Yesterday (8 March) we celebrated the International Women’s Day. It made me reflect on the issue of women at the top in general and women in IT in specific.
By Zafar Anjum
09 Mar 2009
Yesterday (8 March), people the world over celebrated International Women’s Day. I was sitting in a diner when the topic came up for a discussion. I was with two of the most important women in my life—my wife and my daughter. Of course, I also remembered my mother but she lives in India, thousands of kilometers away. All I could do was to give her a call later in the evening.
We all know how the times are bad because of the recessionary environment. My wife, who works in the Singapore office of a global IT company, told me how the number of women workers had dwindled in her office over the last few months. When she had started a year and a half ago, she could count among her colleagues almost half a dozen female software programmers. Two weeks ago, the number came down to just two females in her office, including herself. Presently she is the only one left.
Because of the bad business climate, most contractual workers, male or female, are being let go. End of the day, how does this kind of gender imbalance at the workplace affect the minority—the female employees? And more significantly, does the management need to consider the gender equation in its workforce when retrenchment or cutbacks in headcount are planned? I began to think of these questions. I don’t know if there are any empirical studies on this subject.
All these are issues related with women at the level of the workforce. What is the situation at the top level, I thought about it too.
Women at the top
I had recently interviewed Ranjani Ranganath, general manager, technology strategy and business management, ANZ. She was in Melbourne when we talked about her own career and her story of starting out as a software tester and becoming a top level manager with a multinational bank. She also shared with me her thoughts on women in the field of IT, especially in the perspective of the situation in India.
“I may be slightly outdated, but approximately, just a very crude number, approximately one-third of the annual campus intake (in India) is women,” she said. “So, it’s a very positive story in India, especially in urban India. A woman being an engineer is no longer a rarity, not at all.
“The problem is, however, that as you go up the management rank, you start to see the percentage of one-third rapidly decline, and so most companies are trying to figure out a smart way in which they can address that. The pipeline narrows dramatically beyond middle management.”
Therefore, deducing from hers and my earlier observation, if women are being squeezed out of the workforce right up to the middle level (that is, including the female employees from the lower levels), how would one expect to see more women at the top positions in the corporates, be it in the field IT or non-IT?
Why does it happen?
“Firstly, a lot of them level-off,” said Ranjani. “Women’s thinking is, ‘I get to middle management, I’m comfortable, I’m happy’, and at this point the ambition somehow dries up, or the deep conviction and confidence dries up.
“And I don’t honestly have a theory as to why, a lot of it is also because it is very hard, and you have to learn very rapidly, you have to take chances, you have to take risks, you have to have a deep sense of belief, and at some point it really gets hard.
“The second thing is that women take career breaks. So they’ll take a career break, but when they want to come back, the way the corporations are designed, it’s not easy to break back in. I also had that challenge, but I managed.”
Baby or briefcase?
In their book, Women at the Top (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), authors Diane F. Halpern and Fanny M. Cheung ask and then answer that very question: Why are there so few women at the top of the leading organisations? They write:
“An important clue can be found by taking a closer look at the women who have made it into the rarefied atmosphere of life at the top. It is even more disheartening to find that among the small percentage of high-level executives who are women, almost half do not have children.
“According to a report from the US Census Bureau (2004), the more money a woman makes, the less likely she is to ever have children, with close to half of all women in the US with salaries greater than (US)$100,000 without children…Hewlett (2002) showed that in America, 49 per cent of the “best paid” women in the 41 to 55 age range and making over $100,000 per year are childless, compared to 19 per cent of men.
“The double standard is alive and well at the workplace. The presence of children signal stability and responsibility for men, who are assumed to be better workers because of their role as breadwinners. The identical situation for women has the opposite effect. The choice for highly successful women has been clear: you can choose either a baby or a briefcase.”
While the good news is that women are doing better than ever before (for example, they make 46 per cent of the workforce in the US, 45 per cent in China, 42 per cent in Hong Kong), they have a long way to go to make up the numbers at the top ‘O’ level positions. In the US, women hold more than 50 per cent of all management and professional positions, but only two per cent of Fortune 500, and two per cent of Fortune 1000 CEOs are women (CNN). The corresponding situation is worse in Asia.
If women have to be assured of equal representation at the top level, I think companies will have to consciously work to make the pipeline obstacle-free at all the levels, starting from the lower rungs of the workforce.
Zafar Anjum is the online editor of MIS Asia portal.
