Women Are Narrowing the Gap in IT Jobs

Women in information technology jobs are earning roughly the same salaries as their male counterparts, provided they share equal levels of experience and education and parallel job titles, a recent report found. Now, a new report shows that the number of women it IT jobs is also on the rise.

Dice.com’s Tech Trends for the first quarter of 2013 indicates that while women still only make up 31 percent of the IT workforce, this year has marked some notable job growth for women in the field. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 46 percent of new tech positions have been awarded to women since the start of 2013.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for all tech professionals was 3.5 percent in the first quarter, compared to 7.7 percent for the overall U.S. workforce. The last time unemployment for IT professionals was above the national average was the first quarter of 2004, Dice noted.

Technology consulting continues to dominate the job growth in IT, with more than 17,000 new positions added since the start of 2013. But other areas, including manufacturing, data processing and hosting, continued to lose jobs since the start of the year, Dice found.

Several other jobs had unemployment rates below the national average for IT, including Web developers (1.0 percent), network architects (1.7 percent), software developers (2.2 percent) and database administrators (2.8 percent).

Although many IT professionals have good job prospects given the low unemployment rate, most are not leaving their jobs, Dice found. During the first two months of the first quarter of 2013, for example, 380,000 in professional and business services quit their jobs on average, down from 389,000 per month in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to BLS data. That’s also down significantly from the previous recession, which ended in November 2001, when 494,000 quit their jobs each month.

IT professionals are not immune to layoffs or discharges, either, Dice found. The number of layoffs and discharges in the first two months of 2013 averaged 386,500 for employees in professional and business services. “Having more layoffs and discharges than voluntary quits is the job market we have, not the job market anyone wants,” the report states.