Mid-career women are dropping out of technical roles at almost double the rate of men, a new report from the Tech Council of Australia has found.
Released on Tuesday, the report called Women in Highly Technical Occupations: The Leaky Pipeline, shows women make up only 20 per cent of Australia’s highly technical workforce, but this figure drops to just 16 per cent of the workforce after the age of 40.
Over the past five years, the number of women in technical jobs like software engineers, AI researchers or physicists has grown by only two per cent.
The report indicates there are three key drop off points for women and girls, including early high school when girls make subject choices, late high school when girls decide what degree to enrol in, and mid-career, when women typically take on additional unpaid caring responsibilities and may encounter systemic issues like a hostile workplace culture.
Targeted action at the three drop-out points could double the amount of women in highly technical roles, the report says.
“The number of women working in roles requiring specialist technical knowledge and skills, like software engineers, AI researchers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians, has grown only 2 percent over the past five years – that’s despite the top three fastest growing global skills and 8 of the top 10 fastest growing global jobs being highly technical,” Head of Research at the Tech Council of Australia, Dr Ilana Feain, said.
“This analysis makes clear that women are at most risk of dropping out of these much-needed professions, or in many cases diverting from these career paths completely, in early high school, late high school, and then again mid-career.”
“Australia’s ability to realise the full potential of innovative technology, including AI, depends on having a highly skilled workforce. Targeted interventions at these three drop-out points could triple the number of women coming through the pipeline of highly technical occupations in Australia,” Dr Feain said.
The report analysed publicly available government data to map women’s participation in highly technical fields.
Tech Lead at TCA Diversity, Adair Robins, said boys are two times more likely to select technical subjects at high school and three times more likely to enrol in technical studies at university. This is despite girls and boys starting with similar interest and performance levels in early childhood.
In the workforce, women encounter systemic barriers that men do not, she says.
“Counter to the lower rates of uni enrolments – only 20 percent of engineering and technology students are women, those who do push ahead actually graduate from technical degrees at a higher rate than men and have similar conversion rates as men to highly technical roles,” Robins said.
“For those women who do enter the tech workforce, systemic barriers remain. Workplace harassment, the scarcity of senior female role models, the low number of women CEOs in technical industries, and the challenges of returning to full-time work after having children all contribute to women leaving mid-career at almost twice the rate of men.”
According to the report, skilled migrants make up over 55 percent of Australia’s highly technical workforce, with women accounting for 24 percent of that cohort of workers. Participation by domestic Australian women is lower again, at just 14 percent.
Brendan Hopper, CommBank’s GM Engineering and CIO for Technology, said the under-representation of women in tech is an issue that must be addressed.
“If we’re serious about building a truly inclusive tech ecosystem, we must confront these realities head-on by addressing the underlying reasons why women, and young girls, are opting out of tech at different stages of their life and careers,” Hopper said.
The report, developed with Commonwealth Bank, will be launched today at the National Tech Summit in Sydney.