by Angela Guess
Rachel Wolfson recently wrote in the Huffington Post, “Women in Tech have always been outnumbered by men, but this disproportion could actually be encouraging more females to enter the tech workforce, specifically in Big Data and statistics related fields. As a young woman who has worked in the tech-startup industry for the past few years, I would think that more females would want to be a part of shaping the future of technology, yet statistics illustrate the opposite… Less than 17% of the tech industry is made up of women… Not only is this percentage alarming, it has also been noted that this gender gap is worsening. Women make up about 59% of the US labor force, yet fewer than 25% of women actually work in a technical field.”
Wolfson goes on, “While the statistics mentioned above are alarming, women might actually be more inclined to make a difference due to the apparent gender divide in the tech workforce. According to an O’Reilly Media report entitled ‘Women in Data,’ the lack of women in technology has actually improved over the years. The report notes, ‘The underrepresentation of women in tech has garnered tremendous attention and support of late to the point where the continued existence of the numbers disparity has fostered a nation-wide movement to bring more women into technical fields’.”
She adds, “So which fields are seeing the largest increase in women workers? Recently, Big Data and statistic fields have been attracting a surprising amount of females. It’s been noted that women are achieving more than 40% of statistic degrees, and new career paths in data science now hold multiple opportunities for women.”
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