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Women Leaving I.T.
Deinhard writes "NewsFactor is running a story on the exodus of women from the I.T. field. According to the article, women made up 41% of the I.T workforce in 1996. That number dropped to 35% by 2002 and that "the downward spiral is gaining momentum." While this is certainly a concern, what are the overall effects of such a mass departure?"
Why is this necessarily a concern? I'm not against the presence of women in I.T., but I don't see that it's a problem if the proportion of female I.T. workers declines. This is just sexist scaremongering, along the lines of the GNAA.
Isn't this just another baby boomer generation leaving the office to have kids?
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
slashdot \neq IT
More seriously there are a number of possible reasons for this. I would hazord a guess that a large number of women entered IT for the sake of the $ and now that the $ is harder to get they are moving to other fields.
Not that men didnt do this, but if you look at the major universities they have essentially been bribing women to go into technical fields (engineering, cs , etc.) so I would hazord a guess that those efforts recruited people more interested int he $ than the love of the field.
Of course I could be entirely of base.
My favourite "IT and gender" anecdote occurred shortly after we opened our cybercafe. My French colleague had just graduated in IT, and had a very... well, French... view of what women were for. One morning a platinum blonde dressed entirely in black walks through the door and asks what sort of computers we have. Colleague starts his "well the computers are those little boxes over there" speech, she says "no, what C compilers do you have available, and can I use telnet from here?" Sound of jaw hitting tiled floor... It turned out that she was studying IT in Paris. She pops in about once a year, and last time I saw her she was working for a bank in London. She says she has a lot of female colleagues there, but that there are very few women in French IT.
Virtually serving coffee
IT would not be the only sector where women are less succesfull at getting to higher ranker positions. When push comes to shove, it's the lower ranking employees who get fired first. Not because the are more expensive to the company (because they are not but because they have less clout to defend their jobs. Whimpy nerds too get fired sooner than masculine bigmouthed moneyguzzlin managers. If you still think it is because of pure sexism, think again. I think it is because the selection favours masculine behaviour, not males themselves.
...
And to put things in more perspective: I prefer Female managers over Male ones. I am very sexist at that because I think women have generaly more empathy and people skills, things a good manager needs.
As for masculine behaviour: would posting your holy opinion on slashdot be typical masculine or typical feminine behaviour? So why are there so little women here?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
here's some figures for you to dispute.
I'm a CS undergrad at purdue. Our CS undergrad program, as of the start of last semester had 40 women in it. 24 of them are graduating. it's estimated that 6-10 at most are coming in, by figures I've heard. This is down from 10-15% of the department 4 years ago.
This is in a curriculum which has 800 or so undergrads, if I remember correctly.
I'm currently in a 300-level class (a major requirement, no less) that has 80 students, none of whom are female. Last semester I was in a database class that had 50 students, with a single woman in it. The semester before, I was in a class with 150 people, and a grand total of 4 women, and I know that after that class one of them changed majors out of computer science.
As of the end of this semester, 20-26 out of 800+. Those are very discouraging numbers, for women in CS. And the IT curricula in the school of technology aren't faring much better, I'm told.
There's sexism, and there's realism. The reality is that there is a significant gender difference in leadership styles. Men tend to be authoritarian leaders, women tend to be more democratic. There's a time and a place for both, and one's not universally better than the other.
Your preference in leadership probably reflects the way you work best. Sexism would be "I prefer female managers because they're more fun to look at".
When I worked for a game development company in the US it was extremely rare to meet a female developer, occasionally an artist or level designer. My company had a single female - the office manager.
:-)
When I came to Korea I was amazed at the ratio, it's approaching 40-50% in my new company. And not just artists but programmers, sysadmins etc.
It's not unusual to see a girl on the subway studying a cisco, C++ or Linux book. There's definitely no sense of uncoolness being in IT - it's not even seen as geeky, just a good career.
So in Korea, only old women are leaving IT
Fellow Purdue Slashdotter here....
As a student in the school of technology, I agree that women are drastically outnumbered along with leaving the program(s) entirely.
