Why are women still inferior in the workplace?

Editorial Board

With Women’s History Month starting, it is time to analyze what is really happening in the world of women’s advancement.

Fortune 500 released their annual list of companies that are dominating around the world and this year there are 24 women on the list: an all-time high.

Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors (GM) was ranked 7th in the entire list.

Colleges and Universities are even offering more and more scholarships to women who go into science, math or technology jobs.

So why are women leaving the tech industry in such big numbers?

According to The Los Angeles Times, it’s due to hostility in the work place. Many women still feel they are seen as inadequate to their male counter parts.

In the LA Times article, they interviewed a few women, but one seemed to stick out.

Ana Redmond’s story was interesting because it seemed she had designed a feature for an algorithm, even Google has a similar feature (although which came first is not known) that would allow you to search on the company’s website and it would produce results based on the first few letters of the search based on the memory of your previous searches. The company then reassigned the project to someone else, saying “only architects can pitch features.”

That seems completely counter intuitive and completely dismisses the hard work that Redmond put into the project.

What was also surprising to read was that Pinterest, a website where users are more than 80 percent women, has only 20 percent female employees.

It is unbelievable in this day and age that there is still such segregation in the workplace. When women aren’t given the means to advance, why would they continue?

Why would anyone continue to work in a place where their skills and contributions aren’t appreciated or recognized?

The technology industry, especially in the Bay Area, is the fastest growing industry in the world.

With such progress, one would think the people in charge would be more progressive in their thinking.

A woman gets the same education as a man when she attends school. So why are they treated as if they are inferior?

We college students are the future. We have the power to enact change in our community. Someday we will be business owners, start-up creators or CEOs. We have the power to create great things, but if women of all backgrounds are not treated equally then the advancement of our global race as humans will come to a halt.

It is our job to make sure everyone is empowered and feels like what they are doing matters.

Editor’s note: In an earlier version we stated that Ana Redmond had create a search algorithm when she actually proposed an idea to change how the already existing algorithm did it’s searching.