From Challenge Comes Change: How to Reconnect Women to Technology

Due to both personal preference and personal circumstance, I remained studiously neutral throughout the Cola Wars and their aftermath. I benefited from having dear friends, mentors, and role models at both companies, and business relationships spanning decades at both as well. Plus, I just liked products from both companies. That said, it’s hard to ignore the fact that over the years, Coca-Cola produced some remarkable ad campaigns. (I’m partial to the animated polar bears at holiday time, by the way.) One of the most successful was the iconic sixties campaign, “Things go better with Coke.” It was before my time, but sufficiently memorable that my parents still used this language when I was a kid.

My parents must not have been the only ones because I’ve now heard several friends adapt the tag line in a much grimmer way. “Things get worse with COVID,” they now say. Usually, this observation is applied not just to the horrifying damage of the pandemic itself. As we cross 500,000 deaths in the United States, and approach 2.5 million deaths globally (numbers both certainly understated), the direct human toll remains hard to comprehend in terms of lives lost, ongoing health issues, toll on health care workers, etc.

What my friends are usually referring to, however, is not just the direct human cost of the pandemic, but the array of second-order effects that COVID is having on society. Many of these are dynamics where a crisis of this magnitude has revealed or exacerbated a systemic problem in society — health equity, racial injustice, weak public health infrastructure, deep divisions in politics, an epidemic of mis- and dis- information and fraud, etc.

Some — sadly — are reversals in long-term positive trends that, until now, had been decades in the making. The most obvious of these has been the alarming reversal in life expectancy for Americans, and in particular, Americans of color. Another deeply disturbing trend has been the massive setback to women’s participation in the labor force.

An Epic Toll on Opportunity for Women

The pandemic has taken what was — for a long time — a developing good news story about the role of women in the workforce and forced a sharp reversal. Between August and September of 2020, for example, 865,000 women aged 20 and over dropped out of the labor force, meaning they were no longer working or looking for work. That’s four times higher than the 216,000 men who also left the workforce, according to a National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) analysis. The impact on Black women and Latinas has been especially devastating, with double-digit unemployment rates in September at 11.1% and 11%, respectively, according to NWLC data. Compare those numbers to white men having an unemployment rate of 7.4% and white women having an unemployment rate of 7.7%. And this exodus from the labor force was the tip of a very large iceberg: a new survey from MetLife examining the barriers women are facing found that 58 percent say COVID-19 has had a negative impact on their careers.

Some of the reasons for this are, by now, well understood. The sectors disproportionately affected by COVID — hospitality, retail, health care, leisure, education — tend to be disproportionate employers of women. And there is a mounting body of evidence that women have borne the brunt of the caregiving and study support burden of the WFH era. The economic impact of this reversal is shaping up to be really significant. A report from the Center for American Progress estimates that the risk of mothers leaving the labor force and reducing work hours in order to assume caretaking responsibilities amounts to $64.5 billion per year in lost wages and economic activity for the U.S. Globally, according to research released by Deloitte, nearly 82 percent of women surveyed said their lives have been negatively disrupted by the pandemic, and nearly 70 percent of women who have experienced these disruptions are concerned about their ability to progress in their careers.

Unclear Pathways Back and Forward

Any serious effort at rebuilding our economy post-COVID will need to ensure the at-scale reengagement of women in the economy. And a number of factors will make this a very heavy lift.

· First and most obviously, time is not our friend. Long-term unemployment — a period of joblessness lasting more than six months — accounts for almost 40% of unemployed persons. Workers who remain out of a job for this long enter a financially precarious period, according to labor economists, where their benefits start to run out and employers become less likely to hire them.

· As work itself changes, the burdens of care that fall disproportionately upon women are unlikely to suddenly disappear — even as WFH continues in some way. And even the very best efforts by policy makers to solve problems like childcare shortages are unlikely to have any material impact in the near term — and per the above — the near-term matters.

· Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the work world is changing rapidly, and many of the jobs lost and/or left by women simply won’t be there to return to. By accelerating the ongoing existing trends in remote work, e-commerce and automation, COVID is rapidly changing the shape of new jobs.

Against this backdrop, the chronic and systemic underrepresentation of women in technology and technical fields becomes a massive impediment to healing our economy. After all, women make up more than half the U.S. workforce but hold only 26 percent of computing roles. Despite similar achievement scores among children of all genders in math and science, men are the overwhelming majority of students studying STEM fields in higher education and a substantial gender gap in engineering and computer occupations contributes to women’s overall underrepresentation in STEM careers.

In short, the gender equity problem in technology — long a problem understood on Sand Hill Road and in Silicon Valley boardrooms — now threatens the very viability of our recovery.

It’s Not Rocket Science (Oh, Wait, It is Rocket Science)

While the full range of solutions to this challenge is well above my grade, there is a very specific opportunity that will target a meaningful piece of the problem. There are nearly infinite problems that we need to solve to achieve gender equity in technology-related companies and roles (bias in the education system — and the workplace, lack of role models, etc. all leap to mind).

But one piece of the problem has a clear answer. We can identify the roles that may open tech jobs for women launching or changing their careers. And then as educators, we can develop the shortest paths to helping women land those jobs and thrive. Think of roles like computer network support specialist; computer systems analyst; computer support specialist; customer service engineer and computer digital forensic investigator. Is this step sufficient to solve the gender equity problem in tech? Not even close. Is it necessary? Absolutely.

The great news is that — in dynamic labor markets — the necessary shifts are already in motion, but they may just need the skids to be greased. Roughly 1 in 4 women in the MetLife survey stated they have been considering a career change since the pandemic hit. And many of them are already targeting tech careers for their next move.

This dynamic has a bit of “reversion to the mean” at its core. Historically, this represents a reconnection of women to technology. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and up to World War II, programming was predominantly done by women; significant examples include the Harvard Computers, code-breaking at Bletchley Park and engineering at NASA. I like to think that after bouncing around the mean, we’ll arrive at a gender equilibrium point for technology jobs in the coming years — and not a minute too soon, as — effectively — every job becomes a technology job.

From Challenge Comes Change

On March 8, we celebrate the 110th International Women’s Day, which this year has a theme that resonates strongly in our pandemic year of 2021: Choose to Challenge. At DVU, we are challenging ourselves to take concrete steps to help close the opportunity gap by preparing women to thrive in careers shaped by continuous technological change. We are therefore launching a major new Women+Tech Scholars Program to assist women in acquiring the new skills and developing the networking connections they need to launch or relaunch their careers in STEM.

Through our Women+Tech Scholarship, we’re committed to awarding up to $10 million in scholarships for women in tech who apply and qualify. Beyond scholarships, our new Women+Tech Scholars Program offers a suite of tools and resources aimed to help women take the first step in their pursuit of a tech career and overcome barriers to entry.

DeVry’s mission is to close the opportunity gap by preparing students to thrive in careers shaped by technological change. We are proud that our new initiatives will support women starting a career in the digital economy or transitioning their career paths to focus on more technology-related career paths.

To learn more about DeVry University’s Women+Tech Scholars Program, visit www.devry.edu.