Women Get 60 Percent Of 60,000 Tech Jobs Created In U.S.

WASHINGTON DC ? Of the 60,000 new jobs create in the tech industry in the United States this year, some 60 percent of the positions went to women, reported job site Dice.Com.

“Companies have been focusing on getting more women into technology for a long time,” Shravan Goli, said president of Dice. “This year those efforts appear to be paying off – with 60 percent of new tech jobs created in 2013 filled by women, according to government statistics. To have the best tech organization, companies want to pull from the entire talent pool and we need to do more to get young girls thinking about technology careers early and often. That’s why Dice is supporting efforts like Code.org and Donors Choose to reach the next Marissa Mayer and may there be many of them.”

But do these new statistics give false hope?

According to CNBC, the data Dice.com used comes from a category called “Computer Systems Design and Related Services,” which is not an actual job category.

“What the data is really saying is that a certain type of business that falls under the category ‘Computer Systems Design and Related Services’ happened to hire more women than men this year,” reports CNBC’s Jon Fortt. “That doesn’t mean the women hired by these companies were in tech. They could have been in sales, in public relations, in customer service. A Bureau of Labor statistics spokesman confirmed that there is no way to determine whether women are making gains in tech employment by looking at the Computer Systems Design and Related Services industry category.”

So while more women may have been hired under “Computer Systems Design and Related Services” that doesn’t mean tech companies have been making significant strides in changing the balance of power between genders in their offices and boardrooms. In fact, in March of this year, Catalyst.com released an Overview of Women in the Workplace that revealed that representation of women in Fortune 500 leadership positions has stagnated in recent years.

With Yahoo President and CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg being the very visible exceptions to the rule, according to the Los Angeles Times, even one of the most popular social-media networks — Twitter — doesn’t have a single woman on its board of directors.

Last year, CNN Money probed 20 U.S. tech companies to uncover workforce diversity data and received government reports for five of them — Dell, Cisco, eBay, Ingram Micro, and Intel — to discover how diverse (or not) Silicon Valley is. Ironically, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft successfully petitioned for their data to be excluded from the report. The interactive chart shows that women in tech dominated the “Administrative” category (which combined clerical workers, as well as skilled and unskilled laborers), but were significantly less represented as officers or managers.