Huawei Releases Study Outlining Critical Factors for Female Success in Digitalized Workplaces
ICT provider Huawei recently turned to Dr. Anna Schneider, Professor of Business Psychology at Trier University of Applied Sciences, to look deep at industry and ask, “Is it time to reboot?”
It is well known that representation continues to be an ongoing issue in the tech industry. But how do women fair overall, across all sectors, as our wold begins to benefit from the massive leaps being made in digitalization? This newest seven-country survey engaged with more than 21,000 respondents to find out what women actually experience and look for in this new era.
The results are clear: It is high time to reboot our thinking about how to attract and retain women in increasingly digital workplaces.
- Women across all sectors do not see their strength in their digital skills. When asked to rank their strengths, women in highly digitalized environments consistently rank their digital skills lower than men, even though men in similar positions rank their digital skills as their top skill. Despite this, women benefit disproportionally from digitalized environments. They are equally, if not more, comfortable with advanced human-computer interfaces and benefit more from digitalization-enabled remote work than men.
- Employers are being held back by their “pink glasses”. In opposition of general wisdom, this study found that women are generally interested in the exact same incentives as men. While specific top-5 desired incentives do change from country to country, both men and women consistently most desired company cars, pensions, and stock options.
- A generally inclusive corporate culture has multi-fold benefits. In highly digitalized fields, women are significantly more likely than men to seek work environments that give them a sense of “belonging” and foster a culture that promotes teamwork over competition. In addition to attracting more women, such management cultures result in higher levels of employee acceptance of management authority and decisions.
- Ageism is a uniquely urgent problem for women in ICT. While ageism effects all genders and all industries, this study found remarkably higher levels of ageism specifically effect women in ICT, with women experiencing it up to 36% more than their male counterparts, particularly at the beginning and end of their carriers.
- Gender inequality in tech may have significant knock-on effects for digitalization. The dominance of men in technology development has resulted in a generation of technology that not only perpetuates gender stereotypes, but also neglects the needs of a user base that makes up half of our population. For example, women consistently view the impact of robots on both their personal lives and society as a whole less positively than men. By excluding women from involvement, they are excluded from the benefits.
The results of this study were first presented by Prof. Dr. Anna Schneider at the 2023 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on 27th February 2023.
You can read the full report here:
