Why women are leaving technology

By Chloé Freslon

September 2, 2019

Article originally published in 2017

Is a work environment where you can thrive and be treated fairly too much to ask for?

For the first time, a survey of ex-employees who work in the tech industry explores why they no longer do. The Kapor Center for Social Impact and Harris Poll examined (PDF) a representative sample of over 2,000 U.S. adults – 594 of them women: 67% White or Asian, 33% Black, Latina or Native American – who had left a job in the industry in the past three years.

The two main reasons why women leave their jobs are, unsurprisingly, to find a better opportunity (33%) and to leave an unfair working environment (32%).

One woman in ten says she has been sexually assaulted. 55% say this experience influenced their decision to leave.

Other reasons for leaving include other people taking credit for their work (27%), not being considered for promotion (25%) and being underestimated in their abilities (16%).

It’s worse if you’re not white! Visible minority women are more likely to be passed over for promotion (30%), stereotyped (24%) and mistaken for someone of the same gender/origin (17%) than any other group. Unfairness is the main reason for women of color to leave (36%), while white/Asian women are less likely to leave for this reason (28%).

I regularly hear, “Yes, but in Quebec it’s not as bad as in the U.S.!” Actually, it’s not. Or rather, we don’t know, so that gives some people a good excuse. Canadian Kirstine Stewart, former Twitter executive and current chief strategist at Diply, says: “Some of these opinions [about the Google manifesto] don’t stop at the border, and that’s why we have to be very diligent. Don’t think it’s much better in Canada.” In the same article, Steph Guthrie of TechGirls Canada says there’s also more work to be done to boost ethnic diversity, with black, indigenous and Latino people still deeply underrepresented. “We’re behind the U.S. in many ways because we don’t even have the data,” says Guthrie.

The report also shows that there are possible solutions that work. Nearly 2/3 of people who leave say they would have stayed if the employer had changed the corporate culture. Companies with a strategy of inclusion and diversity are less named in the report when it comes to inequity, sexual harassment, stereotyping and injustice. Employees also noted that having an inclusion and diversity strategy has a greater impact than individual initiatives such as unconscious bias training.