PAPER-4 MODULE-15

Women corporate leaders in IT industry

(A) Personal Details

Role Name Affiliation

Principal Investigator Prof. Sumita Parmar Allahabad University, Allahabad

Paper Coordinator Prof. Vibhuti Patel.

Dr.Ruby Ojha.

HOD OF Economics, SNDT Mumbai,

Maharashtra.

Sr. H.R. Professional at leading Consultancy. SNDT MUMBAI

Content Writer/Author (CW) Dr.Ceena Paul

Shri M.D.Shah Mahila College of Arts and Commerce Malad, Mumbai

Content Reviewer (CR) Prof. Vibhuti Patel.

HOD OF Economics, SNDT Mumbai,

Maharashtra

Language Editor (LE) Prof. Sumita Parmar Allahabad University

Description of Module

Subject Name Women’s Studies

PaperName Women and Economics

Module Name /Title Women corporate leaders in IT industry

Module Id PAPER-4 MODULE-15

Pre-requisites The Reader should have knowledge of the functioning of IT

Industry

Objectives To make the reader

a)understand how women are underrepresented in the IT

industry

b) aware of the few women corporate leaders in the IT industry

Keywords Women in the Corporate World, Visibility of Women in Corporate World

https://www.google.co.in/url

Women corporate leaders in IT industry

Introduction

Across the globe, the Information and Technology (IT) industry has taken up the role of a

key enabler of innovation and creator of new employment opportunities. In India it has also played a significant role in promoting growth in the economy. The industry has helped India

to transform from a rural and agriculture-based economy to a knowledge based economy. The Indian IT industry has also carved a niche for itself in the international arena with its

global offshore delivery model and competent workforce. The IT industry in India is divided into four major segments – IT services, business process management (BPM), software products and engineering services, and hardware.From an aggregate revenue of USD 3.9 billion in 1998 the revenue of the IT sector in India has increased to more than USD 100 billion in 2012. BPO segment of the Indian IT industry has grown exponentially over the last 15 years,the sector has grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 per cent over the period of 2000-2013, and is estimated to expand at a CAGR of 9.5 per cent to US$ 300 billion by 2020 and it continues to be one of the fastest growing sectors in the Indian economy. Further, the industry is one of the most economically significant industry in India -

a) in terms of the share of the industry in total exports (approximately 25% for 2012), b) in terms of export revenue (in 2012 export revenue generated by the industry was USD 69.1

billion ) and c) in terms of industry share in GDP (from 1.2% in 1998 to 7.5% in 2012) (CIS, 2013).Further, the industry has added 160,000 employees in 2013, and has provided direct

employment to 3.1 million people and indirect employment to 10 million people.http://info.shine.com/industry/it-ites-bpo/11.html

1.2 IT Industry and Women Employment

From the above description, it is clear that IT industry is an important source of employment

for young professionals both in India and across the globe. As large number of these young

professionals are women (women made up 42% of India's college graduates in 2010, and

the figure is expected to continue to rise),(CIS, 2013), IT companies have good potential to

become lead employers for women IT professionals. However, according to various reports

the percentage of women in information technology occupations has actually decreased in

the last 15 years. For e.g.according to Data Quest's Best Employer Survey 2012, the

percentage of women employed in the IT industry in India has actually decreased from 26%

in 2010 to 22% in 2012 and this is happening even though the number of jobs created in the

sector continues to increase annually (CIS, 2013). Similarly in USA, Information industry was

among the four industries which contributed the least in the total employment of

women.Information industry just added only 1.7% to the total employed women in 2013

(US Department of labour,2013).The same trend is noted in Canada, in the early 1990s,

women roughly constituted 30% of all the IT workers in Canada; by 2005 the share of

women in the industry came down to 25% (Demaiter and Adams, 2009) .Further when we

look at the composition of women employment in IT sector it is noted that women generally

dominate the IT sector in the areas of technical writing and graphical design/illustration and

the more remunerative jobs in the IT sector such as managers, engineers, analysts, and

programmers are cornered by the male members(Wolfson, 2006).From the above instance

it is clear that IT industry is not a promising sector for women employment.

