Is IT a natural fit for women?

Information technology (IT) is one vertical where women have amply proven their worth and interest. Software engineer, software analyst, solution architect – you have them all there.Indeed, many women find IT a natural fit.

“The fact that technology is ubiquitous in our everyday lives inspires a lot more women to choose IT as a career path. Women just need to find their inner geek,” said Ritika Hiranandani, strategic advisor to National Stock Exchange of India.Maya Culas, senior marketing manager at Hitachi Data Systems India, couldn't agree more. “The number of women choosing IT as a career has certainly increased over the last few years. With more women graduating from engineering and business management courses, IT has emerged as a suitable and stable career choice.”“The IT industry offers women a workplace culture and environment that enables good work-life balance. With flexi-time and ‘work from anywhere’ options, women need not opt out of the work force due to family responsibilities. This ensures that the IT industry does not lose the great opportunity available through well-qualified, talented and committed women that make a positive difference to any organisation,” said Culas.Indeed, some employers offer facilities to help women better manage the work-life balance. These include nanny and nursery arrangements in the office premises, or policies like encouraging women xhief information officers and chief technology officers.

For the record, the CEO of Yahoo is a woman – Marissa Mayer. So was her predecessor, Carol Bartz.“Women are increasingly attaining leadership positions in IT firms, and spearheading the industry digitisation initiatives. Even more significantly, women do not appear to be experiencing barriers to leadership positions in their companies such as CIO/CxO,” said Alpna Doshi, CIO, Reliance Group.E Balaji, MD & CEO of Randstad India, a division of Dutch-based Randstad Holding NV, the world's second-largest HR services company, owes the trend to women's intrinsic characteristics. “Competent skill sets that include being analytical and logical by nature, as well as being multi-taskers, armed with process-oriented thinking and naturally endowed problem-solving capability, make women well-suited to the IT sector. This allows them to fill diverse roles in the sector ranging from software engineers to team leaders and project managers. More than 50% of software students are women today, and the number of women joining the ranks of IT professionals have gone up by 25-30% from around five years ago.”