FROM CLASSROOM TO EXECUTIVE MANAGEMENT - GENDER DIVERSITY IN THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FIELD.

Although women earn a greater number of college degrees (58% in 2010) than men, they comprise a smaller proportion of all employees who work in the Information Technology (IT) industry. Moreover, among the top four consumer electronics categories - LCD TVs, tablets, laptops, and smartphones, women score higher than men in their likelihood of purchasing the latter three. Women also spend more time on social networking sites and conduct more internet searches than men do. Even though, the positive impacts of having more women in top management positions are well documented, they are still under-represented in the middle and upper management positions. The goal of this exploratory research is to investigate the representation of women in the IT field based on two independent and objective data sets. The first data set shows the number of women graduating with IT degrees from 1971-2009 and the second data set shows the number of women who were hired as IT leaders from 2000-2010. The results reveal that the number of women graduating with IT degrees is declining. However, the IT field seems to be doing better when comparing the number of female IT executives to female CFOs and female CEOs who were employed by the 2010 Fortune 100 firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]