7 Reasons Women Make Outstanding Technologists

For International Women’s Day whose theme this year is #ChooseToChallenge I was asked to respond to several common stereotypes about women in technology. Below is my response to the most egregious one.

Stereotype: “Women have worse technical skills.”

I had to pick my jaw up off the floor when I read this prompt. Did such a gross stereotype even merit a response in 2021?

We all know skills are not gendered. That said, I have in fact noticed a creeping resurgence of the “women aren’t technical” stereotype appearing in insidious ways over the past year.

Obviously, we live in cultures where boys and girls are often socialized differently which leads to different, and sometimes gendered, interests and skill development. Do women have worse technical skills? Of course not. But we know there are relatively few women who go into engineering, and what I’ve noticed lately is a misperception that “engineering” = “tech skills.”

While women certainly can be successful software engineers, many find the work narrow, which can lead them to move on from coding to other areas of technology that are less limiting or that demand more nuanced or complex thinking or technical skills.

I don’t want to belittle coding, but I do want to note that tech as a profession is about far more than coding. It’s about creative problem solving using a set of tools and components. Those tools and components may have code at their core, but they are meaningless if they are not put to best use to solve technical challenges for organizations or end users. Studies have shown women consistently outperform men in tasks related to emotional intelligence and soft skills — in other words the skills that can transform a lone coder into a high-performance contributor to a team, scaled product, or solution.

Precisely because of socialization, the following culturally “gendered” traits often make women better technologists:

• Adaptability — learning new technology and systems
• Perspective-taking — solving problems from a different angle
• Making connections between disparate ideas and systems — systems thinking

And for product management and technology leadership roles, in particular, these socialized traits we traditionally think of as “feminine” also often set women apart:

• Empathy
• Written and oral communication
• Listening / Synthesizing Information
• Multitasking and prioritizing

At least one male colleague has already taken issue with my assertion and I’m sure many others will as well. He suggests that women make “just as good” technologists as men. I suppose that, in itself, is progress! Happy #IWD!