> despite still being heavily outnumbered
Despite?
Despite?
Its use here means something like "contrary to the expectation that women face barriers in IT (as evidenced by lower numbers of women in the top positions in IT and in general), they rise through the ranks faster than men."
Hasn't this been debunked already? AFAIK the percentage of women in IT is about the same as the percentage of women graduating from CS.
Not saying that those statistics can be heavily biased due to imbalanced classes - but other commenters already mentioned that multiple times.
Perhaps more importantly the article does not mention confirmation bias, which is surely at play here. (e.g. "average" women are being discouraged from CS degrees before they even start, so only superstars stick it through, so of course they move faster through the ranks after graduation.)
Unless you are awesome, it just isn't worth it to put up with the crap that they have to.
A similar example: in the UK about 20% of girls and 40% of boys study physics at A-level (the final school exam before university). Every year everybody seems surprised that the girls outperform the boys.
However, it is likely that the students who study physics are mostly the students with the greatest aptitude for the subject. If you split the students into any two arbitrary groups then the top fifth from one group are going to outperform the top two fifths from the other. This is unremarkable. Yet when the groups are boys and girls, people are surprised.
Anyway, I would be surprised if something similar isn't happening in CS. With so few women studying the subject, it's likely that those who do are fairly dedicated.