What is the distribution of men and women in the high tech industry?

Hi,
That is a good question, I am in the high tech career field and it seems pretty even where I work..in fact, my team has more women then men. I found this on cnet dot com...

In October, a company reported that women comprise 29.1 percent of its workforce, but only 16.6 percent work in technical positions and just 23 percent hold leadership roles. Twitter said women fill 10 percent of its technical jobs, with 21 percent in leadership. And women Googlers account for 17 percent of the search giant's tech jobs, while only 21 percent manage others.
The average percentage of women in technical/high tech careers is about 30%..."

Here is another article that describes some statistics: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/women-in-tech_n_6955940.html

One of the most frustrating things about the tech industry’s woman problem is the paucity of reliable data on the number of women working in technical roles. Now, thanks to a public Google spreadsheet created by Tracy Chou, a software engineer at Pinterest, we have data on how many women engineers work at 84 different tech companies. To collect the data, company employees have been performing internal head counts, and most contributors have identified themselves openly, though Chou invites anonymous submissions via email. Contributions have also come from people who are manually counting the number of women on companies’ team profile pages. Chou has focused her efforts on women engineers, defined as “women who are writing or architecting software, and are in full-time roles.” Until now, there have been little data on how many women are among the prestigious and well-compensated ranks of engineers, as opposed to the many less technical roles within the industry.
The numbers, while preliminary, are revealing: tech companies employ an average of 12.33% women engineers. This is consistent with what I’ve observed over the course of 16 years working in the industry (12 of which I spent running a web design and development firm) and what I’ve heard from others. The numbers also map neatly to current figures on women computer science grads (pdf), which suggests the “pipeline problem” argument is legitimate.
Among the companies listed, gender diversity varies. A handful are at parity or better: Levo League, Hackbright Academy, and Yellowsmith—all companies, incidentally, with women at the helm—boast 67% women on their engineering teams. The Muse sits at 75% and Kabinet and Spitfire Athlete both hit 100%, though both have two-person engineering teams. On the other hand, 15 companies on the list are without a single female engineer: Treehouse, 37signals, and Causes.com among them.

The high tech sector has become a major source of economic growth fueling the U.S. economy. As an innovation leader, the high tech sector has impacted how we communicate and access information, distribute products and services, and address critical societal problems. Because this sector is the source of an increasing number of jobs, it is particularly important that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and its stakeholders understand the emerging trends in this industry. Ensuring a sufficient supply of workers with the appropriate skills and credentials and addressing the lack of diversity among high tech workers have become central public policy concerns. This report seeks to shed more light on employment patterns in the high tech industry by providing an overview of literature as a backdrop to understanding high tech employment, and analyzing corresponding summary data from the Employer Information EEO-1 Report (EEO-1)[1] collected in 2014.

Employment in computer science and engineering is growing at twice the rate of the national average.[2] These jobs tend to provide higher pay and better benefits, and they have been more resilient to economic downturns than other private sector industries over the past decade. In addition, jobs in the high tech industry have a strong potential for growth. These jobs are important to companies in all industries that require workers with technology skills. Employment trends in the high tech sector are therefore important to the national economic and employment outlook.

The industries and occupations associated with "high tech" are rapidly evolving. There is no single high tech industry-rather, new technology has transformed industries like telecommunications and manufacturing and the functions of numerous occupations. Sections I and II of this report define the high tech industry, or the "high tech sector," as industries that employ a high concentration of employees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) occupations and the production of goods and services advancing the use of electronic and computer-based production methods. This sector requires a substantial professional labor force and employs about a quarter of U.S. professionals and about 5-6 percent of the total labor force. Section III of this report examines the top 75 high tech firms in the Silicon Valley area based on a ranking by the San Jose Mercury News that looked at revenue, profitability and other criteria to identify leading "Silicon Valley tech firms."

This report aims to add to the public policy discussion by exploring employment trends in the high tech sector in three ways: Section I provides a brief overview of some of the literature addressing high tech employment; Section II analyzes EEO-1 data from the high tech sector both nationwide and in the geographic area generally referred to as Silicon Valley; and Section III reviews employment statistics derived from a group of leading Silicon Valley firms. Although growth in the high-tech sector has increasingly occurred in a wide range of geographic areas, this analysis provides a national picture along with a more focused examination on the well-established tech industry in Silicon Valley. The report also identifies geographic areas with high concentrations of high tech jobs that may benefit from future study. Additionally, important areas for further study include employment for older workers and individuals with disabilities.

