Since the dawn of history, stereotype has been an ongoing, innate issue that benefitted the majority but hurt the minor ones. There have been stereotypes based on gender, color of one's skin, age, and quite frankly, anything that sets a person apart from the "norm". Let's start by examining our own mind. Close your eyes and picture a tech-savvy person who works as a developer at IBM. Is the man in your imagination a White male? Today I want to talk about a zoning issue in the tech industry: the pipeline problem, in which women in the workforce are struggling to stay in the field.
The pipeline problem, or better described as the leaky pipeline, is a metaphor for the way that the number of women in the tech industry diminish. The metaphor depicts an image of a leaky pipeline, through which water is poured and is leaked out of the pipe along its length. This represents that young girls enter the tech field, but as they proceed toward, most of them leave the industry. This leaves us with a very small number of female tech professionals. According to a 2008 Harvard Business Review research report (PDF) on women in science, engineering, and technology:
[Between ages 25 and 30, 41% of the young talent with credentials in those subject matters are female … [but] 52% of this talent drops out … The most important antigen is the machismo that continues to permeate these work environments … 63% of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment.]
In the society we are living in, this type of problem is nothing new. Gender-specific stereotypes have been one of the most frequently visited debate topics. Strong male pride in the tech industry -- or in any type of male-dominated fiends -- is an issue we must not overlook.To hypothesize a potential solution to such a problem, let's take a step back and look at the big picture. If many women are being left out and are forced to leave the industry due to the machismo that permeates the work environments, a solution could simply be an increase in the input. What I mean is that in order to yield a higher number of output (in this case, the volume of female tech professionals), we can simply increase the input volume. We can do this by teaching computer science to our future prospects at a much earlier age, thereby exposing more young women to a potential career path in technology, which will inevitably increase the shear volume of women who enter the professional arena. No, this may not solve the grand issue of gender-specific stereotype as a whole, but it will improve the leaky pipeline problem we mentioned thus far.