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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."
WTH are they smoking?
Now, as an alpha geek (Slashdot on Saturday? guilty) I'd be the first to say that geeky isn't something to avoid or be ashamed of. But trying to claim that something very obviously geeky isn't, won't help get more women into IT.
Scale the H1-B program back to pre-Clinton levels.
... actions which tell rational college students to seek other fields.
Women respond to market supply and demand just like men do. If the wages are high enough, women will go into the field.
The guest worker program expansions have depressed wages artificially and given employers incentives to not hire Americans and to outsource
Want more women in IT? Get rid of the guest worker program.
And as a guy student at Georgia Tech, I definately hope that more women start studying the sciences..
We'd all like to believe that those 'myths' *are* in fact myths, and that the stigma associated with IT careers is unwarranted.
But I think there probably is more than a kernel of truth to them. IT careers, at least the ones I've had, aren't in fact very social. Aside from the not-so-infrequent game of foosball, there was not a heck of a lot of interaction going on. Let's face it, IT-centric jobs are not exactly hubs of social activity, so why pretend otherwise?
Certainly there will be much anectodal evidence to illustrate the converse, but on the whole I think it is difficult to discredit the assertion that IT workplaces aren't as socially-friendly as many other fields. If what women are looking for is human interaction, we should not mislead them down the path to computer-centric work.
It behooves us to be honest about what we do.
Not as irresponsible as emcouraging people to go into the hospitality, retail, or fast food industry.
I'm currently teaching computers and programming to middle school students.
Fortunately, the students are quite motivated and the girls perform as well as the boys (and in some cases better).
It's sad to see that as they move into high school, the pressure to conform and be cool forces girls (and boys for that matter) into certain well-defined areas.
It try to encourage all my students to excel in computer skills, but I'm only one voice in a cacophanty of voices (TV, movies, etc.).
What's the solution? Any ides? Anyone?
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
You are forgetting that the reason so many PEOPLE are unemployed in IT is because people started jumping into the Tech bandwagon during the bubble-- even if they didn't have the necessary skills or qualifications for the job.
Don't talk about things you don't know about.
To encourage someone to become a help desk employee is a bit premature at age 14 imo.
One of the strange things about all of this is that in the US anyway more than 50% of all undergraduate degrees in mathematics are awarded to women. So it is not a case of the aptitude or interest in the quantitative world not being there.
There is some other exclusion mechanism in operation. And I think that women are not going to fight it when there are other ways they can express their talent without having to contend with this mechanism.
So what this Microsoft executive is trying to do is wrong headed. You can't get people interested by pushing. There has to be an effort to remove any forces that discourage people from considering a vocation.
I am in a programming class, and in this 30+ student class, there is exactly one girl.
I don't know if it's social conditioning or genetics that makes girls uninterested in IT. Whatever it is, I don't think we'll ever see an equal ratio of men and women.
As for the geeky thing, I think it only applies to men. Let's not kid ourselves -- despite the internet's ubiquity, the IT profession is still very geeky, but it doesn't seem to affect women's social standing in the same way. Women will always have a bunch of horny men chasing after them. Guys don't have that luxury.
It's rather imperative that young women get an early jump into the world of technology. The earlier, the better. IT is a very tough world, and it's extremely competitive, particularly in the realm of programming. I believe (note: personally - not backed by science) that girls develop faster intellectually during jr. high and early high school. The earlier the better I say to get the jump.
I can only attribute my own success in the IT industry from being exposed to computers and getting involved with them as they began to take root in the very early 80s. My dad got me a Vic20 when I was 8, and I was writing programs soon thereafter. I went through the whole gambit of OS's and languages and whatever software I could get my hands on. Because I grew up real poor, I was lucky to use what was provided by the schools, so it gave me a wide range of exposure.
By the time I got to college, I had developed chronic pain, and couldn't do work study in the cafeteria (why is that always the first job??) - so I picked up a job because I knew MSDOS and WP5.0. I was a consultant for a lab at college! And they put me through 2 weeks of school at HP!! *woooo* Not long after that, I changed my major and I was on my way to where I am today. Then I transferred schools to a better program.
