How has Covid-19 affected women working in tech?
The extra flexibility from remote working was meant to make the tech sector more attractive to women - but we're still haunted by the spectre of presenteeism
The current racing of Covid-19 though school populations is affecting women working across all industries, and certainly some female pandemic experiences seem fairly universal. Women picked up the majority of the extra unpaid work that lockdowns generated, often taking on the bulk of the responsibility for home schooling and caring for older relatives - and this includes women who were also essential workers. Plenty of men working in non-essential industries - particularly fathers - freed from long commutes during lockdown, rather enjoyed having the extra time at home. Lockdowns gave them time. The same could not typically be said for their partners who, if they hadn't been furloughed, spent months trying to bend their work around home schooling, often working deeply antisocial hours.
However, the technology sector comes loaded with a particular set of challenges for women who seek a career there. The expectation of round the clock availability, and the fact that development in technical roles often depends on out-of-hours learning, already discriminates against female employees. To what extent have these expectations changed over the course of the last 20 months?
Flexibility isn't everything
In the earlier days of the pandemic, it was tempting to conclude that the flexibility tech employers had to show their employees would benefit women more than men in the longer term. After all, weren't we the ones complaining about a lack of flexibility from employers? To understand why this extra flexibility hasn't worked in women's favour we need to look again at the distinction between attracting women into technical roles - and keeping them there.
The pandemic has accelerated cloud migration to the extent that more technical roles than ever before can be performed from home, as well as in offices and technical environments such as SOCs. Technical companies can offer women starters more flexible terms than they probably would have done before 2020, and some of them are. However, whilst flexibility was a factor in putting women off pursuing technical careers, it was far from the only one. As Computing has argued before, cyber security and software development are examples of areas which need to up their game in terms of the imagery and language that they use when communicating with the sections of society they claim to want to reach. Recruitment ads seeking 'rock stars' are unlikely to attract the kind of people who want to work flexibly - a fact the advertisers must surely be aware of?
Lockdown as a leveller
Recruiting women is a relatively small part of the overall picture. Retaining them and enabling their progression into the role models that tech companies almost always claim they want to see more of is a more complex challenge. The industry didn't get off to the best start. Data from the US indicated that women were 1.6 times more likely to be furloughed or laid off than their male colleagues, ironically because they tended to be in more junior roles.
Reducing female attrition rates also requires a much more inclusive model of working, and in many organisations a different type of leadership. Again, early-on it seemed as if gains had been made. Prior to the pandemic, women working in paid employment would often feel as if they had to hide their families and domestic lives away from employers, lest they be deemed unprofessional and unreliable; but lockdown working meant the domestic lives of all employees working at home were quite literally on display, acting as a leveller because it affected men, too. People got used to small children and home deliveries disrupting meetings. Nobody tutted, and it seemed as if the definition of 'professional' had softened in a way that might benefit women working flexibly. The death of presenteeism was announced, and that could only be good for women.
Digital presenteeism
However, it now appears that reports of the death of presenteeism had been greatly exaggerated. Presenteeism is alive and well - it's just gone digital. The expectation of availability hasn't gone away; if anything, remote working has exacerbated it because women feel under pressure to prove that they aren't shirking. Their male colleagues tend not to report the same levels of pressure to do likewise.
Why do women feel this pressure? Part of the explanation lies in the disconnect between stated corporate aspirations for greater diversity and the nuts and bolts of building a more inclusive workplace. If (predominantly male) managers at enterprise technology firms haven't genuinely changed their attitudes to the visibility, as opposed to the productivity, of those reporting to them (and a great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that they haven't), nothing changes.
It should be interpreted as a message to change the leadership culture
Women aren't being helped by a government and print media narrative of a two-track system developing, with those who choose to work remotely being shunted onto a virtual track and overlooked for promotion. Catherine Mann, a Bank of England policymaker, made headlines last week voicing her concerns that women who choose to work remotely would be left behind. This profoundly unhelpful narrative is interpreted by many women - and their immediate managers - as a message that they need to be visible at all times. This is a shame, because it should be interpreted, especially by tech employers, as a message to change their leadership culture. Employers have the power to ensure that this dual-track scenario doesn't occur, but at the moment the pressure is being felt by those without the power to do anything about it.
Instead of enabling women working in technology to progress, the pandemic, and the shift to hybrid working it has engendered, is in danger of actively working against them. By removing the demarcation between work and home life, but not removing the accompanying presenteeism, technology employers are in danger of increasing female attrition rates instead of slowing them. Inclusive leadership, and an emphasis on productivity rather than visibility, is a necessity if hybrid working is to work for everyone.