The shrinking female IT workforce
Women in mid-management are leaving IT at an alarming rate. The tough economy may be a help -- or a hindrance -- in keeping them.
Computerworld - Last year, programmer Nancy Sheets was forced to take a 20% pay cut along with the rest of the IT department at a Wisconsin-based plastics company, while everyone else working there took a 10% reduction in salary. IT staff also acquiesced to two weeks of unpaid vacation, while the rest of the company took one week of unpaid leave -- all to ensure that the four IT employees kept their jobs.
"I was happy to keep my job, but also I couldn't afford the 20% cut with my husband being unemployed," says Sheets, 55, the only woman in her IT department. Her husband, who had worked as an IT manager at a different company, has been out of work for 14 months.
Sheets likes her work, but she wonders what a job outside of IT would be like. For now, however, she's had to put such musings on hold. "I'm supporting the family," she notes.
Many women in IT found themselves in a similarly precarious position in 2009. In January, the unemployment rate for men held at 10%, while it hovered at 7.9% for women, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics. So it's not surprising that women are leaving their jobs at slightly lower rates than they were in previous years, according to the Center for Work Life Policy.
What's more, about 39% of women are outearning their husbands. "When the woman is the primary breadwinner, she's also less likely to leave her job," says Laura Sherbin, director of research at the New York-based CWLP.
But for women in IT, the salary picture tends to be less rosy. IT salaries for both men and women stagnated in the past year, according to Computerworld's 2010 Salary Survey, and earnings disparities between men and women remained in place.
While male CIOs earned an average of $177,843, female CIOs earned $148,965. Male application development managers earned an average of $114,610, while women with the same title earned $106,679.
Perhaps more alarming, the average bonus for women fell 15.5% in 2009, while the average bonus for men in IT declined 5.6%, according to Computerworld's survey.
"Women don't leave IT jobs primarily because of pay disparities, but salary does play a role in the subtle, unconscious biases often held by IT leaders," says Catherine Ashcraft, senior research scientist at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) at the University of Colorado.
"One way biases play out is evaluations, performance reviews; that definitely affects the salaries. There is that discrepancy, but it's not as great between men and women in technology as it is overall," Ashcraft says.
Lower salaries lead to women dropping out of the IT workforce when child care and other expenses start outweighing the income benefits. "Women make these kinds of calculations. Certainly a lower salary is not helping them stay in the workforce," Sherbin says.
- Read the full report
- Salaries stall, workloads rise, and IT gets squeezed
- Interactive Smart Salary Tool 2010
- The shrinking female IT workforce
- The new IT job search
- Talk your way into a raise
- Opinion: Inspired ideas for retaining staffers


- Excel 2010 Cheat Sheet
- Register for this Computerworld Insider Cheat Sheet and gain access to hundreds of premium content articles, guides, product reviews and more.
- Protecting Against Database Attacks and Insider Threats: Top 5 Scenarios
- Read this new eBook to learn the top five scenarios and essential best practices for preventing database attacks and insider threats.
- Database Activity Monitoring Is Evolving
- Read the analyst report and learn how you can leverage the core capabilities of a DAP solution for better database security.
- Establishing a Strategy for Database Security is No Longer Optional
- The options for securing increasingly valuable databases are very broad and deep, and can be confusing. This research provides an overview of three...
- Thinking Outside The Data Warehouse
- This high level, business problem focused eBook uses 5 customer scenarios to show how people and organizations are tackling real issues using IBM...
- Using BD for Smarter Decision Making
- This paper looks at new developments in business analytics and discusses the benefits analyzing big data bring to the business. All Careers White Papers
- Distributed Database Security with Real-time Monitoring
- View this demo and learn how IBM InfoSphere Guardium database activity monitoring can help protect your sensitive data in distributed DBMS environments with...
- InfoSphere Warehouse Packs Demo
- These flash modules make warehousing more tangible and relevant to business users through detailed explanations of the InfoSphere Warehouse Packs.
- Delivery Management -- Extending Lifecycle Management
- Date: Wednesday, June 20, 2012, 1:00 PM EDT
Siloed organizations continue doing the wrong things and doing things wrong, leading to increased costs,... - Leverage automation today to reduce IT complexity
- Date: Tuesday, June 5, 2012, 2:00 PM EDT
Whether your B2B complexity is caused by multiple technologies due to M&A, business or application specific... - Redefine Expectations in the Data Center
- Need to do more with less? Watch this video to learn how HP ProLiant Gen8 servers can help your business deploy servers three... All Careers Webcasts
How does your salary compare with your peers? Find out using our Smart Salary Tool.
