What are the odds of women making it to the helm of the Fortune 500 tech leadership? Frontier Business, a digital provider for small businesses, wanted to know how many women make it from studying and working in tech-related fields to actually leading tech companies. Women hold nearly 52% of all management and professional-level jobs, so why doesn’t that number translate to one of the most lucrative industries of the modern age?
Frontier Business decided to look at three distinct phases of a typical tech career using information gathered from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics — graduation from college with a tech degree, working in a tech-related job and becoming an executive in a big Fortune 500 tech company.
Here are some of their findings:
- Over the past 8 years, 18.82% of tech graduates have been female. In the 2016-2017 year, 20.34% of tech graduates were female. (more women going into tech fields?)
- Over the past 8 years, 166,470 people graduated with a tech undergraduate degree in the United States with 31,334 of those being women. In the 2016-2017 school year, that number went up to 209,340 total graduates, 42,576 of which were female.
- In 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were 5,656,000 total tech jobs in the US. 1,324, or 23.40%, of those were held by women. In contrast, females make up 46.9% of the workforce in general. That’s almost double the percentage of females in the tech field.
- 39 technology companies made the Fortune 500 list in 2018. Apple came in the highest at #4 and NetApp the lowest at #495.
- The tech company with the highest percentage of female executives was Booze Allen Hamilton with 55%, followed by eBay at 45%, CDW at 44%, Insight Enterprises at 43%, and Oracle at 42%.
- Four of the tech companies had no females in executive positions (as per our definition of executive position): Activision Blizzard, Amphenol, Sanmina, and ON Semiconductor.
- Even in tech companies, not all executives have a tech degree. Some are business people, others over HR, some are legal or financial people. On average, 45% of the executives at each of these companies had tech backgrounds. The highest being Cisco systems with about 80% of executives having a tech degree and the lowest being Activision Blizzard with no executives with a tech degree to our knowledge.
- Of the tech company executives with a tech degree, very few are female. On average, only 10% of all executives at a tech company with a college degree in a technology field are female. 20 of the 39 companies we looked at had 0 female executives with a tech degree.
To read the complete report, click here.
Great news. A very big mistake women make is to adopt the tactics of doing business with men. You just need to use women’s advantages, and the strongest female side is its weakness. A woman by nature is quite flexible, it is much easier for her to survive defeats than for men. And it is more stress-resistant, easier to relate to failures and failures. After all, any business develops in a sinusoid, with its ups and downs. And it’s very important when the recession is not to strain and not try to stop this recession, but just to start thinking about some new parallel projects, steps that this business could take. Sooner or later this recession stops. Good luck!