1.3 IT Industry and Women Leaders

Another question which is frequently probed is - what is the share of women in the senior

management and in the Board of IT companies? Various studies have investigated this

question, a summary of the various studies are as follows-

In the study conducted by The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) (2013) to learn about

female economic empowerment in the IT industry in India, a thorough review was done on

the composition of Board of Directors and senior management of top 6 IT companies in

India (Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Infosys Limited, Wipro Limited, HCL Tech Limited,

Tech Mahindra, and Mahindra Satyam). The study revealed the following facts -

● Number of female chairpersons in the 6 largest IT companies in India -0/6

● Number of women seated on the Board of Directors in the 6 largest IT companies in

India: 4/67

● Number of Executive director (excluding chairmen/vice-chairmen) in the 6 largest IT

companies in India: 0/14

● Number of Non-Executive director (excluding chairmen/vice-chairmen): 4/47

● Number of women holding executive management positions: 6/98

Credit Suisse (2014) in their study to understand existence of gender diversity in the top

management of the company, mapped more than 28,000 senior managers operating in

more than 3,000 companies spread over worldwide. The results of the study showed that

the proportion of women in senior management and the board of directors of the company

is marginal, and their roles in the management of the company are more skewed towards

areas of lesser influence or which offers lesser opportunity to move into the most senior

positions in a company. Another interesting fact revealed by the study was that the lowest

female representation was observed at the CEO level and which gradually moved up at

Business Management and Operational roles, CFO and Strategy and, finally at Shared

Services where their positions were most concentrated. The study also probed the existence

of gender diversity in the top management of the companies in different industries. In the

case of Technology sector it appeared that close to 40% of the companies covered by the

study had no female director in the company board. The study also observed that in the

technology sector the level participation of women in top management was very poor, in

the case of technology hardware sector the share of women in top management was

approximately 7 % and in the case of other technology sector the participation of women in

top management was marginally better i.e.16.4%.

Harvey Nash and Gartner (QualtroughEdward, 2015)) in their study on Gender diversity in the IT industry indicated that Women made up only 13% of the top 100 Chief Information

Officer (CIO) globally in 2015 whereas in UK women made up only 8% of IT leadership roles. The study also indicated some 12% of CIOs globally have no women in their IT team at

all. Further the study also revealed there exist a difference between small and large organisations with respect to gender diversity, with the former it is more likely to have little

or no female representation in the IT departments at all.

In another study, ISS (Kamonjoh Edward, 2014) evaluated gender diversity across the 24

industries in the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) on the boards of S&P 500 constituents. The results of the study indicated that the share of women on the corporate

board of Technology Hardware & Equipment companies was 13.6 percent on an average over the seven year period (between 2008 and 2014) covered by the study.. But the silver

lining is that the female representation in the corporate board of Technology Hardware & Equipment companies has grown by 3.7 percentage points between 2008 and 2014.

The results of ISS study are also corroborated by other studies which have worked on the

constituents of S&P 500 for e.g. according to Gender Map, a data visualization project

created by London-based start-up Data Morphosis (2014), the share of female directors on

the corporate board of technology companies was on an average just 7.1% of the total

board members and similarly the industry also faced a striking gender gap at its senior

management level. The sector also has the dubious distinction of being ranked as the

second-worst industry among all industries in terms of the percentage of female board

directors.Further it was observed that eleven technology companies on the S&P 500 had

lesser than 15% women representatives on their company boards, and out of which Alliance

Data System had no women representative in the company’s board of directors.The trend is

not largely different in large IT companies i.e. those companies whose market value is more

$100 billion such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM. None of these companies have more than

30% of women on their individual company board. When we compare the extent of gender

diversity among the large and mid-and-small-cap IT companies, it is noted that the situation

is more precarious in mid-and-small-cap companies. The large technology companies on

