IT careers: It’s a man’s world, new report says

The percentage of women working in the information technology field has always been relatively low, but not as low as it is now.

It peaked at 31 per cent in 1990, then declined by about 6 per cent over the past decade, even as the percentage of women in other occupations has steadily risen. That’s just one notable metric from a new Census Bureau report released last week that provides a bird’s-eye view of the changing field of computer work since the 1970s.

The report also shows that most IT workers tend to be young, male and often foreign-born, and that the field has grown considerably in size and complexity as technology becomes increasingly important.

The report found the number of IT jobs has grown from 450,000 in 1970 to 4.6 million in 2014, which accounts for 2.9 per cent of the labour force. Additionally, IT work has become increasingly diverse, growing from three categories in the 1970s to 12 in 2014, reflecting new professions within the field.

“In these early years, computers were large, expensive mainframes mostly used by governments, research laboratories, and manufacturing firms,” the report said, citing the mid1970s as the beginning of the personal computer boom. “As the market expanded, so did the demand for IT workers.”

IT jobs identified in the 1970s included computer programmers, systems analysts and computer specialists. As the field grew in size in the following decades, jobs such as database administrators, information security analysts and Web developers were born. The report also reflects not just new jobs, but also old ones that have been classified more accurately.

Wages in the IT field have grown in the past four decades for men and women. In the ’70s, men were paid a median of $74,180, which jumped to $80,895 in 2014. The field represents a rare net rise in earnings — wages for men across all professions have gone down over the same timeline.

For women, wages have grown in IT and across all other professions, although median wages for women are overall lower than for men. In 1970, the median wage for women working in IT jobs was $57,315, and in 2014 it jumped to $70,385. The wage gap has closed over the years, but it persists.

The report also projects the field will grow by 18 per cent by 2022.