Coming up through the ranks in the relatively new field of Information Technology has been fraught with a lot of challenges. Not only is it you against everyone else who is better trained, smarter, or more motivated.. but there truly is a battle of the sexes in IT. Particularly on the network systems operations side of the house. Come on... you know it and see it every day. Sometimes it's caused major issues, but it all has depended on the environment and the level of professionality within it. It's *tough* when you are faced with working 75 - 90 hours a week, and then have to go home and raise a family and care for a home. But we do it, we do it gratefully, because it's afforded us girls a chance to stand on equal footing for once. At least I did.
All of that being said, I fully believe that there should be strong internship and mentoring programs for all young people getting involved with IT, especially those coming in from the bootcamp schools like Microskills, or whatever. While they may have the knowledge and motivation - there is an awful lot more to the IT culture than knowing how to install Windows 2003 or Linux. I sure know that I could have and still do need a good mentor to help me through tough situations that arise in the day to day operations of IT. Some things, I couldn't get through on my own, and left me high and dry, not because of any other reason that my own dumb ass.
Finally, I have to say that 14 years in the industry, I've gone from a flunky consultant bossing around lunkheads in business school to a sr. systems engineer doing huge infrastructure implementations and upgrades, project management, and policy design & implementation. And every 72 hour stretch, all nighter, business trip, massive outage, tear, sweat, blood and torn muscle has been worth it to be where I am today. And I couldn't have done it without the love and dreams that I started building as a child.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
Allow me to present this as an opinion:
The growing influx of technological culture is already demanding more technical competency from society as a whole than the majority of its individuals can provide.
I think the unemployment issue arises from insufficient management with technical competency. The IT workforce lacks a familiar liason to traditional business (think PHB types) that would enable effective utilization of IT in the scale that would provide for a more rigorous application of IT as a profession.
To summarize, I'm saying there's no shortage of demand for skilled IT workers, just that the field is immature in such a way that the industry is still highly specialized and that not everyone has "caught up" enough to apply existing IT workers effectively to the variety of daily work that needs to be done in every business.
It has been my experience that the ladies are extremely unrepresented in IT. The sausage fest has gone on too long!
As for the unexmployment issue, perhaps there should be more focus on developing specially trained IT management to put all these "unemployed" IT folk to work.
"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."
I don't think that's a gender issue at all. The sheer mind numbing boredom of a lot of IT is what's kept me (a male) from entertaining the possibility of going in that direction myself, despite the fact that I've been using computers (macs in particular) literally since I was in diapers. I'm not really qualified to speak about differing genders' attitudes on different fields of work, and I think any generalization in that regard will certainly be flawed, but I think it all comes down to the fact that, and I hate to put it this way, the IT biz isn't really many people's dream job anymore. The promise of guarenteed riches evaporated, making it merely a tolerable and necessary profession earning a living wage. It doesn't inspire lust anymore, sorry to say.
Yup...
OH? What part of Microsoft are YOU in that's not exciting? I work on the main campus and it's much, much more exciting than I ever expected it could be (and definitely more exciting than any place I've worked in years).
For example, within 6 months of employment, my released project was a subject of discussion on Slashdot. (Really, it's 2005, and Microsoft technology is not all about NEAR and FAR pointers, MFC and "NIH" attitude any more.)
The IT folks have all sorts of state of the art hardware to play with, and the stakes of "getting it right" are very high, because if Microsoft doesn't, people aren't inclined to give the company much of a break.
Most girls in high school consider working at the Gap to be the holy grail of employment.
Mind you, most guys in high school consider working at McDonalds to be the holy grail of employment.