S&P 500, the share of women on the board directors was on an average just 18.9% whereas

the share of women on the board of directors of the IT companies on the S&P Mid Cap 400

index and S&P Small Cap 600 index was on an average just 12.9% and 7.2%

respectively.Among the 36 tech companies on S&P Small Cap 600 benchmark, 20 of them have no woman inside their boardrooms.(www.forbes.com)

1.3 Women corporate leaders in IT industry

From the various studies discussed in the previous sections it can be concluded that across

the globe a) decline is visible in the employment of women in the IT sector, b) majority of IT

companies continues to be male-dominated and only a small percentage of women can be

seen in senior positions of authority and c) In the IT sectors, women are more concentrated in few sectors such as technical writing and graphical design/illustration.

Despite such adverse gender imbalance in the IT sector there are still few shining examples

of women corporate leaders in the IT Industry of India and across the globe.

a)Virginia Rometty

http://www.google.co.in/

Virginia Rometty was appointed as the President and chief executive officer of IBM January

2012. She's earned the No. 1 spot in Fortune's annual ranking of America's "50 Most

Powerful Women in Business" in 2012. She was also ranked No. 12 on Forbes magazine's "World's 100 Most Powerful Women"(2014). (Forbes, 2014).

b)Mitchell Baker

https://blog.mozilla.org

Mitchell Baker is the Executive Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit

organization dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet.

As the leader of the Mozilla Project, she is charged with organizing and motivating the

worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who work every day on Firefox,

Thunderbird and other Mozilla products used by millions of people around the world. TIME

Magazine profiled Mitchell under “Scientists and Thinkers” in its TIME 100 and Mitchell was

honored as winner of the Anita Borg Institute’s 2009 Women of Vision Award and in 2010

she was the recipient of the AenneBurda Award for Creative Leadership. In 2012, Mitchell

was inducted into the founding group of the Internet Society’s Hall of

Fame.(https://blog.mozilla.org)

c. Marissa Mayer

https://www.google.co.in/url?

Marissa Mayer led the development of Google's most successful products for more than 10

years and was appointed CEO of Yahoo in 2012, at the age of 37.In 2014, Mayer was ranked

sixth on Fortune’s 40 under 40 list and was ranked the 16th most-powerful businesswoman

in the world that year according to the same publication.Mayer was the first female

engineer hired at Google and one of its first 20 employees. Since then she's gone on to

become vice president of location and local services for the company, but other

accomplishments there have included designing and developing Google's search interface and internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages.

d) Sheryl Sandberg

http://www.forbes.com/profile/sheryl-

sandberg/gallery/2 5

Sheryl Sandberg is now Facebook's chief operating officer, COO but previously she's held

various positions in Google and the World Bank. The former Google executive joined

Facebook in 2008 and became the first woman on its board four years later. Sandberg helped the social network scale globally, go public and expand digital revenue.

e) Vanitha Narayanan

www.google.co.in

Vanitha Narayanan is the Managing Director of IBM India Private Limited, and the Regional

General Manager for India/ South Asia (ISA). Appointed to this leadership position in

January, 2013, she is responsible for all of IBM’s sales, marketing, services and global

delivery operations in the India/South Asia region, including operations in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

f) NeelamDhawan

https://www.google.co.in

NeelamDhawan is the Managing Director of Hewlett-Packard India. She has countrywide

responsibility for revenues and profitability and ensuring the greatest leverage from HP’s Services, Personal Systems and Imaging and Printing businesses.

g)Kirthiga Reddy

https://www.linkedin.com/start/view-full-

Kirthiga leads the Global Marketing Solutions teams in India and plays a key role in building

and maintaining strategic relationships with top regional agencies and clients. Kirthiga

joined as the first Facebook India employee in July 2010 and set up the India operations in

Hyderabad, supporting the company’s growing number of users, advertisers and developers

worldwide. Kirthiga has been featured in Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in

Business 2013, Business Today’s hottest young executives, Fortune India’s Top 50 Most

Powerful Women in India, Impact’s 100 Icons of India Digital Ecosystem among other

recognitions. Kirthiga is also the Vice Chairman of Internet and Mobile Association of India

(IAMAI).

h)Kumud Srinivasan

https://www.google.co.in

Kumud is responsible for general management of Intel’s operations in India, which includes

location’s overall strategy, business-enabling operations, organizational development,

engineering and innovation for market development, as well as managing relationships with government, industry and academia.

