There is now an ocean of research to indicate that when companies employ women in meaningful positions such as those of leadership, the business experiences better outcomes. Teams with a high percentage of women also have higher levels of collective intelligence and make better-informed decisions.
So why, then, does the gender gap prevail – and is there any glimmer of hope this might be changing?
When it comes to the information technology industry, the jury’s still out. In Australia, women account for less than a fifth of the IT workforce, and this problem of industry gender disparity goes much further than our isolated shores. In 1984, 37 per cent of all computer science graduates in the United States were women. Gender equality has come a long way since then, and so you’d be forgiven for thinking this figure could only have gone up and up over the decades, right?