Section I briefly reviews the literature addressing high tech employment, which has tended to focus on two issues: 1) the supply of labor with appropriate skills and 2) the reasons behind the underrepresentation of women and minority workers in the relevant labor force. One body of literature emphasizes the challenges for the U.S. education system to produce appropriately skilled workers and the factors that influence the prevalence of women and minorities in particular career paths and occupations. Another body of literature focuses on the attrition of women and minorities as students and as employees. This literature cites research and personal experience indicating that bias impedes the full and equal participation of women and minorities in STEM fields.

Section II examines employment trends in the high tech sector through an analysis of the available 2014 EEO-1 data. By using nationwide 2014 EEO-1 data to examine the participation of women and minorities in overall private sector employment compared to that of the high tech sector, we identified several concerning trends:

Compared to overall private industry, the high tech sector employed a larger share of whites (63.5 percent to 68.5 percent), Asian Americans (5.8 percent to 14 percent) and men (52 percent to 64 percent), and a smaller share of African Americans (14.4 percent to 7.4 percent), Hispanics (13.9 percent to 8 percent), and women (48 percent to 36 percent).
In the tech sector nationwide, whites are represented at a higher rate in the Executives category (83.3 percent), which typically encompasses the highest level jobs in the organization. This is roughly over 15 percentage points higher than their representation in the Professionals category (68 percent), which includes jobs such as computer programming. However, other groups are represented at significantly lower rates in the Executives category than in the Professionals category; African Americans (2 percent to 5.3 percent), Hispanics (3.1 percent to 5.3 percent), and Asian Americans (10.6 percent to 19.5 percent).
Of those in the Executives category in high tech, about 80 percent are men and 20 percent are women. Within the overall private sector, 71 percent of Executive positions are men and about 29 percent are women.

I'm yet another female software engineer at Zynga. Zynga seems to be especially good at hiring women, but I've still had to get used to being the only woman in a room. Outside of the bay area things are more bleak. I went to the University of Virginia, and in Virginia, pretty much all of the engineering department was white and male. The computer science classes were maybe 10-15% women at best, while the math classes were completely male (except me). When I started getting internships in the area, I was always the only female engineer. These other areas will probably catch up as the industry becomes more appealing and as places like the bay area lead the way, but for now we are outnumbered.

Kasey

I'm a female software engineer the SF Bay Area, working as Software Engineer at Zynga.
I grew up in the area, went to a local university (UC Berkeley) where I studied Computer Science and Economics. At my time at Berkeley, 1/3 of the CS majors and definitely less than that for EECS (electrical engineering and computer science) were women.

I think first, it depends on the company. I've heard that gaming companies tend to be more diverse because of the different employee types (designer, artist, producer, product manager, engineers). At the same time, I know plenty of women who work at non game companies as both technical and nontechnical positions, examples are Oracle, Airbnb, facebook, major companies -- from my personal experience it looks like fewer women in hardware tech companies.

That being said there are many efforts to get women interested in electrical engineering, I really like the lilypad project https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardLilyPad

At my current workplace, I work in the central tech organization (not a game team) and the majority of engineering managers (who start off as software engineers) that I work with are women. There are not as many low level software engineers that I know who are women, but in the leadership positions, it looks like women are very prominent.

In my opinion, with the current efforts for STEM, in about 5 years there will be no difference, or women may outnumber men in technical positions. I do find myself in the minority a lot of the time, but at the same time, there is a strong presence of "let's change this current situation" in the community and I love being part of that effort.

Hi Jaleel,

I've found this piece of information that could help you better in understanding the ratio.

The United States Department of Labor's Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey report describing the Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity [Numbers in thousands] has been provided in detail for the year 2015 in the link below.

You might want to search for the word Computer and narrow down your results as per your requirement.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

Hey,

That's a great question. I, like Hina work for Zynga (Hi Hina) But I'm based in Dublin Ireland so I have a more European perceptive. I found this article really helpful http://tech.eu/features/59/more-women-in-tech-europe/
I've worked in the tech industry for most of my working life in various forms. I've always been on the more administrative/project management side and it has been my experience that this is very female focused.
I am now seeing more women moving into higher technical roles and being more widely accepted within the community but I do think this needs more change. I recently attended an industry event with over 1000 people in attendance and out of 20 keynote speakers only 4 were women.
I echo Hina's comments, I love being part of the effort for change. The more of us that speak out and have our voices heard the better!
Best of luck with everything!