A few weeks ago something extraordinary, even unprecedented, happened at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Toronto. The Information Technology Association of Canada held its second annual Ingenious Awards, which recognize the innovative use of IT in all sorts of organizations, but this year they added a new CIO of the Year award to honour the best chief information officers in the country. That’s not the extraordinary part.
Out of more than a dozen nominations, they decided they needed to give the award to two people, not just one. But that’s not the extraordinary part, either. The extraordinary part is that both CIOs just happened to be women.
Of course, to say they “just happened” to be women is not to downplay the importance of this milestone. The winners were Corrine Charette, CIO for the federal government’s Treasury Board Secretariat, and Brenda Hoffman, CIO for the TMX Group. Both have spent years steadily building careers of increasing responsibility, the respect of their peers and ultimately transforming the organizations in which they work. Given that traditionally it has almost always been men accepting such accolades, however, they are exactly the kind of role models young women in Canada need right now.
According to The Status of Women in Canada report published three years ago, 67% of employed women hold jobs in teaching, nursing and related health fields, clerical or other administrative positions, or in sales and services. Statistics Canada shows that three times as many men are now graduating in computer science compared to women, which is actually even worse than it was in the 1990s. Although there are more than 5,400 women working in a “technology job,” the data on this usually also includes accounting and legal roles, so the real number is probably a lot lower.
Computer Science Education Week from December 8-14 is a great opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve made in trying to reverse these trends and to think about what more we could do. There’s no question the IT industry in Canada has rallied around increasing gender diversity as a major priority. The Informations and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) has a strong mentorship program and other resources for young women in place. High-profile institutions such as the RBC Financial Group have employee groups focused on increasing opportunities for female tech employees. In 2015, the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance’s Women in IT group (CanWIT) will celebrate 10 years of building a support network that promotes tech as a career choice, encourages the recruitment of female candidates and celebrates female tech entrepreneurship.
In one sense, however, establishing programs is only a first step, and could take years to make a substantial impact. The bigger question is, how can we get more young women — even girls in elementary school — more interested in pursuing IT as a vocation?
Oddly enough, the evolution of technology may play an important role. As more software moves off of desktops and into the cloud, and mobile computing moves from laptops to smartphones to wearable devices, women are more surrounded by technology today than they have ever been. Gartner Inc., one of the industry’s most well-known market research firms, has even gone so far to say that, because of how digital technologies are changing the way we work, every budget is an IT budget. That means even women who work in HR, marketing, sales or finance may in some way be working “in technology.” As a result, they may have an opportunity to one day transition from using IT tools to actually making decisions about how those tools could be built into business strategy, or even how they are designed.
To jump-start that process, or at least to help it along, there are things we could all do to make Computer Science Education Week a success, even if you’re not working directly in a technology role yourself. Here are three no-cost ideas:
- Use social media to become a women in technology evangelist. Follow @CSEdWeek on Twitter and share what you think could inspire your followers to encourage more young women and girls to consider technology as a career choice. You don’t have to be attending or actively participating in an event to bring the highlights to other platforms as well, including LinkedIn, Facebook or even Pinterest.
- Find a female technology mentor — or mentor a woman with an interest in technology. In every office there’s someone we could learn from, and someone who could use our help. Start seeking out those potential role models for other young women before they ever get recognized by an awards program and discuss how you can help support them.
- Have a tech talk with a young woman you know. Everyone uses IT in some way to do their jobs. The next time you’re telling your daughter, niece or one of your children’s friends about the work you do, try to convey as simply as possible how technology is a game-changer. Enthusiasm can be a killer app.
The technology industry tends to be ever-optimistic about its potential to make the world a better place. Let’s start channelling some of those good vibes into make it a better place for women to be part of technology’s future.
