In 2019, Allison Wynn, a Stanford research associate, together with three colleagues took part in an 84-recruiting session held at Elite West Coast University. Their aim was to understand why there was no link between recruiters and women. Wynn Corell and Dr. Shelley disguised themselves as students and observed that lot of tech companies had a number of gender biased practices. They found out that adverts did underrate ladies’ jobs in the tech industry. Their study proved that recruiters were not doing enough to cope with the challenge of gender bias in the tech industry.
According to Fast Company, the survey conducted in 2019 by Silicon Valley bank proved that, startups that had ladies in executive roles were only 44% and approximately 40% of the startups had a lady in the board of directors. Reports suggests that startups want to reverse this trend and increase the number of women in the executive roles of companies. According to Wynn, recruiting efforts are very incompetent. She also claims that the companies have a long way to go even in the attempt of improving the diversity and inclusion of tech companies.
Correll and Wynn learnt that major tech companies underrated women’s job or failed to appreciate women in tech industries. For instance, women were used to hand out adverts T-shirts or were not even totally involved in recruitment sessions. What one is capable of achieving is greatly influenced by what people see in role models. Increasing the number of women presenting the works of a firm in a public audience, increases the number of women who want to work in tech companies. Use of gender pop culture references played a great role in diminishing the link between women and recruiters. For instance, in their report they gave an example of an online retail business that used vintage cartoon characters Popeye and Olive where they were undermining the power of women.
A survey carried out by Capital Ones about women in tech survey proved that 80% of women are always happy while carrying out tech works and they are the best when it comes to working. Wynn acknowledges that a lot of qualified women are neglected due to lack of confidence. Wynn urges recruiters to be conversant with the confidence gap between women and men. Wynn discourages companies from adding irrelevant qualifications while looking for workers since they discourage women from applying for the tech jobs. Julie Elberfeld executive sponsor of diversity and inclusion for tech at Capital One and senior vice president of card technology urges recruiters to search for ways to tackle the problem of bias.
Dil Bole Oberoi
