BEC高级阅读文章精选：IT行业极缺女工

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In the US, women held just 25% of professional computing occupations in 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And more than 90% of those women were white. Just 5% were Asian, 3% African American and 1% Hispanic.

Women in computing fields in the US have declined since a peak of 36% in 1991. A 2016 report from the National Center for Women in Information Technology says that women quit the tech industry in numbers more than double their male counterparts.

“Evidence suggests that workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career are some of the most significant factors contributing to female attrition from the tech field,” the report says.

Shaherose Charania, a board member and also the co-founder of Women 2.0, which advocates for women in technology, says that companies lacking diversity are more prone to make mistakes that offend their users.

“There are so many mistakes that companies like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter have made to exclude some of their most engaged user groups,” Ms Charania says, referring to Facebook’s “poke” which annoyed many women and more recently Snapchat’s Bob Marley filter, which was criticised as promoting a racist digital version of blackface.

Lack of female candidates?

While “bro culture” might be blamed for failing to retain the few women who do work in tech fields, the reality is there aren’t many trained female computer scientists to recruit in the first place. Although women earn 57% of all undergraduate university degrees in the US, they account for just 18% of computer science degrees.

Using artificial intelligence may level the playing field when it comes to hiring on merit but it won’t solve the recruiting “pipeline problem” of having too few women applicants.

Ms Charania says bias in hiring is typically not conscious, but a result of people hiring people they feel comfortable with, often from similar backgrounds and universities. If there are no women candidates or just one token female, their likelihood of getting the job is very slim.

Whether or not AI changes “bro culture” remains to be seen. Some of those “bros” are likely to be very talented programmers. But until more women study computer science, gender parity in technology will remain science fiction.

But Ms Masood predicts more and more women will enter the field in the future.

“I believe the next 20 to 30 years is going to be transformative for women,” says Ms Masood. “There’s going to be people from multiple different backgrounds, races, perspectives coming into the field of programming. And I think that’s why Tara is so important in this field in particular.”

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