1.4 Causesof Adverse Gender Diversity in IT Sector

What are the reasons for this adverse gender diversity seen in the IT sector, a number of

studies have explored the factors contributing for the same. A summary of the s tudies

probing the cause of adverse gender diversity in IT sector are as follows -

First, several studies on high school students have indicated that as compared to girl

students, it is male students who are more likely to use computers ,internet and to enter

fields of studies relating to ICT (Pritchard, 1998; Bimber, 2000; Hanson, 1994; Bolan, 2000

cited in Looker, and Thiessen,2003)

Second, an increasing number of studies have observed that there are enough evidences of

masculine occupational work culture operating in computing and IT sector and this culture

acts as a constrain for women’s participation in the IT sector. For e.g. a) work in technology

and information technology is socially perceived as masculine b) IT worker are stereotyped

as an antisocial geek, with taped glasses, locked in a tiny dark corner with a computer,

working day and night punching out code, while rarely interacting with others face-to-face.

Further this computer geek is usually depicted as a young male with poor social skills. Such

images of IT workers do not confirm with the images and stereotypes of femininity (Wright,

1996; Crump et al. 2007; Kendall, 2000; 1999; Wright, 1996; Faulkner, 2000 cited in

Demaiter and Adams, 2009).

Third, studies also suggest that IT workers possess a gendered occupational identity that

excludes women. According to Wright ( cited in Demaiter and Adams, 2009) computer

workers share an occupational masculinity (an identity and culture combining dominant

elements of hegemonic masculinity with characteristics deemed important to engineering

and computing work, such as technological skill, independence and individualism,

aggressiveness and competitiveness) and this occupational masculinity binds the male

workers together, but it excludes women, thereby discouraging their entrance into the

field, and hastening their exit. Other studies have also corroborated argument put forward

by Wright. Panteli et al. (cited in Demaiter and Adams, 2009) explored state of women in IT

occupations in UK; their study identified a “strong masculine ideology of computing,” and this they argued were driving women away from careers in the IT field.

Fourth, not only the culture in the IT sector is masculine, but studies have also suggested

that the very notion of competence in the IT field is also gendered. Peterson’s (cited in

Demaiter and Adams, 2009) study on IT consultants in Sweden revealed that in the IT sector

stereotypically male traits are celebrated while feminine traits are devalued. It was noted

that those consultants who experienced layoffs (regardless of gender) were seen as not

possessing sufficient “toughness” — a characteristic “seen as central to the computer culture as well as for the confident image of the professional engineer”.

Fifth The IT environment is not only culturally unfriendly to women, it appears it also

unfriendly to women structurally as well. Crump and Logan (cited in Demaiter and Adams,

2009) argue that the competitive, high pressure, aggressive nature of the IT industry makes

it extremely challenging for women to return to the IT field after childrearing.

1.5 Summary

Across the globe, Information and Technology (IT) industry has taken up the role as key

enabler of innovator and creator of new employment opportunities.In India the industry has

also played a significant role in promoting growth in the economy.The IT industry in India is

divided into four major segments – IT services, business process management (BPM),

software products and engineering services, and hardware. From an aggregate revenue of

USD 3.9 billion in 1998 the revenue of the IT sector in India has increased to more than USD

100 billion in 2012.Further, the industry has added 160,000 employees in 2013, and has

provided direct employment to 3.1 million people and indirect employment to 10 million

people.

