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Young Women Encouraged to Go For IT
An anonymous reader writes "Wednesday Microsoft Canada's vice president of developer and platform evangelism encouraged 9th grade girls to head for an IT career with a presentation that debunked key myths. Apparently IT isn't geeky or socially isolating. From the article: "Some issues (the girls) brought up included fears that their friends will think (working in IT) is a geeky thing to do, and that IT work is not very social...They were concerned that there were limitations for women in this area of technology, and they felt there is a stigma associated with IT in terms of it not being a very exciting place to work."
I can't believe these are even real concerns among women. Why does your profession have to seem cool to other people? You do stuff because you think there's a challenge there or if it's interesting. Who cares what your friends think? What the f is wrong with women in the US and Canada? If they think like this, I almost don't even want them in the IT industry. I want free thinkers.
I know several women in IT...
It isn't really a stigma once you get into it. Usually they are popular girls. I have to say I have known fewer "geeky" girls in IT than the popular type... It really all depends on the person.
If there is one thing I can say for certain, it is that the female IT stigma is definately non-existant. I'm sure the fear of it exists, but in practice it doesn't. I believe most of the fear of the stigma comes from females that don't know what they are doing and make their way up for other reasons. I know this happens in IT more than other places. And it usually isn't because of a lack of qualified girls, but a lack of hiring experienced girls.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Anyone who's studied even a bit of psychology and perhaps some communications will realize male's and female's naturally excel in certain area's and are also drawn to those things. There's a REASON why you don't see many girl geeks... why try to force this on them by basically lying about it?
While it may just be "stigmata" about the socially isolating aspects, it surely isn't about the "boring" aspects. I promise you my girlfriend just wouldn't ever enjoy spending 6 hours recompiling and securing a *nix system. Where as I find it to be quite relaxing and a fun challenge at times.
With so many PEOPLE unemployed in IT, is it really responsible to encouarge people to take up this profession?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I wish it wasn't...
The fact is that it tends to get exciting a bit more often that I wish and I suspect the "exciting" as in pull your hair out... the CIO is screaming at you... get it fixed yesterday... isn't the kind of exciting that a 9yr is thinking of.
Here's wishing for a nice boring week this week!
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What I don't understand is why schools encourage people to pursue IT as a career.
1) Being in IT is not as profitable as being in management (from what I've seen).
2) Encouraging people into math and science and IT invalidates perfectly valid career paths.
3) Colleges (in my experience) have droves of people who sign up for computer science their Freshman year, and then change out to another major because they find out what the major is really like.
Why do you need to encourage anybody into a particular field in high school? Shouldn't they decide for themselves what they want to do? If you're going to encourage them into a field, why not one that's more profitable. Tell them to become architects or businesspeople. Business is where the $$ is.
Is this entire website not evidence enough that IT is in fact, a geeky and socially inactive job?
Why not just encourage folks who are good at math (and/or science) to broaden and deepen their capabilities in these core academic subjects?
My father became an engineer because a teacher at St. Dunstan's (in Milbrae, CA), his parochial grammar school, encouraged him to do so b/c the guy -- my dad -- was always good at math and science. It wasn't til much later that he actually settled on the particular subcategory of engineering (post tours as a Seabee in Nam) and began working on his career.
I think the same model should still hold. We should encourage those who show aptitude to get into this field. And instead of encouraging them to "join IT," we should be encouraging them to take as much math as they can handle and worry about specific job/career paths later on, when it's more appropriate.
So my two gripes are: (1) don't just encourage girls for the sake of encouraging girls, encourage those who are actually likely to excel and improve the field and (2) don't start pushing specific career paths to 14/15 year olds. Instead get them working on the academics that underpin many careers in technology in general. To encourage someone to become a help desk employee is a bit premature at age 14 imo.
Oh yeah, I'm a girl (a woman, actually).
I hate to say it, but I'm rather against trying to make IT sound better just to encorage girls to get in the field. As a woman in the field, I've seen plenty others of my sex give it a shot for the supposed money (So they weren't very bright. :)) or the novelty of being surrounded by men. In my experience both in school and work, many women don't like IT. You shouldn't pursue it as a carreer unless you truly have a love of the profession. Of course, this goes for either sex.
All sorts of bullshit like you mentioned is prevalent in almost any anonymous setting.
...). You get the point.
