Giving Compass' Take:

• Mark Muro, Sifan Liu, and Jacob Whiton discuss data that reveals that women hold more digital workforce jobs than men, but they hold less power.

• How can funders, employers, and nonprofit organizations work to increase the proportion of women in high-power digital work?

• Learn about funding gender equality. 

Based on a 1 to 100 scoring of the digital content of 545 occupations developed using O*NET’s detailed surveys of actual workers, our data provide a mixed and sometimes surprising view of the interplay between female and male workers’ skills and employment progress.

For starters, our data show that while the lack of women in many critical and well-paying occupations continues to garner attention, women are now slightly ahead of men as a whole when it comes to developing the digital skills increasingly essential for employment, whether in high-end tech or low-end retail.

Overall, on this measure, women now occupy jobs with a slightly higher mean digitalization score of 48 compared to a mean job score of 45 for men.

Underlying this digital edge, moreover, is the fact that women have historically been overrepresented in tens of millions of administration, social service, and health jobs that, while not intensely digital, are middling and increasingly digital.

On the positive side, women have markedly increased their share of such occupations as database administration, computer operations, and operations research analysis.

However, the story is not so bright for some of the largest and most central occupations in tech—including computer programming and computer and information systems management.

Read the full article on gender bias by Mark Muro, Sifan Liu, and Jacob Whiton at Brookings.