DEI for Tech Leaders | The engineer advantage

Featuring perspectives from women leaders in tech at Shutterstock, Google, Etsy, Cardinal Health, Vanguard, and The Estée Lauder Companies, this article explores what’s driving women’s limited representation in engineering and how organizations today are attracting, supporting, and retaining women in tech. This is the eleventh article in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Tech Leaders series from The CIO Program.

Today, 26% of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professionals in the United States are women.¹ While that could be seen as progress considering this number was 7% in 1970, that percentage has only grown 1% since 2018,² and when you dig deeper, progress isn’t evenly distributed across various tech fields.

While women have made gains across all STEM occupations, the majority of those gains have been in social science occupations and math-related roles, as well as life and physical scientists.³ Women have yet to make significant inroads in engineering. In fact, in 20 years, the percentage of women engineers in the United States has only grown by 3%.⁴

It’s a figure worth noting, especially given that there will likely be more than 1.5 million engineering jobs to fill in the United States between now and 2032.⁵ This demand is expected to accelerate as technology underpins many business strategies across industries.

Organizations should do more to nurture and keep women engineers.

While this article focuses on suggestions for creating a better talent experience for this cohort, technology teams are increasingly cross-functional and client-focused. By placing attention on women engineers, organizations could ultimately improve the experience of women and other underrepresented communities of technologists overall.

When organizations don’t prioritize women engineers, they miss out on the collective intelligence they bring that ultimately enables firms to build better products and experiences for their customers. If you want a high-performing team that can solve problems, you need to create a balanced environment that values and supports individuals with all kinds of experience.

– Sejal Amin, Chief Technology Officer, Shutterstock

Engineer is one of the most sought-after roles across industries,⁶ and yet, so few women are represented in the field—there’s myriad of reasons why this could be. First, there’s often a skewed perception of what an engineer is and who does, and doesn’t, have the skills to succeed in the role.

“Our narrow focus on the engineer job title is one of the reasons I believe we don't have a lot of diversity in the field because when people say engineer, they have their own mental model of what that is and it varies from person to person,” says Ovetta Sampson, director of UX Core Machine Learning at Google.

“Engineers are taught there are two types of skills—hard engineering skills, like technical ability and problem-solving, and softer skills, like communication, relationship building, collaboration, and teamwork,” adds Sejal Amin, chief technology officer at Shutterstock. “Since these skills are often viewed as gendered, with the former being more masculine and the secondary being more feminine, women are, over time, pushed toward these more secondary tasks that ultimately reinforce the exact stereotype (i.e., women aren’t technical) that we’re trying to break out of.”

Another challenge that often goes unacknowledged is biology and the fact that peak childrearing years often coincide with peak career growth years.

“While not everyone has to go on the journey of having a family, employers need to be better at supporting women engineers who do go down this path,” says Rachana Kumar, chief technology officer at Etsy. “Putting policies on paper around paid leave and caregiving is a good first step, but organizations also need to normalize taking advantage of these benefits. Making these policies gender-neutral can also help create a culture where people don’t feel penalized for using these benefits.”

Speaking of culture, a traditional tech environment may have also created its own barriers for women.

"Traditionally, the technology industry has less opportunities for career advancement than something on the business side, like finance for example,” says Michelle Greene, executive vice president and chief information officer at Cardinal Health. “This places an emphasis on why we must be more intentional about creating opportunities for women to demonstrate their value across an organization and empowering them to pursue leadership roles when they do arise.”

Weak retention strategies could be another culprit for limited representation as research shows that women leave the tech industry more quickly than men. In fact, 40% of women in STEM leave their careers within five to seven years.⁷ That’s 2x the rate of men; a stat that’s remained unchanged since the 2000s.⁸ While some may be quick to think women leave the tech industry for family reasons, that’s not the primary cause; 88% of application engineers leave because they either feel undervalued, face exclusionary behaviors in the workplace, have no growth opportunities, or have unsupportive managers.⁹

Despite the benefits of having more diverse teams, less than one in four (24%) tech leaders say recruiting, developing, promoting, and retaining diverse technology talent is a top priority.¹⁰ Additionally, 30% say their tech function plays no role in driving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at their organizations.¹¹

Leaders should take intentional steps toward attracting and developing women engineers—but this responsibility ultimately falls throughout the organization. Women are still an underrepresented voice in tech, so truly moving the needle needs everyone, regardless of gender or seniority, to play a role. 

The markers of a high-performing, inclusive engineering culture

Ensuring flexibility, allyship, and belonging are critical steps to creating an inclusive, modern engineering culture. Once that foundation has been built, consider these other key markers:

• Consistent and uniform environment: Having various engineering groups working in different environments is often inefficient and can lead to constant frustration.
• A focus on business outcomes rather than productivity: Don’t judge an engineering team by how much code they write in a day or in a week. Instead, focus on what business outcomes they drove and enabled. Technology work is increasingly client-driven and by measuring client outcomes rather than productivity, teams can be reminded that what they do matters and has a real impact on customers and the business overall.
• Wide variety of incentives: When it comes to compensating engineers, avoid basing incentives solely on availability, deployment frequency, or error-free work. Technology teams are increasingly client-facing, so incentivize them to serve clients. Offer incentives and recognize employees based on client impacts, like how quickly they put real software in the hands of customers, for example. Other possible incentives include badging, which publicly recognizes engineers for the unique skills they’ve developed, or distinguished engineering tracks, which allow high performers to take on more complex assignments and projects.
• A modern IT scorecard: While client impact should be a primary measure to evaluate teams that doesn’t mean tech-focused metrics no longer matter. Consider these five areas to get a sense of how well your IT team is running: Deployment frequency, change failure rate, decrease in defects over time, how quickly a new feature is brought to market, and percentage of IT headcount committed to writing code.
• Commitment to agile: Consider refactoring some legacy environments into microservices and cloud-native environments. It will likely take time and energy but could pay off in the long run. The longer you wait, the harder it could be on you and your engineering teams.
• Collaborative problem-solving: Commit to ensuring any issues developers raise are ultimately solved by them. They should play an active role in addressing pain points in their day-to-day work. But problem-solving shouldn’t be confined to streamlining work. Allow engineers the time and space to collaborate on addressing larger issues that can benefit the overall organization, like how to monetize proprietary data or software, for instance. Let them work on both small and big challenges. They’re problem-solvers after all.
• Tech- and people-focused leadership: Effective tech leaders have both tech and business chops. They can lead technical teams, but more importantly, they can lead people, an area women excel in.²⁵ If people will be held accountable for driving engagement on their teams (and with clients), consider hiring people who are passionate about leading others, not just creating a high-performing tech team. Hire people who strive to do both—and reward them for it. If a leader supports a top-tier team member’s move to another department to pursue their goals, for example, recognize and celebrate that leadership. Those are the people engineers want to work for.

There will likely be 1.5 million engineering jobs to fill by 2032, and yet, women today are only 15% of engineers in the United States.

How can you work to help more women fill those roles? What can you start doing differently today to help ensure the unique needs of the women in your technology organization, including the engineers who are passionate about being part of a high-performing, inclusive team that’s focused on getting things done, solving big problems, and creating solutions, truly flourish?

This article contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this article, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This article is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this article.