Hoosier Women in High-Tech Jobs
Indiana Business Research Center, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
Women have always worked, whether at home or away from home. But how many women work at high-tech jobs, such as computer programming, surgery, math, or life and physical science? While Census 2000 seems a distant memory, we are just now receiving the treasures of that census—details on who works where and at what kind of job. Hoosier women have historically been a significant portion of the workforce. Dual income families are not a recent trend in this state.
Over the decades, Indiana’s female workforce has generally worked in what may be referred to as traditionally female jobs—nurse, cashier, or librarian. And while those professions may continue to be dominated by women, we can see that women do indeed have non-traditional jobs, calling for significant levels of educational attainment and skill.
We will call these high-tech jobs, for simplicity’s sake, focusing on those occupations in the professional and technical fields. This means leaving out administrative or managerial jobs that may incorporate a “high-tech” level of knowledge, or a production occupation that may now use robotics as a core component of the work. The federal classification system does not afford us with such fine detail, so we must use a relatively broad brush in developing a picture of Indiana’s high-tech female workforce, as illustrated in the following graphics.
Figure 1
Distribution of Indiana's High-Tech Jobs by Sex, 2000
Figure 2
Number of Women Working in High-Tech Occupations, 2000
