Bulgaria, Romania top women in tech index

Bulgaria, Romania top women in tech index
Bulgaria has the most women working in tech and Turkey has the smallest men/women pay gap
By bne IntelliNews March 23, 2018

A strong gender divide persists in the tech field internationally, with men substantially outnumbering women and commanding higher salaries. A new study shows Bulgaria has come closest to reducing the gap, with women making up 30% of the people working in tech in the country, closely followed by Australia (28%) and Romania (26%). 

It’s tempting to attribute the performance of Bulgaria and Romania to their communist past; under state socialism most women worked and women as well as men were encouraged into the tech and scientific fields. Yet this doesn’t fully explain the phenomenon since it’s not reflected across the post-communist space; Slovakia, for example, has the lowest proportion of women working in tech of the 41 countries in the OECD and EU surveyed, just 9.29%. 

Another factor in Bulgaria is the large number of women pursuing degrees in the science and technology field, a pattern seen across several other CEE and SEE countries as well. 

Other CEE countries that perform strongly on the 2018 Women in Tech Index released by European tech-focussed job platform Honeypot are Lithuania (in fourth place with 24.93%) and Latvia (sixth, 24.89%).

But there follows a wide gap, with Estonia (18.77%) and Slovenia (17.45) hovering around the middle of the ranking, and Slovakia, Turkey (9.91%) and the Czech Republic (11.17%) at the bottom. 

Surprisingly, given the country’s increasingly conservative politics and relatively small tech sector, Turkey has the lowest gender pay gap within the industry, with women earning just 8.42% less than men. 

“This study has revealed some fascinating cultural case studies. Take Turkey, which has the lowest gender pay gap for tech jobs in the index, and the fifth lowest overall gender wage gap. Yet, they also have the lowest percentage of women in employment.” says Honeypot co-founder Emma Tracey. 

“This would suggest that although there are cultural barriers working against women in Turkey, those that do work are paid more fairly for their contributions than many countries which consider themselves to be more equal such as Germany and the United Kingdom.” 

The CEE/SEE region’s socialist heritage doesn’t appear to have had much impact on equality of pay either; only Latvia and Croatia are among the 10 most equal countries, in fourth and ninth place respectively, with the top of the list otherwise made up of West European countries plus New Zealand and the US. 

Bulgaria and Romania, despite having higher proportions of women working in the field, have substantial pay gaps of over 19%. And the highest gender pay gap in the region is reported in the Czech Republic, at 32.5%. 

Honeypot’s research also shows that the gender pay gap increased in 17 of the 41 countries surveyed within the last five years. 

“As tech recruitment specialists, we are often confronted with the gender imbalances of the industry… with the proportion of female tech workers remaining under 30% across the board, we hope that this study will enrich the conversation concerning equality in this industry and inspire more women to seek out opportunities in tech,” commented Tracey. 

She also stressed the economic benefits of improving gender parity in the workplace, alluding to a McKinsey study that found that $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality, and a 2017 World Economic Forum study that forecast equality for women in the labour force would add more than double this amount — $28 trillion — to the global economy by the same date. 

 

 

 

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