Women Discover a ‘Gender Gap’ in Computer Field
Computer-related occupations remain highly segregated by sex, with women earning lower wages and men dominating in the high-paying executive posts, a new study shows.
“High-tech may produce integrated circuits, but it does not necessarily produce an integrated work force or eliminate earnings differences between men and women,” said Myra Strober, director of the Institute for Research on Educational Finance and Governance at Stanford University.
Strober and Carolyn Arnold analyzed U.S. Census data to conclude that “the computer field was sired by the fields of mathematics and engineering, and the newly born prestigious and technical jobs quickly took on the gender designation of the parent fields.”
Computer engineering and electronic technical work employ few women, while data entry, “which quickly took on the characteristics of clerical work, became a virtually exclusive female preserve,” said Arnold, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Education. “Production work too is preponderantly female.”
In the beginning, most computer programmers were female.
“But very shortly after the computer was introduced, men began to fill the emerging jobs,” Strober said. “Although women have increased their representation in the jobs of both computer programmer and analyst, women remain less than one-third of the incumbents of these occupations.”
The researchers analyzed census data in three computer-related fields: computer scientists-systems analysts, computer programmers and computer operators.
The researchers found that “the higher the status and the pay, the more white men were over-represented compared to the labor force as a whole, and the more minority men and women of all racial and ethnic groups were under-represented.”
Men were more likely to be in managerial or technical-professional positions in high-tech industries than in non-high-tech industries. Women fared “far worse” in managerial or professional positions in high-tech industries than was generally true in non-high-tech industries.
Women’s average annual earnings and median hourly earnings were less than those of men among computer scientists-systems analysts, computer programmers and computer operators.
“Women’s own behavior, employer discrimination and the interaction of labor markets and gender relations all may contribute to the differences,” Strober said.
“Women are still more likely than men to exclude themselves from advanced science and math training. Men who work in these intellectually challenging and highly lucrative sectors may develop a ‘culture of engineering’ in part to keep women out.”
The work style and pressures in the most technologically competitive sectors of the computer industry also may discourage many women.
“Women who want to succeed have to put in long, hard hours of work, and this can be a barrier for women--and men--who try to balance their home and work lives,” Strober said.
“Women need to be made more aware of the channeling that leads them into less prestigious, lower-paying occupations or industries and be helped to develop strategies to counteract this channeling,” she said.
“We need to find ways of making occupations and workplaces more welcoming to both genders and more compatible with satisfying personal and family lives.”
