Reshma Saujani on Tech’s Structural Gender Problem

Reshma Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2012 with the goal of closing the gender gap in technology. Thirteen years later, she has reached 580,000 girls through the programme’s after-school and campus clubs. The gender gap in computer science has narrowed modestly. The gender gap in technology leadership has not.

We spoke at the Girls Who Code offices in New York. The conversation was less optimistic than I expected, and more interesting for it.

The participation numbers have moved. The leadership numbers haven’t. What explains the gap?

Pipeline is not the problem. We have been told for twenty years that if we fix the pipeline — get more girls into computer science — the leadership problem will solve itself. We’ve made real progress on the pipeline. Women are 27% of computer science graduates now, up from 18% when I started. The percentage of women in senior technical roles at major tech companies is 22%. We’ve moved the pipeline number by nine points in thirteen years. The leadership number has barely moved.

The problem is not getting women into the industry. The problem is what happens to them when they get there. The attrition rate for women in technology is approximately twice the attrition rate for men. They’re leaving. The question is why.

Why are they leaving?

The honest answer is that the culture of most technology companies is still built around the preferences and working styles of the demographic that built them, which is primarily young men without caregiving responsibilities. The remote work shift during the pandemic temporarily disrupted this — it turned out that distributed work benefitted women with family responsibilities substantially — and then the return-to-office mandates reinstated it.

I’m not arguing that offices are bad. I’m arguing that the specific implementation of office culture in technology — the long hours, the expectation of availability outside work hours, the social capital accrued through informal networks that are harder to access when you’re the minority in the room — creates structural disadvantages for people who don’t fit the prototype. Most of those people are women and people of colour.

What would actually change it?

Accountability. Not DEI training programmes, not mentorship initiatives, not women’s networks. Accountability, tied to compensation, for managers whose teams have disproportionate attrition rates for specific demographic groups. The behaviour that drives people out is managerial behaviour. Change the incentives for managers and the behaviour changes. Everything else is wallpaper.