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Amid continued discussions on gender equality in technology, women are still under-valued, poorly paid and often discriminated against in the technology sector, according to statistics.

Diversity is important in technology, as it allows businesses to produce  safer products that take everybody into account, not just one segment of society. Through this, women remain mostly under-represented in the role of IT.

Statistics:

Women make up 47% of all employed adults in the U.S., but by 2015 they occupy just 25% of the computer positions, according to figures from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). Of the 25 per cent of women working in technology, Asian women accounted for just 5%, while black and Hispanic women reported for 3% and 1% respectively.

All this regardless of the fact that the growth of STEM jobs has surpassed the growth of overall employment in the region, which has increased by 79% since 1990, while overall employment has increased by 34%, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Despite global debates about the lack of equity in technology, women are disproportionately losing out on this boom.

According to statistics from the National Science Foundation, several women than ever have earned a STEM degree—and are catching up with men to receive a Bachelor of Science and Engineering (S&E) degree. However, when you are isolated by area of research, women received just 19% of their degrees in computer science in 2016, compared to 27% in 1997. Even then, while women are less recognized in undergraduate CS departments, those with a degree in computer science are more likely to delve deeper these days, when the number of masters in computer science obtained by women soared to 31 per cent in 2016, up from 28 per cent in 1997.

If a degree is obtained, hard practice starts, and the numbers for tech women are maybe even more alarming. According to statistics from the National Science Foundation, only 38% of women with a major in computer science work in the field compared to 53% of men. Similarly, just 24% of women with engineering degrees currently work in engineering, comparison to 30% of men. This is a persistent development that has been called a "leaky pipeline" where it is impossible to keep women in STEM positions after they have earned a degree with a STEM

Women are not joining technology occupations at the same pace as men and an explanation can be traced back to male-dominated workplaces. A 2017 survey in the Pew Research Center study showed that 50% of women reported having encountered gender discrimination at work, while just 19% of men reported having encountered gender discrimination at work. The figures were also higher for postgraduate women (62 %), employed in computing occupations (74%) or in male-dominated workplaces (78%). When questioned why their appearance made it more difficult to excel at work, 20% of women said yes and 36% said that sexual discrimination is an issue at work.

Scholars studying discrimination argue that in the tech industry, decision-makers often believe that men are essentially more technically competent than women. They think it is economically a better investment to employ male tech personnel and give higher budgets to the male staff than the female staff.

They argue that the main problem is not unconscious bias but conscious belief in allegedly scientific notions of sex differences, citing that the percentage of women in the highest quality tech work has decreased despite a decline in traditional and unconscious gender bias and quotas for women at lower levels of tech.

According to this model, those investments lead to more opportunities for male staff to produce high-quality results, which reinforces the statistical bias and is used as an argument for male technical superiority, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy.

While this model states that there is systematic discrimination towards women in tech, it explains it due to specific economic investment issues. It does not presume a society-wide patriarchal structure, nor even that discrimination must necessarily favor men in all aspects of society.

In 1970, 13.6% of U.S. computer science and information science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women. By 1984, that number rose to 37.1%. In 2011, however, only 17.6% of undergraduate computer science degrees went to women.

As of 2004, only 4% of the engineering workforce in the UK were women. In information technology (IT), the Dice Salary Survey estimated that between 2008 and 2009, women earned an average of 12.43% less in salary than males. However, it is unclear if the Dice survey specifically addresses sexist discrimination as a possible cause for women to earn lower average salaries in technology, or if the pay gap between men and women can be accounted for by differences in training, seniority, competence, overtime, or other variables that can effect salary. In addition to unequal pay, one study suggests that women are often excluded from informal work networks and become targets of bullying such as sexual harassment.

In May 2014, Google posted on its official blog that only 30 percent of its employees globally were women.

In January 2015, the New York Times said "the largest technology companies have released reports showing that only 30% of their employees are women", with the percentage of technical employees being even lower.

A 2015 survey entitled "The Elephant in the Valley" conducted a survey of two hundred senior-level women in Silicon Valley. 84% of participants were told they were "too aggressive" in the office, and 66% said that they were excluded from important events due to their gender. In addition, 60% of women said that they received unwanted sexual advances in their respective workplaces – the majority of which came from a superior. Almost 40% did not report the incidents out of fear of retaliation.

A Fortune magazine review of data available for the 92 US-based venture capital firms which had raised "at least one fund of $200 million or more" between 2009 and 2014 found "only 17 had even one senior female partner", and 4.2% of "partner level VCs" were female.

An Open Diversity Data website has been created to provide access to diversity data for specific companies.

Only 11% of Silicon Valley executives and about 20% of software developers are women. At Google, only 18% of technical employees are women. On Forbes ' 2015 Top Tech Investors list, of 100 investors, only 5% are women.Women in technology earn less than men, with men earning up to 61% more than women. "Bias against women in tech is pervasive", according to an October 2014 op-ed in The New York Times.

The New York Times obtained a copy of Google's Salary Spreadsheet in 2014, which depicts each employee's salary and bonus information. This spreadsheet reports that at Google, women receive lower salaries than their male counterparts for five out of six job titles that are listed on the spreadsheet

According to early childhood development studies in human children, boys preferred technical toys (e.g., wheeled vehicles). In contrast, girls preferred social toys (e.g., furry animals). The same obtains for non-human children: rhesus and vervet monkeys, who cannot be said to be "socialized." Thus sex-based preferences for STEM subjects are innate, and assuming third-party bias is wrong in itself.

There are various criticisms of these claims, however. One is citing that since infants interact with other humans from birth, if only their parents, and rapidly absorb accents, the concept of a pre-socialized stage is spurious. These critics argue that the monkeys who study primatology have lived close to human settlements and imitated human habits and are therefore not non-socialized. Other critics buy the existence of a pre-socialized stage. However, they argue that there would be no evolutionary function for a brain mechanism that distinguishes social phenomena from other phenomena before socialization starts. Therefore, these authors argue, distinctions between toys that predate socialization are unrelated to interests later in life.

Some primatologists argue that female chimpanzees in some groups hunt and use tools at least as much as the males. There is no innate universal primate bias towards technology being male.

Against the deterministic cultural approach, the Norwegian documentary Hjernevask presented a few arguments that cause a widespread debate, particularly with the first episode, The Gender Equality Paradox, which might have contributed to the Scandinavian government's decision to stop funding the regional gender studies institute.