If this is actually going on in your (engineering/CS) work environment, then you've got a problem and I'd suggest you don't waste yourself toiling amongst such people.
Otherwise it's just jackoffs being jackoffs. Not relegated to the field of CS, unfortunately (just ask folks in Sales, or the Financial Industry or
IT is an incredibly boring profession.
If they want to do something interesting and worthwhile, they should become scientists.
...you should focus on being a careful thinker.
That would include, for example, not drawing inferences about "women in the US and Canada" based upon the reported meanderings of 14 year olds.
..men were encouraged to enter the rather cushy field of teaching Kindergarten classes. "Don't feel as this is a feminine thing to do, that your friends will laugh at you for doing something so.. err.. gay" the head of the board of education was quoted as saying.
Why is this even an issue? Maybe the reason why there is a lack of females in IT is because
a)they dont want to do it or
b)they arent as suited to it
Why must they be cojoled and sweet-talked into doing something they wouldn't otherwise do? You dont see men being encouraged to teach Kindergarten classes, for exactly the same reasons above: they dont want to or they arent as suited to it.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
Most jobs working for someone else are at the very least 75% boredom, politicking, drudgery, etc. Unless you happen to be very attractive, intelligent, charismatic, or born of privilege this will be true whether you work on an assembly line, at a fry vat, or in a cubicle.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
With so many PEOPLE unemployed in IT, is it really responsible to encouarge people to take up this profession?
The more unemployed people there are in IT, the lower the wages. The lower the wages are, the more money that companies will have to spend on computers and licenses for Microsoft products. You didn't expect a large corporation to be interested in anything but their own profits, did you?
Letting Microsoft address young children on the "benefits" of going into a field where there is rampant unemployment is like letting RJ Reynolds tell them how cool smoking is. Sure, the latter is worse, but neither corporation is going to be acting in the interests of the students.
We need to stop trying to make it something it isn't in order to appeal to women. We don't try to make daycare, social working, teaching and other female-dominated areas more enticing for men precisely because the jobs fit women better than men as a general rule. These can be great, highly respectable jobs that do a lot of good. They may not be as glamorous as IT is in some circles, but they are necesssary and hard.
From what I have seen watching freshmen girls in CS now that I am a senior is that a lot of them really aren't interested in computers. Most of them really aren't at all. At my university we have a female CS professor who is very incompetent and tries to recruit girls because they are girls. Then she turns around and gets on their cases in her classes when they screw up, in part because they're "making girls in CS look bad." This isn't healthy and at its core, this is what specifically seeking out girls for CS does. It makes them a statistic and ignores what they might actually be good at and enjoy.
Women should be encouraged to try things for the sake of the liberal arts experience, not because "we need more women in IT." Frankly we don't need a hell of a lot more IT workers. We are already training lots of people who suck, are apathetic toward it and/or would be happier elsewhere. That last part is the most critical part. These feminazi recruiters don't care what might make that girl happy, they want to see their quota of estrogen for IT filled, even if the girl ends up in a field she hates with a degree that is worthless for what she ends up wanting to do.
This is the natural result of the "group rights" bullshit popular on the left. You see the forest, but you don't see the trees. You are so damned concerned with gender politics to realize that, regardless of what the Vagina Monologues say, a woman is not defined by her vagina anymore than a man is by his penis. A woman's destiny, is not in her gender, but in herself and God's plan for her. Oh wait, did I just say God's plan for her? Another strike for political incorrectness.
I think anyone with some interest should be encouraged to take an entry level CS/CIS/IT class to see what's involved. Just stop pushing girls to do more than that. Let them make their own decisions and stop telling them that their choice isn't good enough. If she wants to be an IT worker, that's her choice. If she wants to be an artist, that's her choice. If she wants to work on cars for a living, that's her choice. If she wants to be a housewife, that's her choice. It is no one's right to tell her that because she was born female that any of those choices are invalid for her. Her career choice, as long as it is legal, is her choice. If she wants to get married and stay at home to raise her kids, that's her right and choice.
So repeat after me: let the girls make the choice and then respect it. The fucking elitists, most of whom are feminists, have no right to criticize a woman for pursuing the occupational path that makes her happy. Social justice is about people being free to live as individuals and to pursue happiness, not about stuffing individuals into a faceless quota. The irony is that feminism has accomplished nothing for women. Coercing them into professions is no different than coercing them into being "barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen." It is not liberation to chastise her until she feels unhappy and without self-realization outside a 9-5. It is nothing more than a different manifestation of the same alleged patriarchical drive that "forced women to stay home" the only difference being is that the feminists tend to want to force them into the work place. If the goal of feminism is freedom for women it should place a huge sample plate of life options before them and let them choose and then be proud that they are happy regardless of which one they choose.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Ive got to say I agree.
