An Exploratory Study on Gender Gap in Career Mobility among IT Professionals in Korea

Abstract

The information technology (IT) industry has been growing rapidly due to constant technological advancement and the increased need to conduct business transformation in the advent of AI age. This has resulted in a shortage of skilled IT professionals, making career mobilityimportant issues to study in order to attract and retain more IT professionals. In particular, women remain a largely untapped potential in the IT industry, with very low rates of female participation in the IT workplace. Based on a large novel dataset comprising the career histories of 26,363 IT professionals in South Korea, we examine how career mobility (sequential and hierarchical) differs for men and women. We also study the mechanisms behind the gender differences such as individual profiles. Gender difference findings include disparity in sequential and hierarchical mobility over various IT career clusters.