I've noticed a general flow of kids going for a technical education here though. They start off in a program like engineering or CS, fall back to school of tech., and lastly end up in either management (or some derivative of business) or as an education major.
there's no question that the interest simply isn't there.
... WHY is the interest not there?
The question is
Now, a "sexist pig" (or Harvard president) would suggest that this is strictly an innate difference. Someone a little more educated in the field of psychology (specifically gender studies) would be more prone to say that this is a socialized difference.
Women aren't electing to be programmers (or any of the numerous other IT positions out there), just like they aren't swarming to engineering and physics and chemistry. Nobody's saying they should be forced into jobs they don't want. But there's an indication of a problem when women as a whole are being indoctrinated with the idea that they CAN'T pursue these jobs, when they are capable of doing them.
More to the point, this isn't a gender difference that's always around. Women don't abandon their interests in science and technology until they're in their teens, as a rule. Ask 20 fourth grader girls, they all want to be scientists and doctors and executives and astronauts. Ask 20 9th grade girls, 18 of them will want to be thinner and more attractive, and have substantially no long-term goals beyond their appearances.
The problem is "why is the interest disappearing when these girls start puberty?".
However, people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement working on computers are better at computers than those who do not, and people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement are far more likely to be men.
Although geeks are very important to IT, they often lack qualities that are very important to IT. In my IT department I can think of a very good example of a male geek who has enough certs to choke a horse and a female non-geek with just a low interest in persuing off-hours IT-for-fun kind of stuff. The woman is better.
The male is an egotistical blowhard who doesn't finish projects completely or on time. His projects are poorly documented. But, heck, he can answer almost any question off the top of his head about the interals of the servers and services he runs.
The female is demure and often has to say " I'll need to check on that." However, her projects work, come in on time, have excellent documentation and can be used much more easily by the whole company.
So, she's not as smart, IT-wise, as the guy. But who's the better IT worker?
TW
i can come up with several reasons why my career is taking me ever more into the business side of the aisle, away from the geek cubes::
First, I've still never met another female software architect. People like to work with people who are like them. It gives them more to talk about than just "the code". It's hard to make friends at work when you're surrounded by mostly men. Everyone thinks you're "more than friends".
Second, IT managers tend to have less "soft skills" than their business-side counterparts. Face it, we live in a world where women do the lion's share of child-raising. If my manager isn't sensitive about the time I *need* to be away from work cos school is closing early, then I'm going to be less happy on the job.
Third, IT managers tend to be male (as are most IT workers). Managers like to promote people who are like them. It's been hard for me in some organizations to envision a good career path.
Lastly, it sucks sometimes to be in meetings and be the only woman there. Yes, that can be a point of pride, but it's not always a comfortable feeling.
I hope that you're not serious, anyone who would leave their chosen career field because someone else didn't think that they could cut it is a very weak person indeed. I really hope that you'd give women more credit than this.
After watching my mom go back to school and work her ass off for what she wanted I'm offended when I hear statements like this.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
I'm not sure that I'd say women are "better in less geeky programming, where it is more business oriented," but I would say that (in general) women I've known tend to prefer that end of the field. Maybe it's a desire to not have to spend their evenings learning new languages and technologies; maybe it's just less of an interest in pure technology and a predisposition toward seeing tech as just a tool for getting other things done; maybe it's something else entirely. But in my experience, the pattern does seem to exist. That generalization doesn't apply to me. I strongly prefer the "more geeky" hackerish stuff that requires keeping up with tech; it appeals to my curiosity about how things work. Nevertheless, the generalization has affected my career, because it's a perception many of my managers have had over the years. To be fair, my career does span two decades, and I started out in the southeast US, an area not well-known for progressive attitudes towards women in the work force. Lately, I've seen MUCH less of this, though perhaps it's because I'm now on the West Coast.
The experience I gained for myself in school included UNIX file systems kernel work, IBM mainframe data communications and systems-programming-level assembler, writing an ancient commercial computer game, etc. I spent my vacations paying my own way to Usenix UNIX research conferences and my spare student cash on a Compuserve connection and the PC Pursuit service (cheap long distance for calling BBSes) in the pre-Internet days. When I got out into the real world: "no, we don't think you're right for this systems position, how about this COBOL application development group?", (I was far better, and more experienced, at OS internals in C or assembly than I was at COBOL) "we need someone with your expertise in user interface design," (huh? I had none), etc. An astonishing percentage of the time, companies have steered me toward work in business applications even when I demonstrated more aptitutde and interest in other areas of computing. One choice quote: "Oh, honey, you don't want to spend your days lugging 50 pound servers around." Reality: I have found it frustrating to work in the same business apps development environment for very long. After a very short period of "learning the environment", my work consisted largely of tediously lining fields up on grids and populating database schema, NOT learning about technology or improving/challenging my dev skills (companies specifically didn't want new technologies used in their apps because then, horrors, my coworkers would have to LEARN them!). At one place of employment, a small VAR, I referred a (less technical) male friend to my employer. Before I knew it, he was the organization's official customer engineer (a job function that previously occupied half my day), getting to do customer system configurations, on-site support, etc. I was only trotted out as a problem solver when customers had trouble with their installations, complained and specifically requested my presence, having heard through the grapevine that there was a girl at the company who really knew her stuff even though the company insisted my friend was their best techie. Other women I know have had similar experiences.
It wasn't until I hung out my own shingle and had right of refusal over EVERY project, that I was able to lead my career away from that.
This is applicable to the slashdot crowd because I'd like to encourage folks to take an open mind toward the women you encounter in tech. Some of us have wired our homes with X-10 gear, read OS source code with breakfast and yes, even have a history of butting heads with school admins over learning activities they insisted
Well, I'm sorry you're offended, but if people constantly get brushed off there's often a limit to their patience.
Not everyone is as tenacious as your mother. Having work done for you and having people treat you like you're a "special person" is a pretty bad impression, and if a woman wasn't set on an IT career that could turn her off.
Hell, idiot geek students almost turned me to another major. When it looks like you will have to probably spend the rest of your life with people you can't stand, you start looking for alternatives.
-mkb
've noticed a general flow of kids going for a technical education here though. They start off in a program like engineering or CS, fall back to school of tech., and lastly end up in either management (or some derivative of business) or as an education major.
I can't remember where I read this, so I can't cite my source, but most men who drop out of engineering (either to take something else or to drop out of school entirely) have averages in the D's or below. Most women who drop out have averages in the A's and B's.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's a sort of mild autism that makes people a whole lot better at math-related fields. From this little we understnd about autism, it could well have a sex bias. I'd certainly like to know the answer myself, but as the president of Harvard demonstrated, one can't even *ask* the question in Academia today.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I assume that this is the real cause as well, actually.
For example, during the dot-com era, some of the bigger consulting companies were crash-training whole classes of non-technical people to do IT. Can a former art or literature major with 3 months of technical training develop quality software? Generally not, but we're talking about companies like Anderson or PwC that don't mind solving problems by throwing more bodies at them, since that equates to more they can bill.
When the tech market took a downturn, a lot of these people got forced out of the market. Some discovered they had a real talent or love for IT and stuck with it through the thin periods, but most went back to whatever it was they wanted to do in the first place.
I think this kind of crowd was proportionaly more women than men, and their departure is what the statistics are really showing. I've met some great women in the IT field who do it for much the same reasons as most of the men you'd meet in the field, and those women aren't going anywhere.
how many in IT are 25 to 35 now? Because that's the age when many people have kids now. My wife was in IT till our son was born. She's staying home with him. Although not as many moms stay home while the kids are in school, a lot more stay home with them for the first year or so.
About 45% are home atleast a year -- "55 percent of women who gave birth between July 1999 and July 2000 returned to the labor force within a year of having their babies". "Of the 41.8 million kids under 15 who lived with two parents last year, more than 25 percent had mothers who stayed home, according to a Census Bureau report."
Some might think this is a bad thing. But "You're not how much money you have in the bank."