericsson gave a great presentation on how Ericsson is trying to address gender diversity with its targets (30% female headcount by 2020, they currently sit at around 14%) and initiatives to combat the gap (Ericsson has now implemented a rule in North America that at least one applicant for all managerial positions must be female).

Following Steve’s presentation we had a panel discussion chaired by Rachel Revel, Senior Business Development Manager - Networkers including representatives from the University of Texas at Dallas, Microsoft and the Iron Yard discussing some of the initiatives they have in place to help promote diversity, particularly focusing on education and ensuring that the number of women pursuing technology as a career path increases as it needs to.

Last but not least, Kim Testa, the Head of Marketing & Communications for ATOS addressed the crowd. Kim delivered a very informative presentation which highlighted some statistics that the industry desperately needs to change. For example, of the 1.4 million tech jobs expected to be needed between now and 2020, only 3% are on course to be filled by women. Kim also highlighted the huge drop in 12-17 year olds interested in pursuing technology educations and how ATOS is specifically trying to address this with its annual ‘Girls IT Day’ targeting 13-18 year olds.

The event was a great success and the first step in our partnership with Girls in Tech.

If you’d like to see the full Voice of the Workforce report which contains more statistics on diversity, please click here.