In short, high school is a fucked up place that has no bearing on reality. And the people in that society aren't very good at making life-changing decisions.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
You point out that IT people would ideally be more people-friendly than the Average Joe. Interestingly enough, one data recovery service actually employs a psychologist with no computer training to help calm distraught callers. She helps provide some of the people-soothing skills necessary to get the hysterical callers to calm down enough so they can describe their problem to tech support. Wouldn't it be even better if the tech support could provide that human touch? Why employ two seperate people? We can argue all day about whether women really, truly empathize more than men as the common belief goes. But there is definitely a need for IT people of either sex to be more understanding and friendly than they are. I know I've talked with some people on the phone who are borderline rude. Please, no replies here about how it's a thankless job (I'm getting to that below) and I should be understanding of how they treat me.
People in IT get treated pretty badly sometimes. Think about it: they work long and hard for little to no thanks. No one walks up to their sysadmin and says "Hey, thanks for all you do. My system worked perfectly today!" No, the only time co-workers take notice of them is when things are going badly. In many ways, IT and sysadmin-ing in general is a thankless job. Now, I have no idea whether women are more able to put up with this kind of situation or not. But I can see where it would take a very unique kind of person to feel happy in such a job. And I see no reason why only men would have the necessary outlook on life, their career, and their role within a company.
By the way, I happen to know a female sysadmin who works out at the local gym. This is no typical-looking geek girl. She is really damn sexy. We're talking blond, super-fit, and breast implants. I mean everyone in the gym watches her with envious eyes (she's married). And when I was in grad school, the syadmin in our department was this asian cutie who was so pretty she made your teeth hurt! So the idea that only unpopular girls who don't care about their appearance go into IT is definitely not true.
GMD
watch this
On the one hand I agree entirely that one shouldn't just encourage girls for the sake of etc (although I might argue that the mainstream media have previously been known to act to encourage a given gender in these things *cough*). On the other hand, at the risk of falling foul of 'the plural of anecdote is not data', I've often heard from female friends of mine that they were interested in all those geeky topics like computers and physics and whatnot, but consider themselves to have grown out of it. Usually when I hear that it's expressed in tones of mild surprise that the same thing hasn't happened to me, as though it's a developmental flaw to be in one's twenties and still a physicist.
Thinking about the education we shared, I can see how that way of thinking can have come about. Speaking objectively, there is something of the obsessive in computing (or hi-fi, or photo, or cars) with which it is not easy to come to terms. Lots of squabbling over product codes, feature sets and relative merits. I can also see that a little positive encouragement during that time could have made a difference. So I wonder if this initiative is merely trying to encourage girls (rather than both sexes) as such, or just trying to help like-minded girls compensate for the tendancy to be put off by the apparent childishness of these things, to get past the public face of the hobby and see the substance of the career.
In a way it can make sense. The XP Pro partition is kept for serious stuff (such as learning ASP). The XP Home partition is for time wasting, installing games and so on. Lots of people here dual boot between a Windows OS and Linux, using one for games and one for work - is it truly such a silly idea to dual boot between two Windows OS with the same ideas in mind?
Why do you need to encourage anybody into a particular field in high school?
Well, probably some woman looked at the chart of gender ratios in various careers and said, "whoa.. look at the gender gap in IT... let's 'work on that'". And off they go.
I studied both engineering and CS in college. The make-up of the classes was quite interesting.
Engineering: maybe 30% girls. Both guys and girls were mostly normal-looking, outgoing, friendly, and also quite bright and a bit nerdy. A few "dorks" but not too much. They washed regularly. Star Trek T-shirts were in the minority.
CS: frightening. Very few girls. Everybody either grossly overweight, underweight, or suffering from strange emotional problems. It's quite a sight to see a pimply-faced geek with man-teats hitting on an overweight chick wearing an uwashed "I Grok Spock" T-shirt. *shiver*.
My conclusion was that CS was still something that isn't taught well. Too new of a field. You just have to kinda be good at it on your own. And *on average* I think girls don't get into that kind of thing on their own. (Yes, I know *YOU* were hacking OpenBSD before your first period, but *YOU* are exceptional). So in CS I saw mostly self-taught males who did computing as a hobby.
