Women are on the rise in technology. With the increased visibility of women in high-powered positions, they are becoming increasingly more prominent in the technology industry.
Mobile is a field filled with a low, but increasing number of females, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ past three Current Population Surveys. The “having it all” gap may be narrowing due to the availability of productivity, scheduling and telecommute apps, but also to the women developing them.
“We are seeing more women now joining the computer science fields, engineering fields, etc. From a college recruiting perspective, we are definitely bringing in a lot of women, more recently in our hiring,” Kelly Manthey, mobile solutions delivery director at Solstice Mobile, told TMCnet in an exclusive interview.
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So, how can a woman balance a full-time, rewarding career with the other full-time responsibilities of motherhood? Interestingly, the women working in the mobile field, helping develop apps like Evernote (News - Alert), Dropbox and Google Drive are showing it can be done.
The traditional role of a woman has been the primary care taker of children, keeping the house in order, and keeping the family running – acting as the glue that holds it together. But, with women working more full- time jobs and with a focus on a career, these tools have enabled women to run their family and their work from anywhere.
Manthey is a woman who has both a career and consumer stake in the mobile industry. She has been in the business for over a decade, working with companies like Sprint (News - Alert) and Redbox to develop internal and consumer-facing apps, all while being a mom to two young boys.
“I can turn off my phone, and I’m basically turning off the office,” she explained. “I can turn my phone back on when I have time and I can do the things to help manage my family and my work.”
Solstice Mobile, a mobile development firm that focuses 100 percent on enterprise mobility with Fortune 1000 clients, works with its clients to build out their internal and external mobile use cases. Solstice Mobile works off the Google (News - Alert) platform, enabling access to any documents or information needed related to work right on a mobile phone.
“For example, any kind of internal productivity tools that a company might use for to optimize their business processes that they want their employees to be able to access via their mobile phone, as well as any customer-facing applications,” she said.
“While I am sitting on the train on my morning commute, using Solstice Mobile, I am able to do my online banking from a personal perspective, as well as get a head start on whatever is waiting for me in the office that day,” explained Manthey.
At Solstice Mobile, Manthey notices she is interacting with more women in the product-owner role – a role that drives some of the decisions around what the product should be that Solstice Mobile is developing.
“More women in the technology field recruit other women,” Manthey added. “The more women that start grow their careers within the technology space, are able to recruit other women as well, bringing in that top talent.”
These days, mobile computing has enabled women to stay in the field longer whereas more traditionally, women may have put their careers on pause to raise a family. “Now, we are able to juggle both a lot easier because of mobile technology,” she said.
Mobility helps facilitate this in a positive way where the work day is not constrained by sitting at the office, but rather being able to pick it up when there is time.
Although mobile technology is not yet a female-dominated field, it certainly is becoming a lot more balanced.