Justina Alexandra Sava
Research expert covering the IT security & services market
Get in touch with us nowHighway to Silicon Valley
Employment in the IT sector in the United States has constantly been increasing over the past decade. After a severe drop in the IT workforce in June 2020, IT employment exceeded three million people starting April 2022 and peaked at nearly 3.12 million employees as of January 2023. Moreover, by 2032, U.S. tech employment is forecast to surpass 6.1 million people. When it comes to salaries, jobs in IT management were paid the most, with salaries valued at 152 thousand U.S. dollars. Additionally, for software developers and cyber security engineers, average wages varied between 120 and 130 thousand U.S. dollars annually. It is hardly surprising that IT professionals earned the highest salaries in Silicon Valley. The region in Northern California is the global center of high tech and innovation, with some of the world’s largest companies having their headquarters there, such as: Apple, Electronics Arts, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Netflix, Tesla, Nvidia, or Twitter. Despite the number of global tech start-up layoffs – leading with Amazon as of January 2023 – data from Silicon Valley Index shows that the tech hub has historically low unemployment compared to other regions.Pushing for gender diversity in the tech sector
It is hardly surprising that the tech sector has a long-standing problem concerning gender diversity and inclusion. In spite of several improvements being made over the past years due to increased societal pressure, global organizations still found hiring women for IT-related jobs to be more challenging than hiring minorities or veterans. The share of female leaders in tech companies worldwide peaked at 14 percent in 2022. In the same year, software developer gender distribution worldwide consisted of approximately 92 percent men and, five percent women, and 1.67 percent non-binary, gender queer, or gender non-conforming. Notwithstanding countries having equal gender representation across their entire labor force, tech companies' discrepancies are more significant. For instance, while female representation in France’s total labor force is at 48 percent, this percentage drops to only 21 percent when applied to tech organizations. In 2022, countries like Nigeria and Mexico were considered among the most gender diverse countries regarding cyber security professionals.
