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Feelings about tech job security differ by gender

• Young women don't share men's confidence: study

Tyler Hamilton - June 26, 2001

Are young women workers of the digital economy more cautious? Or, are the men simply more cocky?

According to an industry study obtained by The Star, women in their twenties feel far less secure in their jobs than men in the same age group when it comes to careers in the high-tech sector.

The study, conducted by Ottawa-based employee recruitment firm TalentLab Inc., found that 35 per cent of women between the ages of 20 and 29 are confident about the security of their jobs, compared to 67 per cent of twentysomething men.

About 750 individual job-seekers and 175 corporate hirers were surveyed for the report.
Alan Kearns, president of TalentLab, said the findings suggest that young women have a more balanced and realistic approach to the first phase of their careers.

Simply put, they're better at managing their expectations.

At the same time, Kearns said the different attitudes between young men and women may have less to do with gender and more do to with the types of skills they have - and the jobs that they tend to take on.

"The percentage of woman in technology (roles) is still lower than males,'' he said.

Kearns said that men still dominate engineering and programming positions, while women outnumber men when it comes to marketing, communications, human resources and administration positions.

"It's not whether I'm male or female. Rather, it's what skills I have.''

Unfortunately, when companies such as Nortel Networks Corp. and JDS Uniphase Corp. announce massive job cuts, the first positions to be slashed are non-technical roles.

Research and development jobs, by contrast, are the last to be targeted.

And it's not just twentysomething women feeling the impact - it's all women.

" I believe the first people to be laid off are the women,'' said Julie Krahule, a former executive administrative assistant "in her forties.''

Krahule, who was let go by Nortel Networks after its first major round of job cuts in January, said it's not a surprise that young women feel less secure about their jobs, which tend to encompass ``supporting roles'' within an organization.

"It has nothing to do with your ability,'' she said.

"It's just a matter of who gets chosen when the crunch comes down.''

The TalentLab survey also found that women over the age of 40 place less value on stock options than men.

However, both sexes across all age groups are confident the high-tech sector will rebound, even if it is more risky than it was a year ago.