Since I have started working in this industry, I see the same content circulating during women’s day celebrating their achievements and ‘breaking the glass ceiling’. This is one of the reasons why I hate ‘Women’s Day’. Don’t get me wrong, being a woman myself I love my ladies. But why are we acknowledging the achievements on one single day/month and why is there a glass ceiling to begin with?
Though the same discussion on ‘Women in Tech’ circulate around women’s day, there still remain very few female tech leaders in the industry. Companies are even taking up this as an opportunity to commercialise or market themselves. This year, even the theme of Women’s Day is ‘DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality’, showing the need to push more women into STEM.
Surrounding myself with some amazing tech leaders, I’ve always wondered, if there were no change makers and a few women who wanted to break the conventional norms of what women should do, what would the technology industry look like now?
For a change, let’s see what the technology industry would have looked like if women were not involved in the sector. Women have made significant contributions to the technology sector, shaping the industry in various ways.
One of the first person that comes to my mind is Ada Lovelace. Being a literature graduate, I was a huge fan of her father’s work and was astonished at realising how she is one of the first women to ‘break the glass ceiling’ and steered away from literature to choose the STEM sector. She is considered the world’s first computer programmer.
Imagining a world without programming seems impossible. Computers would be nothing but a useless piece of box and plastic (maybe considered as a bigger calculator). Her groundbreaking invention laid the foundation for the development of computer programming as we know it today.
Dr Shirley Ann Jackson’s research in theoretical physics helped lay the foundation for advances in telecommunications and data communication.
If these women had been unable to make their contributions, the technology industry may have been facing a setback. Their inventions and innovations have had a significant impact on the industry, paving the way for further progress and development.
I am not saying that without them these technologies wouldn’t have been invented. Now that wouldn’t make sense. Would it? But in an ever-evolving industry like technology, a delay in inventions like these would set the sector years or even decades behind.
Yet, nothing much has changed. Women still have to break the glass ceiling, which looks like a regular ceiling in many companies. They still have to fight for their rights and even in the 21st century, women in STEM are still not common. When I talk about a CEO, most people picture a man. Why? As of 2022, women make up 28% of the tech industry workforce. Of these, only 15% of engineering jobs are held by women, making the STEM field where women are most highly underrepresented.
Maybe we should stop celebrating women’s day and start acknowledging their contribution just as much as we acknowledge men’s. We don’t need a day to celebrate us. Give us 365 days of EQUAL opportunity. Haven’t women proved enough times that they don’t need to be treated differently?