Far too much people are pushed towards the IT industry. Thats one thing that didnt go away with the dot com.
When will people learn that the IT industry does not collect all the people youd rather sweep under the rug or cant find an industry they want to work in?
Perfectly simple.
You invest tons and tons of money and resources into telling people that they should go pursue a career in the sciences.
What about the people who really wanted a career in the humanities? You totally read statement #2 wrong. It's not a relationship between IT and math and science, it's a relationship between IT/Math/Science and every other field that there is. The emphasis is always "we need better engineers." Last time I checked, we didn't need any more engineers. In fact, the field was so glutted that salaries were going down and jobs were getting outsourced. There are plenty of other fields than math and science to go into, so why the emphasis on math and science?
Robert X. Cringely did a documetary on the PC industry that aired on PBS a few years back called "Revenge of the Nerds." There's a very minor part of that documetary that has always stuck with me. Right at the beginning several people are quoted including a ten year old boy who loves to dabble in electronics and technology. When he's asked what his friends say about this, he says "Boy, he's a nerd. Yeah, but I don't mind, I'm used to being called a nerd, can't have other people stop your dreams."
I found that very touching, and I wonder if that attitude has something to do with the reason why there aren't more women in technological fields and especially in IT (not to put too fine a point on it, how many ten year old girls can you find that would say something similar).
The concern about the lack of women in IT and related fields is mostly linked to the salaries involved (not too many projects devoted to encouraging girls to become truck drivers). And when a high paying field like IT has such a small percentage of women, the goal is to remove any barriers that may specifally target women.
Up until now the emphasis was to remove biases in education (biases like calling on boys more often than girls in math classes, yadayadayada) But I always thought that the social factors outside of the classroom were very important and I'm glad to see that this is being recongnized, although I think the approach to address the problem is wrong.
Teaching nine-year-olds that there is no stigma is pointless. Their peers will be glad to inform them that there is a stigma. The question is, why are there more boys at that age that are willing to resist the stigma and be, to a certain extent, loners than there are girls?
The most frustrating thing is that the choices nine-year-olds make about what interests they pursue will acutally influence what career path they start to persue when they are twice that age; but the social pressures that they hold all-important at the age of nine will become practically irrelevant when they are adults (or I should say that they may still find social pressure to be motivating as adults but it will be based on a totally different set of criteria).
My oldest stepdaughter was about 14 when I married her mother. At that age she thought anybody who had anything to do with a computer was impossibly geeky, and she certainly wouldn't touch one herself. Now she is 22 and a journalist and you couldn't pry her iBook out of her hands.
I have three other daughters, the youngest one is six. I hope they can have a choice of careers from the widest selection that is open to them, but there is this problem, I think, that we socialize girls to be more dependent on the opinion of their peers while boys apparently can sometimes be more independent. Rather than trying to convince girls that IT is social, non-stigmatized, etc., I feel we should be trying to get them to be more resistant to socal pressure. It isn't easy -- I didn't teach them that their friend's opinion is so important, but they pick it up anyway.
Schools can be helpful in changing this, but of course the real problem has to be recognized before solutions can be sought.
Why?
I won't let my daughter go into IT if I have any say. If you don't go into IT management, your options shrink when you get into your mid 40's and after. Plus, global competition is eating away at both salaries and opportunitees. Business and sales have more long-term opportunities and safer from cheap offshore labor. If she has the knack, that is where I will encourage her to go. IT is fine if you really dig it for technology's satisfaction alone; otherwise it is a dead-end wallet-drainer going the way of manufacturing.
Table-ized A.I.
I'll go ahead and respond again, just in case my argument got lost in there.
The point isn't that IT isn't hot. It is. The point is that high schools seem to push everyone towards it.
The result of this is that you get a lot of people going down a career path that they don't actually want to be on. You take some 9th grader, and tell them that the career that they are interested in is "nice," but today, we're going to explore the great future you could have in IT. Soon, everyone thinks that IT is the career for them, or, at least, that's the one that the smart kids get into, or that's what they're supposed to do, or that's where the money is.
