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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?"
... of participants here this has long since happened.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
There were women working in IT???? Where?
Easy, stigma of the geek. Kill the stigma of IT and the geek and IT will attract more Women. Meanwhile IT will scare away just as many Women as any other geek...
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.
While this is certainly a concern, what are the overall effects of such a mass departure?
Less sex on the job?
Oh, wait, we're talking about IT right?
Nevermind.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
How often is it though that you see an actual vagina-and-boobs bearing person in the IT field? Their scarcity may be scaring them off (No pun intended). It's simply a male-dominating field, considering some studies have shown that males have better grasps on logic and reason than woman, who tend to think more emotionally. That's obviously not the case with ALL women (See: Hilary Clinton) though, and I shouldn't be taken stereotypically.
"While this is certainly a concern, what are the overall effects of such a mass departure?"
We will have to get the teas and coffees ourselves.
The general exodus from IT given the fact that most jobs in this sector pay next to nothing and seem to be as satifying as a red hot poker crammed up the *ss.
Is it any wonder the people are leaving given that family friendly seems to be a concept completely lost on most companies.
Isn't this just another baby boomer generation leaving the office to have kids?
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Apply patches first.
The few women I know in the IT field seem to have gotten into it for the money or because they couldn't think of anything else to do, rather than because they like working with computers. Now the money's gone, so are they.
The same applies to many men of course, but it seems to me that geeky traits are exhibited more often by men than women, so women are going to be fewer than men in geeky endeavours.
I don't think that a 50:50 split in any particular field is necessarily fair, what matters is not the male:female ratio, but that somebody with the requisite talent is able to pursue a career in a field without being artificially held back on the basis of their sex.
Judging by many of the replys so far probably the bigest thing driving women out of IT is the attitude of male IT workers who seem to think that we're still living in the 50's, for an industry thats meant to be the cutting edge of the future, many peoples attitudes seem to be about as old fashioned as they come.
Where you stand depends on where you sit...
Lets face it, women generally aren't interested in computers. (being very general here)
There is nothing wrong with this. Why is it a crisis?
I suspect the "downward spiral" is due to a lot of women who went into IT (perhaps due to all the efforts made to attract them) only to discover they really weren't interested.
The effects won't be very significant. (it may have an impact on the consumer level as less software is written with women in mind though)
Live and let live. They're not interested, so what?
Women _are_ smarter than men.
May the Maths Be with you!
I worked for a female I.T. manager once. She fired someone every 28 days.
Start with the two years the mention: 1996 and 2002. 1996 was the start of the dot-com boom. And 2002, a slump after dot-bombs are clearing away.
Where's the numbers in the middle? Did it drop in 1997-1999, in the boom? Did it stay the same until 1999, then drop? Has it been a continuous rate change? Where's the support that it really is a "downward spiral"?
Second, lacking from TFA are actual numbers and places.
Is this the IT market globally, including countries like India, China, Russia, and others? Or is this the IT market in the US? Or perhaps just the San Jose area? Or just Arkansas where the school that ran the survey is at? How many women? Has there been an increase in the number, just less of an increase relative to men? Or has the total number stayed about the same, or dropped? What are the women doing? Are they including women employed as secretaries and managerial operations within the IT business? How about men similarly working in IT companies, but not doing IT? What about the people not in the IT business but doing the work for small companies?
Given the (lack of) data we are shown, their conclusions are not really warranted.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I really don't see why people get overworked when statistics like this come out. Is there anything really wrong with the concept that there might be inherent differences between men and women that would account for something like this? Or will I be modded down like Lawrence Summers effectively was?
[ home ]
If IT remains a field where the only relevant knowledge is what you've done in the last two months or two years, then it makes no sense for someone to spend a career on it. Kids are coming out of school (in schools around the world now) with the latest programming languages. If a short absence from IT means you are less valuable than a recent graduate, then it makes sense to leave the field after an absence. Women are more often forced by circumstances like having children to make more mid-career decisions like this than men.
In other professions, there are skills you use and tools you become proficient at over the course of many years. It seems that these either don't exist in IT, or (as I believe) they do exist, but are rarely developed or valued. If returning to IT is as difficult as starting over in a new profession, we shouldn't be surprised that people choose to do so.
E.g., according to real studies, 3 out of 4 "programmers" just can't program. E.g., about 2 out of 3 don't even know the basics of the language they're paid to program in. Yes, males included. Doesn't really have anything to do with gender.
