Ginni Rometty on how to ensure more women work in tech

I know how both an education and a career in technology and engineering can advance a woman’s prospects. I grew up in a family of little financial means. As a student I enjoyed mathematics and was the first in my family to complete a four-year college degree. I chose to study engineering—often as the only woman in my classes—because it taught me how to solve problems with logic and ingenuity. It also earned me a scholarship from General Motors, the carmaker. My bachelor’s degree in computer sciences helped me get an entry-level job as a systems engineer at IBM in 1981. In 2012 I became the company’s first female chief executive.

My experiences showed me practical steps that educators and employers can take to increase women’s access to the best jobs in some of the most exciting and lucrative fields. These ideas are not all gender-specific, but increasing opportunities for all underrepresented people will inevitably benefit women.

A quick way employers can expand economic opportunity for women is to drop four-year degree requirements for some entry-level positions and instead evaluate candidates’ skills and aptitude. According to the National Centre of Education Statistics, just one-third or so of students graduating in STEM subjects in America in 2020 were women. Many of today’s tech roles require skills that can be acquired without a university degree, but some employers still demand the academic credential. This “degree inflation” trend, prevalent over the past two decades in America in particular, puts up false barriers to employment in most developed countries for the 60% of people who do not have four-year degrees. Hiring for skills instead opens the workforce to marginalised workers, including women, and allows open positions to be filled more quickly. It also makes it easier for people with university degrees in unrelated disciplines to switch careers as market needs change. 

In 2012 IBM couldn’t find enough applicants to fill cyber-security roles and we realised that our degree requirements filtered out some qualified candidates. At the time less than 10% of all IBM jobs were open to those without degrees. Our recruiters rewrote many cyber-security job descriptions to outline the skills needed for each position, including proficiency in different coding languages, as well as creativity and project management. We also stopped requiring a degree. 

The revisions were so effective that we expanded them to other roles and began recruiting more people who had never attended college—including many women. By 2019, IBM saw a 63% increase in candidates from underrepresented groups applying for positions that no longer required a degree. That year about 15% of all our American hires did not have a four-year degree. Now IBM has removed bachelor’s degrees from job postings altogether unless the role absolutely requires it. 

As firms place more emphasis in hiring on skills rather than academic credentials, young people will require more options than a four-year university degree to develop the capabilities that employers need. We developed one such option during my tenure at IBM by co-founding a new programme to teach tech skills to high-school students. The Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) lets them earn a high-school diploma and an associate degree in applied science in six years. It began in New York in 2011 and has since expanded globally. 

P-TECH enrolls participants in both high school and community college, pairing classes in science, technology and engineering with hands-on work experience. P-TECH programmes are free and don’t require standardised tests for admission, eliminating other potential barriers to tech and science education. P-TECH schools also team up with 600 companies worldwide, which provide mentors, paid internships and full-time positions after graduation. There are 300 such schools in 28 countries at present. 

The third way to make tech education and careers more accessible is through apprenticeships. America has lagged behind European countries, particularly Germany and Switzerland, in adopting apprenticeships for non-trade jobs, partly because of the country’s misplaced bias towards college as the best path for economic mobility. To increase the practice of apprenticing, businesses should create common definitions for credentialed apprenticeships for occupations that are the same regardless of employer, such as software engineer and project manager, and register them with the federal government. In Chicago, the insurance firm Aon, working with the city government, has built a network of 80 employers that operate two-year paid apprenticeships in technology, finance, consulting and other industries. Since 2017, the cohort has produced more than 1,500 apprentices. 

During my time at IBM, our P-TECH programme and changes to our recruitment process brought more diversity, including more women, into our workforce. Other companies should follow suit—businesses that include a variety of perspectives and experiences are more innovative, more competitive and more able to create products that appeal to a whole host of users. Giving everyone equal access to education and employment opportunities also promotes women’s economic security and so will help societies flourish. When it comes to science and tech careers, women must not be discouraged, overlooked or derailed. They must also be paid equally. Teaching, hiring and advancing women benefits us all.

Ginni Rometty was the CEO of IBM between 2012 and 2020. She is the co-founder of OneTen, a network that aims to advance career opportunities for black Americans, and the author of “Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World” (2023).

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