Despite conversations about gender diversity in tech, women are still underrepresented, underpaid and often discriminated against in the tech industry, the numbers don’t lie.
According to a report by The World Bank, women make up less than 40% of the total global workforce. Of course, this number differs when you zoom in to specific countries or regions. For example, in the EU the employment rate for women of working age is 66.5 %. While the rate has improved over the years, it’s still less than men (78.1%) and women tend to be employed in lower-paying jobs.
Narrowing our scope down to women in tech, an excerpt from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) report provides us with ample evidence of the statistics of women in tech in 2016. A more recent statistic shows that 48% of women in STEM jobs report discrimination in the recruitment and hiring process. Black and Hispanic women, who majored in computer science or engineering, are less likely to be hired into a tech role than their white counterparts.
If we are being sincere with ourselves, there is still so much to be done in order to balance the scale of gender diversity and inclusion in the tech industry.
Over time, a number of companies, the tech giants inclusive have made an effort on their part to bring more women into their workforce—combined, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft only have a workforce of about 34.4% women.
We do not want to sit back and hope that the imbalance would rectify itself. If history and numbers have taught us anything, it is that history would always repeat itself if there are no factors to cause a change.
We strongly resonate with the words of Former Reddit CEO and Current Co-Founder of Project Include, Ellen Pao when she said; “We need to understand that if we all work on inclusion together, it’s going to be faster, broader, better, and more thorough than anything we can do on our own.”—and that is why we have set out on this journey towards creating a community of women who support, train and nurture each other in tech.
We consider ourselves advocates for gender inclusion, we want to create a community where women support, train and nurture each other.
Eduabasi Chukwunweike, Founder, Wentors
About Wentors
Wentors is an online global organization geared towards providing a platform women in tech can gain unfiltered access to female mentors in the industry. We believe that every woman can aspire for a role in technology and achieve her goals. We also believe the people best situated to nurture these dreams are the women currently in technology.
We are not another organization that equips women with skills relevant to the tech industry, no! We go beyond that, creating windows of opportunity that links them up with senior-level female mentors in the industry.
Mentorship for women in the industry has been everything but easy. Access to senior-level female mentors has been more stringent than comfortable. We see a gap here and we want to be the bridge that closes that gap.
Although we have a long road until we achieve gender equality in the workplace, we recognize a positive trend across the tech industry. Women-only tech groups, like the FBomb Breakfast Group, are popping up all over the country, acting as an important way for women in tech to meet, network, discuss the challenges and triumphs of their work and lift each other up. We especially dream of seeing equal numbers of male and female C- suite executives of multibillion-dollar tech companies.
We cannot downplay the influence of women in innovation, gender diversity breeds a higher quality of solutions. Inherently, the only ones who know how best to solve the problem of gender inclusion in the tech industry are women.
Quoting the founder of Wentors—Eduabasi Chukwunweike, ISV lead, Microsoft4Afrika— We consider ourselves advocates for gender inclusion, we want to create a community where women support, train and nurture each other.
This is why Wentors exist!
Going forward, we hope to change the narrative of women in tech, honing in on our individual stories to not only inspire but to serve as a guiding light for every woman in tech and the ones who aspire for roles in the tech industry.