Upstart Business Journal – Why aren’t women leaning into tech jobs?

With Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In as a welcome backdrop, here’s how one Silicon Valley shop—RichRelevance, the one that pays me to be its chief marketing officer—fares in the challenge of gender parity. Right now, like most tech companies, we’re not even close to gender parity.

Our company’s leadership is 20 percent female. Our total employee statistics skew more male than female (79 women, 170 men). Those numbers are important because we plan to double in size this year, and we want to recruit a brilliant—and, ideally, diverse/balanced team—to launch our latest products, but right now male applicants far outnumber female applicants. According to our most recent Jobvite statistics, female candidates make up 25 percent of engineering and sales applicants; 30 percent of ad ops, client services, and science applicants; and a scant 3 percent of applicants in the IT department.

I’m laying out all our numbers to spark discussion about what we should be trying to do to encourage more young women to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers in the first place. After all, if they don’t want to get into these fields in the first place, there won’t be much leaning in actually going on.

As a tech firm, there are some things we can do to help fix the imbalance. But there are also things we just cannot do.

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