When CS becomes something that can be a little more "teachable", I bet you'll see the ratios even out. Any bright person of any gender can be a good engineer once they are taught, I think the same is true for a programmer or a sysadmin, but the teaching isn't there yet. Things like, e.g., Design Patterns are a step in the right direction. When I did my first programming projects nobody told me about design patterns, unit testing, or even *how* to program. They just gave me a spec and a due date and some useless information on "big-O notation". Only now after being out of college for nearly a decade have I actually gone back and re-learned how to program using agile methods, design patterns, unit testing, "pragmatic programming", etc.
I'm a ten+ year professional with experience in every thing from C++, 4 year .Net, 7 years Java and it took my 9 months of hard looking to find a job. All of the people in in the industry I know look to me for answeres to difficult problems they are trying to resolove. So don't tell me "any qualified professional" should be able to find a job. Most employer's right now seem to be fishing for GOD and when they find a GOD (me) they don't believe it or are intimidated by your skills. In fact I had to dumb down my skill set just to get a piss ant coding position.
"Some issues (the girls) brought up included fears that their friends will think (working in IT) is a geeky thing to do
....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."
If you're more concerned about what your friends think of your career, then you simply don't have the drive or ambition necessary for it and you should go find a nice hostessing or GAP job to occupy your time until you find some sucker to take care of you.
and that IT work is not very social
It's a job. If you want social - be a hairdresser. Why do women think that your choice of work should be based on how little work you actually have to do? It's work. It's not a popularity contest or a social club. Go be a trophy wife if you're not willing to put in the hard work.
Again. Stop being so fucking preoccupied with what other people think. If these are your concerns, you're a weak fucking person and should stop blaming the "male dominated work place".
The simple fact of it is that men, unlike women, have to work from pre-adulthood until (usually) their death. Work is not an option. We don't have the option to stay home with children, be a housewife, go to school for eight years, find Mr. Right, settle down and let him take care of us. We don't flit around for 15 years, wasting our money and ignoring our careers while we prance around town and travel and party. We don't live with our parents until we're 25. We work. We work hard. We make sacrifices. We sacrifice our time, energy, dreams, social life, family life and even our HEALTH. If you aren't willing to work as hard and take the same risks as men, then stop complaining.
The fact is that men work harder and make more money, BUT WHILE WOMEN WORK LESS, THEY HAVE A BETTER QUALITY OF LIFE. Did you know that 94% of all deaths in the workplace are MEN? Did you know that women don't actually live an average of 7 years longer than men? Until the turn of the 20th century, men and women were only one year apart in their lifespan expectations. Men and women actually have the same biological lifespan. IT IS THE WORK ENVIRONMENT, STRESS AND RISKS THAT CAUSE THE MORTALITY RATE OF MEN TO BE SEVEN YEARS LESS THAN WOMEN.
So quit your fucking bitching - or do something about it. Stop whining about how it's "too hard" and "no fun" and expecting people to just hand shit out to you because you're a "minority" (woman).
With respect to the IT field, if you're not willing to move for a job then you deserve to be out of work.
Bingo. You just nailed the gist of the problem. Women are not willing to move as much as men are. Men take the chances, risks and stress of things like moving whereas women will turn down opportunities instead of moving. If you don't make sacrifices, you'll never make it in a well-paying career.
I talk to all kinds of people who think that IT/Programming/Computer Science is a great, high paying career.
Which it is -- compared to most things. The median household income is something 45,000 for native born families. If you have two computer professionals in the family with the kind of jobs that require degrees, chancs are you're doing better than most. A lot better.
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."
I wouldn't necessarily assume that, without real data to back it up. It is true, the guys who make bg bucks are more likely to be B-school types, but I think that people who set out to make lots of money get a lot more variance in their results than people who set out to have an engineering career. Engineers as a group are usually in comfortable circumstances, and good engineers do make a bit more than poor ones, but nothing in comparison to their true relative value. People who set out to get rich sometimes get rich, sometimes are poor, and (not surprisingly) by in large get medianish or slightly better than medianish results.
