Gender bender

A 2012 report on gender equality in the knowledge society found the number of women in the fields of science, technology and innovation “alarmingly low” in the world’s leading economies, including the US. As women have gradually grown to occupy a not so insignificant portion of the workforce in R&D, it would be interesting to know what their impact has been on the IT industry.

Although mathematics and science have been traditionally seen as male bastions, the field of computer science, which is based on these foundations, has had some exceptional contributions from women.

Ada Lovelace (who incidentally has a programming language named after her) and Grace Hopper, who was the inventor of the first compiler and credited with coining the term “debugging”, are considered path-breakers in the domain.

Today, in the Indian IT industry, we do find a good amount of gender diversity. Engineering colleges have many young women taking up computer science, electronics and other such streams. As a woman from the IT industry, when I am asked the question, “What is the impact of gender diversity?”,I ponder on the traits that stand out among women.

Women are team players and one rarely finds an exception to this rule. I find that even as young graduates enter the industry, a woman engineer tends to take a group approach to problem-solving.

They do not hesitate to seek help when stuck rather than spend time finding solutions on their own. They are meticulous in problem-solving and look for a complete solution.

Their thought process tends to be non-linear, which means that multiple options and perspectives come into play. In group discussions, one does not hear ideas or perspectives from a woman unless she is very sure of the subject and confident of handling counter-questions.

It’s an oft-repeated aphorism that women are good at multi-tasking, so one never finds a woman too immersed in her work not to answer emails or the phone, they are communicative even in the middle of a busy schedule.

They come up with technological innovations but in the areas that are related to their work domain. This manifests as less number of contributions from them to open source and hackathons.

In the IT domain, I generally find them to be strong in debugging and testing functions and excel in application programming rather than in hardware engineering. Loyalty to the team and company is higher among women.

Over the years , I have seen women transform and take on more active roles in defining their careers and willing to take on new challenges.

There are also good number of similarities between men and women when they are engaged in R&D. They are equally competitive, yearn for appreciation and take pride in their work. The urge to innovate and find newer ways of doing things is a strong point for both genders. As we see the numbers grow and have stories of women coming with significant technological innovations, there would be critical mass available for extensive research on this topic. Until then, we have to make do with our own experiences.

The writer is the executive director of development engineering at Dell India R&D

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