Many people claim – and the boom in the sector is currently proving them right – that digital technology is the future. And yet strangely, the number of women working in digital technology has halved in the past 30 years (see INSEE study). This leads us to a seemingly naïve question: why are women leaving the field free for men to decide the future?
You could say that they have no choice. That women face hurdles which discourage them from moving into the digital technology sector. The truth is that only 9% of start-ups are run or founded by women, and fact: they find it more difficult to secure funding. Some sort of exclusion is therefore likely to be involved…
But that doesn’t explain everything. Social stereotypes, shared by both men and women, have an effect on both genders’ career choices, providing encouragement on one side, and increasing (self) exclusion on the other.
These social stereotypes are founded on iconic figures such as the nerd popularised during the Eighties, of which a watered-down version is the modern-day geek. We also have the technophile, who shows little interest in their appearance, talks only to their peers...and is definitely not female. And yet it’s this type of person who has influenced the “standard” for the ubiquitous IT developer we see today, as well as forming a subliminal message for women: “this is not your world”.
If we could indulge in a game of word association for a moment, and ask ourselves what gender we would more readily ascribe words like virtual, immaterial, conceptual and abstract to, we start to understand why so few women go on to study physics, maths or computer science, at least in Europe and the USA (see UNESCO study).