With women as retail’s primary buyer and purchase influencer, the importance of having the gender prominently working in marketing and merchandising roles has been widely acknowledged. With technology becoming increasingly customer-centric, has retail IT joined their ranks?
Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, an organization that seeks to get young women involved in tech, is among those that believe a better balance of women in retail technology jobs is becoming essential for stores to understand how to best deliver on the customer experience.
“Technology is completely changing how people buy products, how they interact with brands and what they’re buying,” Ms. Saujani told the National Retail Federation (NRF). “In an industry where women control the majority of consumer spending, it’s an enormous missed opportunity to not have those voices at the table.”
Unfortunately, her organization was formed because not many women are pursuing tech careers at all. The nonprofit organization states that in middle schools, 74 percent of girls express an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), but only 0.4 percent select computer science when choosing a college major.
Beyond any challenges hiring women for IT jobs, a study from McKinsey & Co. in March showed the retail industry needs to do a better job advancing women in tech.
On the positive side, the retail and consumer goods sector was found to have a higher percentage of women in all entry- and mid-level tech roles than the study’s overall sample of industries. But the proportion of women in top roles fell sharply – to 13 percent – compared with the already low 18 percent for the overall sample, reflecting below-average top-level promotion rates.
“In our sample as a whole, women were 92 percent as likely as their male counterparts to make the jump from senior vice president to the C-Suite, while in retail and consumer goods the odds were far lower, at 45 percent,” wrote McKinsey. “Not surprisingly, only 23 percent of women in this sector feel that gender is a priority for their CEOs, compared with 35 percent for the overall sample.”