4.6 million IT jobs — and most are going to men

The percentage of women working in the information technology field has always been relatively low, but it didn’t used to be as low as it is now.

It peaked at 31 per cent in 1990, then declined by about six 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 U.S. 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.

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 US$74,180, which jumped to US$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, according to the census report.

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 US$57,315, and in 2014 it jumped to US$70,385. Clearly, the wage gap has closed slightly over the years, but it persists. A breakdown of wage and gender on a specific job level reveals that the wage gap tends to be bigger where there are more women employed. For example, for the job of database administrator, which has the most equal breakdown of genders within the IT field, the gender wage gap was the highest. The wage gap along with the drop in female workers in IT, which decreased from 31 per cent to 25 per cent since the ’90s, shows that issues surrounding lack of women in tech persist.