How do you deal with the technology labor shortage? With women!

By Chloé Freslon
February 1, 2020
¨Pénurie de main d'oeuvre

Article originally published in January 2018

In November 2016, Google set up an artificial intelligence research group in Montreal. Then at the end of 2017, Facebook announced that its latest artificial intelligence research lab would be in Montreal. The same year, Microsoft doubled the size of its artificial intelligence research group.

These tech giants demand a lot of highly skilled labor. Add to that Montreal’s ecosystem of startups and other tech companies that have long been established in the metropolis. That’s a lot of manpower! How are we going to feed all these companies with skilled labor? I’ve got the answer: with women, of course!

The IT labor shortage is not a recent problem. We were already talking about it in 2014 in the newspaper Les Affaires, and we were talking about it again in 2017, in an article by Radio-Canada. According to the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC), Canada’s digital economy should continue to grow substantially over the next five years. The council predicts that employment in Canada’s digital economy will reach 1,637,000 by 2021, creating some 216,000 new jobs between now and then.

Two reports on the information technology (IT) workforce, released this week, make the same observation: women are under-represented in the field. That’s why I created this blog.

ICTC today released a report entitled Digital Fruits: Adjusting to the Changing Economy, which looks at Canada’s challenges in the digital economy.

“Representing nearly half of working-age Canadians, women are part of an important talent pool for the high-quality digital jobs that will support our future economy, ICTC’s report states. Women’s participation in information and communications technology (ICT) professions has remained relatively constant, averaging 24-25% […], a trend that suggests there is clearly room for improvement by renewing the focus on diversity and inclusion.”

The study entitled Diagnostic sectoriel de la main-d’oeuvre dans le secteur des technologies de l’information et des communications au Québec 2018, which was carried out by the TechnoCompétence committee, makes the same observation.

“The proportion of women in ICT professionals has been stable since 2011,” it says in the sectoral workforce committee’s study. It stands at 20%. In Quebec specifically, the situation is evolving for the better, and the interest of girls in joining the ranks of professionals in the sector is strongly on the rise. Over the past five years, the number of girls enrolling in the ICT bachelor’s program has doubled, and graduation rates have risen by 41%.”

I’m convinced that women are the key element against the IT labor shortage. Whether some people like it or not, we’re going to have to make an effort to attract them. Otherwise, business productivity will fall. As the ICT sector is highly competitive, it’s the companies that understand this early on that will come out on top.

An article in the Washington Post reports that companies that prioritize innovation are worth more when women are in management positions. These companies are worth $44 million more on average.

A McKinsey report explains that, in general, companies that focus on diversity and inclusion are more successful. Profits and returns on equity are also higher for these companies.

Organizations with a diverse workforce were more innovative and had less turnover, reveals another study published in Forbes.

Fun fact: did you know that this isn’t the first time women have been turned to when there’s a tech labor shortage? We did it during the Second World War. Due to the large number of men away at war, women were hired to carry out ingenious calculations during the design of the first computer, called ENIAC. It was used to predict where war projectiles would land. Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman were the six women who worked on ENIAC, and are therefore usually considered the first female computer scientists.

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