Female presence has been growing in the area,
but we still need to gain space in technical positions
By 2022, one in three people working in technology companies in the world will be a woman. This represents an increase of 2 percentage points compared to 2019. But only one in four will be occupying a technical position, highlights one global study carried out by the consultancy Deloitte, which considers this advance to be small, but representative.
This is a reality similar to that in Brazil, where women accounted for 32.6% of professionals employed in the technology area in 2020, according to the Diversity in the ICT Sector report, carried out by Brasscom (Association of Information and Communication Technology and Digital Technologies Companies).
Looking at the hierarchical levels, the participation of Brazilian companies is greater in the middle and at the top of the pyramid of technology companies. Women occupy 41% of assistant positions and 42% of coordinator and specialist positions, one level below the top (which continues to be male, with 67% of men occupying director and manager positions).
The disparity between genders, according to Brasscom, is slightly greater in the services and software subsectors — which concentrate 76% of hiring in the area. The female presence is greater in administrative, financial and human resources areas and lower in technical functions, the report points out.
By analyzing the performance of 20 large technology companies that employ 100,000 people, the Deloitte study goes in the same direction and shows that the proportion of women is higher in the workforce in general (they represent 32.9% of a company's employees technology) than in technical positions (25%).
Female presence
Looking at the market movement, the female presence in the technology sector grew by 60% in five years — from 27.9 thousand professionals employed in 2015 to 44.5 thousand in 2020, according to the General Register of Employed and Unemployed Persons (Caged).
Furthermore, Brazilian women are becoming more interested in jobs in the information technology area. From January to May 2021, 12,716 candidates applied for vacancies in this area — in the same period in 2020, this number was 10,375, that is, 22.6% lower, points out the National Employment Bank. Of these, 4,318 were hired in January 2021, an increase of 116% compared to the previous year.
According to the Deloitte study, global companies, especially large ones, have been making efforts to hire and promote women in favor of diversity, but the results are being noticed little by little.
On iFood, women were the majority iLab's first selection, the technology talent acceleration program created in 2021. “They represented 52.5% in the class and did very well in the assessments, showing a lot of technical quality”, says Marilia Leocadio, coordinator of people development in technology at iFood.
She highlights that women are part of the history of technology, like the English mathematician Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first algorithm. “The first programmers in the world were women, but they were put aside when men saw that this work was relevant,” says Marilia. “Nothing more fair than returning to this prestigious place.”
For women who want to be inspired and make a career in technology, how about learning the story of two software engineers from iFood? A Marcia Castagna and the Ester Lourenço They tell, in the Real Stories section, what their careers were like in this area.
