The retention problem: Women are going into tech but are also being driven out

  By 2029, there will be 3.6 million computing jobs in the U.S., but there will only be enough college graduates with computing degrees to fill 24% of these jobs. For decades, the U.S. has poured resources into improving gender representation in the tech industry. However, the numbers are not improving proportionately. Instead, they have remained stagnant, and initiatives are failing.

  Women make up 57% of the overall workforce. Comparatively, women make up only 27% of the workforce in the technology industry. Of the 27% that join the technology industry, more than 50% are likely to quit before the age of 35, and 56% are likely to quit by mid-career.

5 tips for women to negotiate a higher salary

  Today is Equal Pay Day — March 14 — a date determined by how long into the new year American women must work to catch up to American men’s earnings the previous year. In 2022, women earned 82% of what men earned. The wage gap for Black and Hispanic women is even higher — these groups made 70% and 65%, respectively, of what white men made.

  Some of the gender pay gap can be attributed to differences in how women negotiate.

Racism and sexism combine to shortchange working Black women

  Black Women’s Equal Pay Day arrives around this time each year, marking the estimated number of extra months—roughly eight months—that a Black woman working full-time year-round in the United States must work into the current year to have earned what her white male counterpart earned during the prior year. This year, Black women will have to work well into the month of August to catch up to the wages that white men earned in 2018 alone. In concrete terms, this means that Black women experience a pay gap every day—and this gap adds up. In 2017, for example, Black women earned 61 cents for every dollar earned by white men, amounting to $23,653 less in earnings over an entire year. In the span of a 40-year career, this translates into an average lifetime earnings gap of $946,120 between Black women and white men.