If getting rich was as easy as simply setting your sights on B-school, more guys would do it. True, I've known a few guys who set out to make money and succeeded, although at least one of them is currently under investigation. But I've also known guys who have set out just to do something they love to do who've also ended up making a lot of money. But they'd have been winners even if they didn't luck out.
In any case, if you enjoy IT, want to make a salary that by reasonable standards is comfortable, and don't mind that there isn't a pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow, you're in the right profession.
If you hate IT, and are in it to make big bucks (odd the first time I typed that it came out "bugs" not "bucks"), well, you made a bad career choice. You could get lucky with stock options and IPO. Some guys did. Some guys also won the lottery, but that's not a career path.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
FWIW, I seem to remember reading an article a few years ago about a study that correllated job satisfaction and over-all happiness of IT workers with their Meyers-Briggs classifications. IIRC, the study found that people are extremely unlikely to be happy in an IT career unless their Meyers-Briggs classification is xNxP (only the second and fourth were meaningful.)
Approximately 25% of males fall into that category while only 5% of females do.
I remember testing out their hypothesis by showing an online Meyers-Briggs test to a bunch of co-workers. The vast majority of my co-workers were INTPs, a few were INFPs and myself and another guy were ENTPs. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who enjoys working in IT and isn't xNxP.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
In Sweden, a couple gets to -split- a year
of Family Leave (paid at 90% of the salary
of person taking it - on a particular day)
If the man doesn't participate in the 1st-
year's child minding (after the woman goes
back to work), they lose some of the bene-
fit.
A man almost -has- to look after the kids;
in Sweden, it's not really an option.
(The women wouldn't want it any other way,
nor would a Real Man(tm), either, I think)
I have however noticed that if any one of them ever runs into a problem in their code or admining in general, they generally have half a dozen guys fighting to give them a hand.
;-)
No joke, at my school the cs program is quite lacking for women. With very few exceptions, the attractive girls either drop out of cs or learn to get guys to do their programming for them. And there are guys stumbling over eachother to help them. This was the case with my exgirlfriend. I refused to play that game. Somehow I still managed to attract her, don't know how or why.
Anyway I remember sometimes she would come over to "help" me with homework we both had. Less then an hour into our first assignment she was calling up her guy friends asking how to do the assignment. It was in Java which I didn't know at the time, but knowing c++ is easy to pick up. I remember one time she calls up some guy and then *hands me the phone* I was like WTF??? I turned in every single program late in that class, but I was smitten. How could I turn down her "help" especially with what would always happen after programming
No joke, a little while ago she IMed me asking how classes work, and what they do. She is a fucking senior in CS. Thanks for bringing down the value of the whole program...
I don't know why she broke up with me. As comic book guy says, "There are so many valid reasons, but why?" I don't buy her 'no time' excuse. Maybe she wanted my source code (which I refuse to give up, fuck getting caught cheating). Maybe I wasn't like the frat boys who were so eager to please her by doing her work for her. I was ready to teach her to program but she wasn't ready to learn. I would really love to meet a true geek girl. I know they exist, but where are they? If I can't find one in CS then where? Actually I would be happy with a non-geek girl who likes me for me and doesn't ask me to do her homework for her.
As a side note... I'm so lonely.
I am a highschool senior girl working as an IT intern. I wouldn't consider myself particularly popular or geeky. I love my job, but I don't think that it is something that I will do my whole life, I have other plans for the future (involving science and CS). One of my favorite aspects is the social aspect... talking to the other people I work with. If girls don't like IT because it is not social... I'd say that being the only girl working with a bunch of guys is a great way to meet guys. And not all of them are geeky.
In my experience, girls/women just don't see IT and CS as "fun". Part of the focus needs to be on figuring out what young people find interesting about computers and guide them in that direction. Systems administration? Probably not. Maintaining their own Linux box so they can use free software like inkscape and the Gimp, or have their own website they have total control over? Now you're talkin' our language.
I remember 9th grade - that 8086 my parents set up so mom could dial into the mainframe and work from home. Icky black screen with white text. I ran through all the text-based "games" and got bored of it. Fortran in college didn't do much to help matters. Computers didn't get fun until much later when I figured out I could do pretty stuff.
