rnational Women’s Day 2023 //

Today is International Women’s Day. The theme for this year’s IWD, DigitALL: Innovations and technology for gender equality, should be embraced by the martech community.

Lauren Wetzel (chief operating officer at InfoSum), a vendor of data collaboration platform, says that “IWD 2023 offers a wonderful opportunity for businesses to reflect upon the progress they’ve made with diversity and inclusion initiatives and where they need to go.”

We thought Wetzel’s suggestion was a good one. We’d look at the status for gender equality in martech.

Martech is the intersection between two very different sectors. 47.8% were held by women in U.S. marketing jobs in 2021. This is 1.7 percentage point higher than the average worker. Contrary to this, women only held 26.7% in tech jobs in U.S.A that year.

Martech intersects business sectors. It is difficult to determine the gender profile of martech as it is a function, not a separate business sector. Our 2022 Salary and Career Survey contains some martech-specific information:

• On average, women earn 30% less in martech jobs than men at all levels. This is worse than in the IT sector at all levels, where women make an average of 28.9% more than men , according to the U.S. Census.
• Men account for 56% of director-or above roles.
• 29% of men were promoted within the past six months, while 24% of women were.

Martech professionals tend to view it more as marketing than technology. This is why the number of women working in this field is declining.

“Mass layoffs have been hard hitting the tech industry recently, but it seems to be affecting women more than men,” said Alex Theriault (data and customer solutions expert, GM, Spherical, Lotame). Research has shown that women are 65% less likely lose their jobs in ongoing layoffs. This is particularly difficult considering they make up a disproportionately small percentage of the tech workforce.

This is after the pandemic that took a huge toll on women in tech.

According to a BCG study on the impact of the pandemic on women leaders in technology, gender diversity in tech leadership has fallen from 86% to 59% between 2020 and 2021. Pandemic-related caregiving, which was more burdensome on women, is responsible for this. 44% of women said they spend well over 20 hours a week caring for others, compared with 33% of men.

Women working more . This split is almost identical to the proportion of those who had more work responsibilities during that period: 43% for women and 33% for men, according a TrustRadius survey. According to the report, 57% of women feel more burned out at work now than they did before the pandemic. Only 36% of men felt the same way.

A study by BuiltIn also found:

• 39% of women consider gender bias to be the primary reason they are not offered promotions.
• 66% of women say there is no clear pathway for their careers at their current companies.

These are just a few reasons 20% women in tech consider quitting.

Why do we care? This is bad news for businesses. A company’s performance will be better if it has more diversity at all levels. Numerous studies have confirmed this.

• Companies with the highest proportion of women in top management have a 35% greater return on equity and a 34% higher total return for shareholders than those with the lowest. (Catalyst)
• Companies that are ethnically diverse are 35% more likely than those who are gender-diverse to generate higher revenues, and 15% more likely to do so. (McKinsey)
• The 100 Fortune 500 companies with the highest number of employees have more diverse boards than any 400 other companies. (Forbes)
• High growth brands (annual revenue increase of at least 10%) are 1.9x more likely to have diversity-and-inclusion related talent objectives than negative growth brands (Deloitte)

What can we do? Companies can take concrete steps to support women in the workplace. These are:

• For women of color and women of color, formal mentorship programs
• Services for emergency child care
• Outside the organization, sharing diversity metrics
• Setting numeric goals for race/ethnicity/gender representation in senior management
• Facilitating conversations about diversity issues with managers
• Managers can be trained on how to ensure promotions are fair, equitable and just

These are the top-performing companies , according to McKinsey.

Alex Theriault says that cross-pollinating within departments is another important way to empower women at work. Certain divisions in organizations lean more towards one gender than others. For example, customer service or marketing leans toward women while engineering leans towards men. Jobs or departments with a male leaning receive higher salaries than those with a female leaning. However, teams that break gender norms and are more diverse are more likely to do better.

Women can look for organizations that are already bringing about change outside of work.

Gabrielle Turyan is the director of product marketing for Digital Remedy. She says that “the martech industry changes before our eyes” and with it, the form of leadership. Digital Remedy offers digital media solutions. “Pivotal organizations such as SheRunsIt, and inter-organizational mentor group are opening the doors for women like me to be able to sit at the table.

MarTech first published the post International Women’s Day and the martech community.