Foreign Policy Magazine

Gender Hack

The dearth of women in the tech world is cultural—and therefore entirely reversible.

Four years ago, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, sent her son and niece to a Silicon Valley coding camp where she was dismayed to see a stark gender disparity. “Out of the 35 kids, only five were girls and two of those girls were my niece and her friend,” she told me. “It’s terrible—it has to change!”

Sandberg, as COO of a company where women hold only 27 percent of top management jobs, should know. It is widely acknowledged that an ever-growing proportion of the better-paid jobs in the American workforce will be linked to digital technologies, and that women are strikingly underrepresented in computing science.

Government data

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