IT industry is an important source of employment for young professionals both in India and across the globe. As large number of these young professionals are women (women made up 42% of India's college graduates in 2010, and the figure is expected to continue to rise),(CIS, 2013), IT companies have good potential to become lead employers for women. However, according to various reports the percentage of women in information technology occupations has actually decreased in the last 15 years. A question which is frequently probed is - what is the share of women in the senior management and Board of IT companies? Various studies have investigated this question.The result of various study indicate that across the globe a) decline is visible in the employment of women in the IT sector, b) majority of IT companies continues to be male-dominated and only a small percentage of women can be seen in senior positions of authority and c) In the IT sectors, women are more concentrated in few sectors such as technical writing and graphical design/illustration. Despite such poor presence of women on the corporate board and senior management of IT companies there are still few shining examples of women corporate leaders in the IT industry of India and across the globe.

● Virginia Rometty

● Mitchell Baker

● Marissa Mayer

● Sheryl Sandberg

● Vanitha Narayanan

What are the reasons for this adverse gender diversity seen in the IT sector, a number of

studies have explored the factors contributing for the same. A summary of the studies

probing the cause of adverse gender diversity in IT sector are as follows -

A large number of studies have explored the factors contributing for the same. A summary

of the studies probing the cause of adverse gender diversity in IT sector are as follows;

● First, several studies on high school students have indicated that as compared to girl

students, it is male students who are more likely to use computers ,Internet and to

enter fields of studies relating to ICT

● Second, an increasing number of studies have observed that there are enough

evidences of masculine occupational work culture operating in computing and IT

sector and this culture acts as a constrain for women’s participation in the IT sector

● Third, studies also have suggested that IT workers posses a gendered occupational

identity that excludes women.

● Fourth, not only the culture in the IT sector is masculine, but studies have also

suggested that the very notion of competence in the IT field is also gendered.

● Fifth, the environment in the IT sector is not only culturally unfriendly to women, it

appears it also unfriendly to women structurally as well.

References

·http://info.shine.com/industry/it-ites-bpo/11.html

Bilbao-Osorio Beñat, Dutta,Soumitra and Lanvin Bruno, (ed.) (2013), The Global

Information Technology Report 2013 -Growth and Jobs in a Hyper connected World,

World Economic Forum.

US Department of labour, (2013),Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics - Labor

Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey http://bls.gov/cps/cpsaat07.htm

(2013 annual averages)

Not Just Google And Facebook: America's Boardrooms Are Still Woefully Bereft Of

Women JUL 9, 2014www.forbes.com

Demaiter Erin I. and Adams Tracey L. (2009), “I really didn't have any problems with

the male-female thing until …”: Successful Women's Experiences in IT Organizations

,The Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol. 34, No. 1 ( January), pp. 31-53

:http://www.jstor.org/stable/canajsocicahican.34.1.31 Accessed: 24-08-2015

Ticoll David (2005), Canada’s Information technology Labour market 2005: Issues

and Options,Report of the Information and communication technology Council

Expert Panel

Wolfson, William. (2006), Analysis of Labour Force Survey Data for the Information

Technology Occupations 2000–2005.Software Human Resource Council, Ottawa

Diane Looker, and Thiessen Victor, (2003), The Digital Divide in Canadian Schools:

Factors Affecting Student Access to and Use of Information Technology, Research

Data Centres Program, Statistics Canada. Ottawa.

LannonJadine, (2013), Research Initiative: Women in India's IT Industry, The Centre

for Internet and Society ,http://cis-india.org/

QualtroughEdward |(2015), Women in IT leadership and CIO roles lower than 2013

figures, 19 May,CIO UK.http://www.cio.co.uk/news/workforce-

development/women-in-it-leadership-cio-roles-lower-than-2013-levels-3612304/

Credit Suisse (2014), The CS Gender 3000: Women In Senior Management

Kamonjoh Edward (2014), Diversity on Boards A Review of Global Trends,

September 25, ISS. www.issgovernance.com

Forbes (2014), Silicon Valley's Women Problem: Only 7% Of Tech Boards Are Female,

July 19. http://www.forbes.com/