A young woman I know decided to take a Basic class in high school, thinking it was an easy A for some credit she needed. It wasn't easy. And, mostly, it wasn't fun. We spent a lot of time helping her figure out her assignments without actually doing them for her. One night, she was polishing up an assignment early, so I did a quick hunt and gave her some hints on how to tweak her interface with color and ascii art (animated even). All of a sudden, the whole thing was kinda fun. The next day in class, all the geeks were around her monitor, oohing and ahhing. Not only did she have fun decorating her program with faerie dust and roses (or something like that), but the social aspect of the situation improved drastically - she had been an outsider in the class. The class of 20 or so kids were all guys, except her, and part of the math-geek clique surrounding the instructor. The instructor's reaction was disappointing - he didn't understand why she'd decorated her program, and wasn't impressed... bad move dude.
Part of the key to getting kids interested is exposure on several levels - to folks they can identify with, to activities that tweak their interests and are applicable to other aspects of their lives, and actually using and maintaining their own computers. Kids who could become "geeks" often don't because they're intimidated, bored, perceive it's a clique they can't fit into, or simply never given a chance.
Hairdressers are the happiest workers, while civil servants, social workers and architects are the unhappiest, a new poll shows.r eer.happiness/
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/02/25/ca
Dr Cynthia McVey, a psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, added: "Blue-collar workers like plumbers get the daily satisfaction of going home having seen a practical job well done, like the installation of a boiler.
"White-collar workers are part of a chain and often don't see results of their labour and so are more prone to stress."
http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=213162005
"Smart girls will divorce themselves from the stupid social herds"
Smart girls will do no such thing, socially inept girls will do that. The herd or pack instinct which seems to kick in at puberty is useful if you understand it.
"Most males are pigs".
Eh, no they are male humans, the desire to have sex as often as possible and with as many partners as possible is a bog standard part of the human male design. If you don't like the way male and/or female sexuality is expressed by young men or women then talk to the parents.
"It takes a special breed of woman to be interested in IT or engineering. I imagine the male equivilant of such a breed would be a man that would be interest in interior design."
I take it that you mean gay?
"women are, in general, better at multi-tasking."
And generally poorer at focusing on the task at hand.
"Women communicate "better"."
Well they certainly communicate *more*. But if more were better then supersizing would be a good thing, wouldn't it.
Anyway MS are going about it the wrong way. If you want to get women into IT, tell them that the job will naturally put them in regular contact with lots of high status males (and no, I'm not talking about other IT staff, they don't count as high status).
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
A degree in computer science generally isn't a degree in hardware, or in Microsoft Windows.
Some very good programmers I work with have no ability to use a computer above and beyond the compiler, and a few unix commands. The ability to work with end users, gather requirements and turn them into a working system are distinct from the ability to understand why MS made a "Pro" and "Home" version of Windows XP (something that still isn't clear to me).
I'll grant you, there are a few people who understand everything from the boot manager, to device drivers, to HTML coding, to Java coding. Those people are exceptional, and I don't think that makes other people "bad" or "dumb"
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Remember that "sexist" Harvard president who talked about innate abilities of women awhile back?
One of the things he discussed was that being a stay-at-home parent for a year or two may significantly impair a person's career. Since mothers tend to be the stay at home parent, guess who's career suffers? Imagine quitting your job in 1999 to raise your baby, and re-entering the IT field in 2004? You'd have missed the release of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, a linux kernel or two, new stuff on the Cisco end, new security issues, etc.
When questioned about why women in Europe had more success in there careers, he mentioned that the shorter European work year may be a factor. (Makes sense -- imagine working crunch weeks in software -- a man is expected to sacrifice his family during that time, a woman is not.
(He also did ask for more research on innate abilities, which is why he was called sexist. He questioned if some fields don't appeal to women. He might have a point -- parts of the IT industry seems to require solitary behavior and an obsessive streak. Maybe more men then women are inclined that way.)