I talk to all kinds of people who think that IT/Programming/Computer Science is a great, high paying career. That's why CS people should go into the field. The fact is, that the guy who went into business school, for the "to make money" reason, did better than the guy who went into Computer Science "to make money."
As for smarts, sure, you can be very smart and go into IT... or Political Science... or Business... or Architecture... or Music. Life as a musician may be hard... but we're not outsourcing all of our music to foreign countries. If that's what the kid wants to do, why are you telling them that they should go into Math/Science/IT.
For that matter, why are you telling women specifically to go into the field? I agree that there are fewer women in CS (and I wish that the ratio was better... it's hard finding a date in the department), but telling a bunch of high school women "you should go into IT to even out the ratio" is akin to saying "all of the jobs that you'd rather pursue are girly jobs, you need to go into IT to keep up with the boys."
You should just provide the best environment possible for kids to become the best whatever they want to be that they can be. You should get rid of sexism by not practicing sexism. You should get rid of racism by not practicing racism. You should let kids pursue a career path that they enjoy so they don't become 20-something slackers that don't have anything to do with their lives, because they foreclosed on the opportunities that they wanted to pursue, because you told them that all of the money was in computers.
Seriously, why would anyone want to encourage men OR women to enter a career path that is currently in decline? Between the budget cuts, increasing security problems, and constant outsourcing of jobs overseas, IT is becoming a MISERABLE profession to be in.
Hey, I'm all for women entering high skilled jobs, but I'd recommend going into law or management instead. That's where the money and future career growth is.
To further follow up on this... I went into Computer Science. I couldn't be happier with the field. I want to get my PhD, in fact. I'm in graduate school now, and I love it.
I, however, wanted to be in computer science when I was a kid. I spent much of high school learning about programming, robotics, and AI. I went to Jefferson Lab for their series of lectures aimed at high school students and loved every second of it.
So, this brings about the question. If a kid is going to Model UN, are you going to sit there and discourage them from studying the humanities because you want them in IT, or are you going to leave them alone and let them grow up to be an ambassador?
Encouraging technology skills development will help the province compete over the next several years as the world moves toward a global, knowledge-based economy, Doerksen said. "The skill requirements will continue to grow, and we just need more people in (technology) fields with skills and talents to make us more globally competitive."
I notice a weird hyprocracy. Countries overall seem to want more techies for national security and "global competative" reasons. Yet, they don't take care of the techies they have. They happily let them compete with Phd's making $3-an-hour in Cheapbuckistan, and then complain when not enough people go into tech.
Use the carrot, NOT the stick if you really want more techies. Draining the paychecks and opportunities via "free trade" is not going to encourage potential techies. One hand tries to create what the other hand is destroying. Typical of governments.
Table-ized A.I.
and a coordinator for my university's Women in Computer Science initiative, it's good to see more organizations target girls, specifically, in their recruitment efforts. There have been many studies that show that disproportionate numbers of girls "lose interest" in science, math, and computers as they progress through adolescence. This may be the new millenium, but there are still influences that turn girls off these areas of study.
While there may be physiological differences between men and women (and there are studies supporting that), no study has conclusively shown that women inherently lack the necessary skills to succeed in math, science, and engineering. Therefore, the reasons that girls choose English, Psychology, and Biology over Math, Computer Science, and Engineering (for example) are societal influences. There is a real male-oriented culture still in these areas, and people have two choices: to point to all the progress that has been made over the past century and the lip service that equality is given and say "Look! There's no problem at all!"... or to open their eyes and realize that discrimination and discouragement happens in subtle ways.
Adolescent girls, like adolescent boys, are delicate. A few off-color comments about women's ability in a field by a person in a position of authority, and a girl may, when the going gets tough in junior high, decide to go the safe route--and excel at writing, art, music, etc.
Unlike boys, I suppose?
Because, as we all know, young male geeks are always the most popular kids in high school. They're never social outcasts. They're never isolated. They always have girlfriends. They never EVER get bullied.
See the point?
In your rush to play knight in shining armor to these "victims" who don't feel "encouraged" enough, you've completely ignored the fact that boys have traditionally never been encouraged to get into these fields either. They've typically received harsher treatment, including physical violence, just for being geeks. But notice, they didn't give up, they didn't run off and major in business or medicine, no, they stuck it out.
