No, women are still not equal to men in IT

“Cracks in the glass ceiling” is an overused phrase, but it’s apt when you look at the position of women in IT. Equal pay for equal work is a reality in the industry, and women — at least a few of them — helm high-profile companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Yahoo.

That’s the good news. On the other side of that equation is a lot of evidence that IT is still a man’s world, and that “leaning in,” as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg famously advocates, is not an option for most women in the industry.

[ Follow all the developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. | For the latest in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter. ]

Both high-level and rank-and-file IT staffers are still much more likely to be male, and that probably won’t change any time soon. Women comprise only about 17 percent of students working for a computer science degree in the United States, although they represent more than half of the overall university population, according to statistics compiled by the National Science Foundation in 2010.

What’s more, women who work in IT are less likely to hold the highest-paying positions. “What we have is a position gap, not a pay gap,” says Tom Silver, senior vice president of Dice, a large job board for tech workers. In a survey of Dice users that garnered 15,000 responses, the company calculates that “average salaries are equal for male and female tech pros, provided we’re comparing equal levels of experience and education and parallel job titles.”

But there’s an overall $8,400-a-year gap between male and female workers in IT, with men averaging $95,929 a year versus $87,527 for women, Dice found. Worse, that gap appears to be widening: Average salaries for male IT workers increased by about $5,000 from 2011 to 2012, while the salaries of female IT workers rose by just $2,000, according to Dice.

“Pay equity is a good step; I’m really glad to hear that,” says Nancy Lamberton, president of Women in Technology. “But women are still underrepresented in tech, and there’s something in the culture that makes it difficult for them to step up into leadership positions.”

Male from top to bottom Lamberton, who worked in high-level tech-related positions at Lucent, SAP, and other companies for more than two decades, says it still all too common for a woman to walk into an IT staff meeting and realize she’s the only female in the room. The statistics bear her out.

A 2012 survey by the U.S arm of British tech recruitment group Harvey Nash found that just 9 percent of U.S. CIOs are female, down from 11 percent in 2011 last year and 12 percent in 2010. About 30 percent of those polled said their IT organization has no women at all in management, yet only about half of survey respondents considered women to be underrepresented in the IT department.

The position gap is evident in the Dice data when you examine the jobs held by men and women and how much they pay. Of the five job titles most commonly held by respondents to the survey — software engineer, project manager, IT management, applications developer, and systems admin — four of those held by men paid more than $90,000 a year.

Women, though, were paid more than $90,000 a year for just one of the top five positions they hold: project manager. Even in that category, they are paid less. Salaries for male project managers averaged $108,000 a year, while female project managers earned just $101,750. Although that may appear to undercut the argument that there’s pay equity in IT work, Silver says that the Dice study also controlled for years on the job and education, meaning that men tended to have more experience and so commanded higher salaries due to that fact. If men and women had the same amount of experience, then their salaries typically were the same.

That’s progress, of course, but it’s clear that women are not yet breaking through the glass ceiling into higher-paying jobs and are underrepresented in IT as a whole.

The fault is in the system According to Dice’s Silver, roughly 30 percent of the IT workforce is female. There’s always some disagreement about the definition of IT, but a glance at numbers compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Silver’s estimate is in the ballpark.

Women make up 47 percent of the adult U.S. workforce, but just 26 percent of what the bureau calls “computer and mathematical occupations.” Within that category, just 19.7 percent of software developers — arguably the hottest segment of the IT jobs market — are women, and that group also includes people working on application and systems software. The category with the highest representation of women is “database administrators,” at 36.6 percent, according to the BLS.

Of all the statistics I looked at for this story, the one that surprised and worried me the most is the one on student enrollment. As I mentioned, just 17 percent of the nation’s computer science undergraduates are women. But in the early 1980s, around the time Apple issued its IPO and Time magazine named the PC its Machine of the Year, women accounted for just over 37 percent of the students earning bachelor’s degrees in computer science. Talk about retrograde motion.

It’s probably fair to say that the glass ceiling in IT has been cracked. But it will take more time and a lot more effort to shatter it. Facebook COO Sandberg certainly makes some good points in her book, but my concern is that she puts too much emphasis on the individual woman to be more assertive and not enough on changing what’s still a discriminatory system.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Post them here (Add a comment) so that all our readers can share them, or reach me at bill@billsnyder.biz. Follow me on Twitter at BSnyderSF.

This article, “No, women are still not equal to men in IT,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.