Attracting Students and Professionals in IT: It’s the Work-Family Culture for Both Women and Men

The war for talent in the field of information technology (IT) has intensified over the last years. Especially the attraction of skilled women to compensate for higher demands and to bring in different perspectives and diverse expertise has become a challenging task for organizations. So far, literature suggested promoting special female programs and a balanced work-family culture to attract more women to IT omitting that women may also seek general career characteristics such as salary and benefits, career advancement and promotion opportunities, and challenging tasks. By using an experimental conjoint design, we simultaneously tested and compared the effects of these career characteristics on the intention to apply for an IT- related position for IT students (Study 1, N = 187) and IT professionals (Study 2, N = 216). Across studies, the results suggest that both women and men in IT value work-family culture as the most important characteristic. General career characteristics followed work-family culture while mentoring programs for women appeared as least important. The only gender difference emerged for IT students in female students seeing mentoring programs for women as more important than male students do.