Remember when Jon Katz tried to make a big deal out of bullying? Most Slashdotters would have nothing of it, even though many were themselves victims of bullying. At worst they might crack the occasional joke about it, but they seldom--if ever--complain.
Why can't women do the same? Why can't they just stop complaining, STFU, and do their work just as men do? Why do they always need special treatment, special privileges, and special protection?
I don't know. I think gender does play a considerable role, but not necessarily for the reasons usually mentioned.
You're absolutely right though about I.T. in general. I think the *only* reason people flocked to it a few years ago was this idea that you'd get a huge paycheck for doing relatively little actual work. (Everyone from construction workers to truck drivers were chomping at the bit to get their MCSE, A+, and so on - and to then free themselves from physical labor and boredom while doubling their take-home pay.) Unfortunately, this only lasted for a short while, at best - until the bottom fell out of the crazy dot-com era and Y2K panic subsided.
I.T. today is pretty much back to what it always was before the "general public" thought it was a career track worth pursuing... LOADS of PATIENCE and a stubborn desire to find solutions to frustrating little problems and glitches. It likely includes pulling some LONG hours, and/or researching things on your own time, off the clock, to find answers.
Male or female, this isn't usually most people's idea of a "rewarding/fun job" - but it fills the bill nicely for us long-time computer geeks who did this stuff all day long for free anyway, as a hobby/personal interest.
That's where the "gender issue" really comes in, IMHO. The vast majority of people I meet in I.T. today who are really sharp and do their job well have had an interest in computers for years before it became a career path for them. 99% of the time, women didn't have this interest - so when they get into I.T., it means they're only using knowledge they gained through school or study guides/courses. They're not applying a vast collection of real-world knowledge built up in their head from the time they were a young teen playing for hours each day with a home computer in their house, etc. etc.
Notice, we still call them "garbage men." That's because there are few, if any, garbage women. I live in a big city and I have yet to see a woman hauling bags into the back of some filthy trash truck.
Isn't this a problem? Isn't the fact that the extremely lucrative field of sanitation is completely male dominated something that needs to be corrected? Or maybe under representation of women in a field is only a problem if society views that field favorably. If it's a dirty job, let the men do it, huh?
I don't know about anyone else, but this sort of targeted campaign gets on my nerves. I would much rather have people getting in to the industry because they are passionate about it, and actually *care*, as opposed to because of some external trapping (e.g. the ever popular race/creed/gender/religion gambit). At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if your skin is purple and you only speak in anagrams; what does matter is if you're good at what you do, and if you love what you do.
No, I'm not denying that the workplace is probably different if you're a woman, or whatever else, but I am saying that a) there's no reason for it to be and b) any employer that actually rejects talented women/etc. or treats them unfairly isn't going to last particularly long at this point anyway.
"My heart is in the work." - Andrew Carnegie
After reading this thread I just have to wonder, what kind of boring places do you people work at!
Everyone seems to think that everything relating to the computer field is network management or coding alone through the night. Engineering of all kinds are usually very social, it involves working together with diverse, almost allways interantional teams of people and very little of it is actually the alone time on the computer writing code, specifications or blueprints.
I work in the automotive field writing software for the embedded systems in the car. On a normal day I discuss design decissions with my work mates, troubleshoot problems with the hardware guys and/or discuss feature request with the customer. I probably write more e-mail than code and I definately spend more times in meetings than coding alone.
I would have thought that was the norm rather than the stereotypical jolt drinking hacker, but aparantly I was wrong.
I guess my advice to women fearing that the CS fields are too antisocial should make sure they go inte SW engineering.
That's because you are a guy and you don't see the stigma because it doesn't affect you.
As a woman in IT, I deal with:
Not all guys do this...I actually work with a bunch of guys who see me as one of them. Not "one of the guys", but as a techie who has something to contribute.
But they act suprised when I point out other people's behavior...they don't notice because it doesn't happen to them.
The way to get more women in the field is to get the message out that you don't have to have a certain set of sexual organs to do this sort of work. This message needs to go to young girls as well as the stupid boys that already work in IT.
or encourage them to fields that actually NEED people in: math and sciences. Wonder why you keep seeing doctors from India in our hopitals, clinics, and interviewed on Discovery shows about molecular biology? It's because we americans are so brainwashed by our MTV that we have to import people for the trades that really matter. No offense against them, its a win-win situation, they get some great experience, often great perks like training and so on, and their native country gets great doctors and researchers when they return.