Women in IT go east, data shows

Computerworld - Silicon Valley may have the highest total concentration of IT workers in the nation, but when it comes to women in the IT workforce, it's eclipsed by several large East Coast metropolitan areas, according to the annual American Community Survey (ACS) released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau.

So if the highest proportion of women in the IT workforce isn't in Silicon Valley, where is it?

That would be the Washington metro area, which includes Arlington and Alexandria, Va., and employs 55,126 women IT workers. They comprise about 32.3% of the total IT workforce there, according to the census numbers.

The Detroit area, which also includes Warren and Livonia, Mich., ranks second, with 31.5% of its IT workforce made up by women, followed by the Baltimore/Towson, Md., metro area, with 28.6%.

IT workers in the U.S.A. America's techiest cities Women in IT go east Map: 2006 Computer Employment by Metro Area Metro Area Query Tool

So where does that leave Silicon Valley?

Interestingly, among 18 large U.S. metropolitan areas, the San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara region ranks close to the bottom in terms of women in the tech workforce, at 22.3%. Only Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue was lower, at 20.8%, according to the census data.

"If you go to a lot of the bars here, you'll see that [statistic] play out," said Steve Van Dorn, president and general manager of the Santa Clara Chamber of Commerce and Convention-Visitors Bureau. "There's a lot more men to women. ... That's what my younger friends tell me. I can't think off the top of my head what would cause that."

David Leighton, president of Women in Technology International in Sherman Oaks, Calif., said he is surprised by the lower percentages of women in IT in tech-centric areas such as San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Clara and Seattle, but he added that it could be misleading.

"When you look at some of the numbers on women-owned businesses, so many women in the technology industry leave to start their own businesses. That could definitely impact a lot of the numbers" in California compared with the East Coast, he said. "They fall off the radar as an IT person" and are classified as business owners rather than IT professionals, Leighton said.

Another trend that's occurring, Leighton said, is that many more women are moving into executive rather than hands-on IT roles, which changes their job categorizations, even if they remain in IT. "A lot of what we view as the technology parts of a business are widening," he said.

Leighton said that a recent book on women in business, How She Does It (Viking Adult, 2007), by entrepreneur and writer Margaret Heffernan, points out that an average of 280 women-owned businesses start up each day in the U.S. And many of those, he speculated, are being started by women who are moving away from direct IT roles into business leadership roles where the IT component is no longer their prime job.