The percentage share of women among students at technical universities is constantly increasing, and more often girls decide to learn programming. On May 23, 2018, the Carrots Foundation, supporting women in the IT industry, presented the results of the analysis of the situation of women in the IT industry in Poland. The premiere of the “Women in IT” report took place in Mindspace in Warsaw.
Over 2,000 women took part in surveys, of which nearly a thousand are currently working in the IT industry. The remaining respondents deal with either other areas or are unemployed. The results of the study were supplemented with media analysis – both qualitative and quantitative. We checked the media in terms of issues concerning women specializing in new technologies. The entire report has been supplemented with comments by experts.
It turns out that in order to work in the IT industry, you do not need to have a specialist education. What’s more, technical studies are not necessary. The most popular are online courses, networkings / meetups or specialist trainings. The IT industry is focused on self-improvement.
The area of new technologies is still dominated by men. The IT teams are still dominated by men. Where there are women, there are about three times less than men.
Following this trail, we have checked how the Internet mentions about male and female versions of profession names associated with the IT industry, such as programmer or tester / software tester. In the case of programmers, it turned out that the male version of the word is definitely more often used. The percentage of female programmers was only 3%.
Although much is said about the unequal treatment of women in the new technologies industry, according to respondents, it is rarer than in other areas. The most common form of discrimination is stereotyping. 85% of the respondents met personally with this phenomenon. 61%, while in the same position as men, received a lower salary. 28% of respondents had to deal with discrimination based on sex.
Although, as the results show, women still have to fight stereotypes, then experts note changes going in the right direction. Robert Stalmach, CEO of Newspoint says: Women’s awareness is growing and more and more of them will enter the labor market without complexes. Along with the growing share of women in the IT industry, some (as our research shows – unfortunately still alive) stereotypes will be weakened. As the president of Newspoint, a technology company, I estimate that women in the IT team are as good as men. In addition, they have a positive impact on the functioning of the teams.
The report consists of 76 pages filled with charts presenting the results of the research. They have been described and supplemented with the statements of numerous experts and supported by examples of references.
Report partners: Newspoint, Accenture Polska, Connectis, Filttr, SW Research, Kreatik, under the patronage of the Ministry of Digitization.
We encourage you to read the full version of the report, which is available online. You can download it from gocarrots.org/raport2018.