Wanted: Women in Tech

The federal government has long struggled to recruit and hire technologists of all stripes. Look no further than the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov and the mad scramble to fix the site last year. 

But another problem continues to lurk in the background: a persistent dearth of women in science, technology and engineering careers across the federal ranks. 

It’s a problem that’s garnered more publicity in the private sector, in part because the gap there is much wider. “The Silicon Valley Diversity Numbers Nobody Is Proud Of” blared a Bloomberg headline last summer, revealing the meager percentage of female and minority coders, engineers and computer scientists employed by the Northern California tech giants. 

For many agencies, cracking the code of hiring a diverse tech workforce also remains a challenge. 

All told, women make up about 44 percent of the federal workforce, but only about 30 percent of IT jobs governmentwide, according to an analysis of federal data by CEB, a member-based consulting firm based in Arlington, Virginia.

That compares favorably to the percentage of women in IT-related jobs at the big four Silicon Valley companies—Facebook, Apple, Google and Twitter—which hover at only about 16 percent. 

The government gap, however, isn’t confined to IT positions. 

At NASA nearly 80 percent of aerospace engineers are men, and less than a third of the agency’s computer engineers and general engineers are women, according to 2014 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data. At the Federal Communications Commission women outnumber men in the agency’s overall workforce—53 percent to 47 percent. But in one of the major occupational categories at the agency, electronics engineering, men vastly outnumber women—88 percent to 12 percent.

"Those numbers certainly aren't surprising, because we can't be naive and think that the disparities that we see in Silicon Valley exist in one geographic region instead of applying more broadly to an entire industry and skill set,” says Laurenellen McCann, a civic innovation fellow at the New America Foundation. McCann is a member of Tech LadyMafia, a networking group for women in technology, which has a strong following in Washington. 

The ‘Robot Sentinel’

Solutions to the dearth of women in tech across both government and the private sector have focused on getting more women and girls interested in technology fields to help prime the educational pipeline with more qualified female candidates. Women now account for just 18 percent of computer science graduates, for example, even though they comprise nearly 60 percent of all U.S. college graduates, according to federal statistics. 

But there may be attributes specific to government that exacerbate the gender tech gap, namely the rigid federal hiring process. 

Job seekers applying for open spots through the governmentwide career portal USAJobs have to self-evaluate their skills on a fixed scale. Applicants who are less confident—or simply honest—or who have untraditional experience may never see their resume make it past the site’s algorithm and onto a hiring manager’s desk.

“USAJobs is like the robot sentinel between you as a human being applying to work for the government and the government even knowing that you exist,” McCann says. “That's not a great way to be considerate about diversity and inclusivity for any job set, let alone for these particular fields that require attention and care in order to increase their diversity."

Silicon Valley Shift

Leaders and policymakers in government say feds are ready to roll up their sleeves and fix the problem. Some agencies are already on the fast track. 

At the Housing and Urban Development Department, nearly half of the agency’s 200 IT workers are women. And it’s not just agencies with small IT workforces that have seen success. About 42 percent of the Treasury Department’s 7,500 IT employees are women.

The General Services Administration’s new 18F digital-services agency, which officially launched in May and has about 50 staffers—about 30 percent are women—also aims to shake up the conversation on women in tech. 

18F hosts regular hackathons—informal, collaborative training sessions—and has made it a point to tailor events specifically for women. 

The goal of the hackathons is to offer a number of different entry points “for women who, for whatever reason, were not feeling comfortable attending tech events,” says Leah Bannon, an 18F product manager who spearheaded the effort. “The idea was kind of to make it a ‘gateway drug’ into tech events."

18F is also trying to hack the hiring process to make it more attuned to the types of high-tech, high-skilled workers the government increasingly needs. The takeaway of 18F’s effort: Diversity doesn’t have to suffer in the search for top talent, Bannon says. 

“When you work hard to find the best people, you end up with a very diverse team,” she says. “It's not about having quotas.”

Advocates for a more diverse federal tech workforce also see hopeful signs in a few recent personnel shifts at the highest levels of government tech.

Last summer, the White House named Megan Smith, a Google executive with the company’s cutting-edge research arm, to be the nation’s first female chief technology officer. 

Throughout the Obama administration, the White House has famously poached from Google and other digital giants to fill high-ranking tech positions. 

It sounds optimistic, but in the future, the government could actually have first dibs on top talent—men and women alike, says Merici Vinton, who helped launch the original digital team at the brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011.

"People in Silicon Valley focus on the snacks and the free food and the beer and the Ping Pong,” she says. “And actually my guess is, that's not going to be popular—nobody's going to want that in five years. What you want is an organization you feel like you can make a difference in and you can grow in.”

Smith, the new CTO, has a unique perspective on what ails Silicon Valley. “I think the tech industry is at that moment where it's starting to wake up,” she said during an interview at The Atlantic Ideas Forum last fall. 

Advocates hope her appointment as federal CTO will similarly help enliven efforts to increase the diversity of the government’s tech workforce. 

When asked at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit last fall about efforts to increase the number of women and girls in STEM fields, Smith cited the importance of mentorship, of increasing the visibility of successful women in tech and the need for hands-on computer science education beginning in elementary school. 

“All the things we're doing, we just need to keep doing them,” she said. “They're working."