It's Actually Been a Decent Year for Women in Tech

Perhaps it’s the intense focus on hiring practices, but InfoWorld is reporting that based off of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women in computer science-related fields have gotten more jobs this year than men have.

According to InfoWorld, the first 9 months of 2013 showed a turn for women:

…a total of 39,000 jobs were created in what the government calls “computer systems design and related services.” Of those a bit more than 60 percent went to women, compared to just 34 percent for all of 2012. Over the last 10 years, the average proportion of women hired to fill new jobs in the sector — there were about 534,000 — was just 30.8 percent.

InfoWorld goes on to note “[a]n oddity in the data,” which is that the reason these numbers for women are so high is not that more women have been hired, but that less men were. To get a picture of how the past decade or so has been for hiring women for tech jobs, check out this graphic from Dice:

The issue is that though the number of women in these positions is growing, the number of available positions is growing as well, which means that in general, it’s hard to imagine that this is the beginning of a trend of women taking over the tech world or even getting close to filling an equal number of positions as men. This information also doesn’t indicate that women are in particularly high-level positions in any of these companies, nor does it explain exactly what types of jobs women are filling at different companies. It is a necessary part of the picture, however, in beginning to understand where women go when they get out of college with degrees in computer science.

Shocker: Women outnumber men in this year’s tech hires [InfoWorld via BetaBeat]