“At the time, coding was a geek thing”, remembers Camille Jandot, 28, datascientist at Criteo, a large French advertising retargeting company on the Internet. When she joined the Telecom Paris engineering school in 2013, she did not see herself continuing towards a technical profession. “I was considering more “feminine” courses, such as a double degree with Sciences Po or a business school, perhaps to free myself from the very scientific aspect of the training”, she adds. A common reflex: according to a study of the Boston Consulting Group published in 2020, only 15% of data scientists in the world are women, while they represent nearly 35% of students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And in France, women represent only 17% of digital graduates working in the sector, indicates investigation Gender Scan by Global Contact, published in February.
From high school to business, through higher education, when it comes to IT, women remain on the sidelines, and are often victims of sexism. In 2017, a investigation the Social Builder association, which works for the inclusion of women in tech, had the effect of a bombshell when it revealed that seven out of ten female tech students said they had been “subjected to sexist acts during their training, ranging from sexist jokes and remarks about their skills to sexual harassment”. In the middle of #metoo, investigation of Social Builder is taken up everywhere and puts schools face to face with their responsibilities. “Some establishments did not consider sexism as a real subject, explains Emmanuelle Larroque, General Delegate of Social Builder. There was, at that time, a real gap between their desire to attract more women and their difficulty in looking reality in the face. »
From 2018, some schools and companies are launching major awareness-raising plans, internally and externally, in order to bring more women into their ranks. But four years later, IT still suffers from stereotypes, and its employees are still seen as geeks. This lack of diversity worries many professionals in the sector who, faced with the shortage of developers, have been trying for years to implement incentive policies to recruit more women. Without much success: in decline at the beginning of the 2010s, their proportion in tech has barely regained its 2012 level, i.e. 17% of the workforce. One step forward, two back.
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