A woman’s role and performance in the world of technology has been a hot topic for many years, and was revisited on Oct. 9 when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made some controversial comments while talking to Maria Klawe at the Grace Hopper Conference in Phoenix. He suggested that it’s “good karma” for women to wait for pay raises, saying they should have “faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along.”
Afterward, the head of Microsoft apologized writing that “I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work…If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.”
Still, the row stirred the debate about gender inequality in the information technology all over the world.
Ukraine is no different from other countries where the gender ratio is extremely skewed. The share of women employees among technical specialists in some of the biggest Ukrainian software development companies varies from 17 to 20 percent, while in the U.S. this number reaches 25 percent, according to data compiled by WhoIsHostingThis.
However, Ukraine’s tech workplace is becoming diversified. The average share of female tech specialists in the top five software development companies – Luxoft, EPAM, Ciklum, and GlobalLogic – where more than 11,600 are employed, has increased from 16.7 to 18.4 percent over the last two years.
Similar findings were reported in a semiannual salary survey conducted by DOU.ua, a Ukrainian software developer community. In December 2011, only 6.8 percent of women participated in the survey. By May 2014, this number had increased to 12.4 percent.
In other, non-technical fields of IT, the share of female employees is even higher: GlobalLogic’s spokesperson Vladyslav Tkachuk told the Kyiv Post that as of Oct. 16 women accounted for 34 percent of the company’s managers, up 6 percentage points from 2011.
It starts with education
Meanwhile, the number of young women who pursue programming-related degrees is significantly lower than the number of female tech specialists in Ukrainian companies. According to the Department of Informatics and Computer Science in Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, 12.4 percent of the students enrolled in the 2014-2015 academic year were female, up almost 2 percentage points from the previous year.
This difference lies in the fact that a significant part of women in technology, work in non-development positions. More than a third of the female respondents in the DOU.ua survey conducted in May worked in quality assurance (QA), which does not necessarily require a tech-related degree, while only about 20 percent described themselves as software engineers.
“Women (in software development companies) usually work in QA, project management, as Scrum masters or designers,” Iryna Pashko, a project manager at Ciklum who has a background in software engineering told the Kyiv Post. “Among programmers, it’s like one woman for every 10 men, or even less.”
In Pashko’s opinion, women seldom choose to work in programming because they prefer positions that involve more communication with other people. Yet with demand high for all kinds of IT specialists, she doesn’t think that it’s more difficult for women to get a good job in the industry.
“As a project manager, I know that a team with women among its members is more disciplined and balanced,” Pashko said. “Twice I had a situation when an all-male team asked (the HR department) to hire a female member. When I asked one of the teams what skills they expected her to have, they said they don’t really care.”
Lower pay
A salary gender gap exists for women in IT. In the U.S., women working in science, tech, engineering, and math earn an average of $75,100 yearly, whereas men earn closer to $91,000.
Pashko said she’s never noticed this issue on the tech market in Ukraine. “There’s market demand, and if you have certain skills and attitude, you will earn (a) certain (amount of) money. It also happens that women earn more than men with a similar skills set,” she said.
Data from the DOU.ua salary survey doesn’t support Pashko’s view though. Men and women working in the field of QA with similar skills and experience tend to earn about the same amount. Software engineers are treated less equally.
For example, in Kyiv a female Python developer aged between 25-39 years and with less than three years of experience earns an average of $1,800 monthly, while a man of the same description gets paid $2,400.
There are exceptions when women earn more, but the general trend is that the salary of male software developers is 15.5 percent higher than their female counterparts living in the same city, with roughly the same experience, and possessing the same hard and soft skills.
The difference in pay could be explained by reasons that Pashko mentioned – employers might be softening their requirements when looking for female candidates, but also pay them less. This explanation, however, doesn’t seem to go well with the standards of equality generally accepted in the industry.
Andrii Degeler is the Kyiv Post’s information technology reporting fellow. Degeler has been covering the IT business in Ukraine and internationally since 2009. His fellowship is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe. He can be reached on Twitter (@shlema) or [email protected].