The dot-con fraud attracted a _lot_ of frauds in this field. The dot-cons were throwing other people's money out the window with both hands, just to show that they can. People with less brains or economic sense than a garden snail, had found themselves in a bunch of money, and had no idea what to do with them... other than show the Joneses that they too can spend like the big boys. Fast cars, huge headquarters, corporate airplanes for a tiny startup, or expensive programmers, it was just conspicuous consumption. (I.e., same as having a massive gold watch, just to show the neighbours who's rich. Doesn't even have to be a good watch: it just has to look blatantly expensive.)
And they hired _anyone_. Literally _any_ drooling ex-burger-flipper was suddenly employable in IT or programming. People who were too stupid to operate a cash register, were ok as "web application developpers" or whatever.
Lots of them, preferrably. Having 20 programmers and 30 artists for a 3 page web site was _cool_. Made the PHB feel like he too can play with the big boys' corporations.
And unsurprisingly, a lot did fake a resume and move into IT or programming. A whole caste of fraudsters was created whose _only_ skill was marketting themselves. They too "deserved" the big bucks, a sports car and a plasma TV, and were not gonna let utter lack of skill and knowledge get in the way of their American Dream.
It had nothing to do with liking to use a computer, or having any skill or inclination. Most not only had none, they didn't even try to learn either. They just "deserved" the money, they didn't actually want to start working for them.
And I don't think that being male or female played that big a role there. If there weren't 50% females there, if anything, makes me suspect they're more honest. Because anything to do with skill or liking computers, it sure didn't have.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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
I tried not to be redundant and all, but ...
TFA talks about women's participation in IT as a percentage of the IT workforce, but that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not women are fleeing IT. Try this as an experiment:
Time 0: 100 IT positions. 40 are women.
Time X: 1000 IT positions, 350 are women.
We've gone from 40% women to 35% women. Have women fled the field? HELL NO.
We need absolute numbers to figure out whether or not there are less women in IT than there used to be, but TFA doesn't seem to have them (or I missed them -- I did R it, of course).
Heh, with there being as few IT jobs today, women are pretty smart to be leaving, if you ask me.
When the ship is sinking, the women and children leave first don't they? :)
Blame the outsourcing iceberg. Something about "no longterm prospects".
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
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
Just take a quick glance through the comments here and it becomes kind of obvious.
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You know, I sorta wonder about the generalization that everyone who left, was in it just for the money, and everyone who stayed is passionate about it.
I personally know people who left a field or a job precisely _because_ they were passionate about it... and it had turned into something they disliked. E.g., we have at least 3 people here alone, who used to program assembly since the days of mainframes and long before dot-coms, and then left for other completely unrelated jobs (2 of them became marketters and 1 trained to be a usability expert) when basically the job was no longer what they liked to do.
Loving computers and programming is sometimes _the_ best way to _hate_ an IT or programming job, respectively.
People liked coding a smart algorithm or maybe a cute game at home, they had their peer recognition for being good with computer in university, and... then moved into a real world that doesn't even vaguely resemble that. In the real world they:
- got bogged in hundreds of hours of verbal-masturbation meetings,
- were forced to do overtime for someone _else's_ mistake (e.g., the boss being too weak to tell the customer that completely changing the program needs more time and budget),
- were asked to implement blatantly wrong specs, or use the blatantly wrong tools, just because a PHB (own or client's) said so and wasn't gonna take feedback from a lowly peon. (The nice salesman says it's the perfect "solution" for anything, so now go make it work. If it doesn't work, it's your fault, not the nice salesman's.)
- had to wrestle with systems that wouldn't have been the wrong tools as such, but were wrongly configured and piss-poorly adminned by some other corporate department that's above the law,
- had to deal with co-workers that were annoying in a miriad of ways (ranging from the 400 pound stinking geek, to office backstabbers, to people who are utterly incompetent and lazy but awesome at selling snake oil to the boss, to whatever else),
- were forced to do stuff that really had nothing to do with the job they had signed for, such as being the poor-man's marketer instead of a programmer,
- were asked to do blatantly unethical stuff, like to actively lie to a customer,
Etc.
And some of us just learned to shrug and deal with it. Some left the job. And I think it's a bit unfair to just lump them into the same category as those who were in it just for the dot-com's money.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
anecdotal, but ...
... I wouldn't trust any of them to do the job I do (mixed environment system administration), because it's not what they know. But in their fields, they're significantly better equipped than most of the men they graduated with.
3 of the best programmers I know are women. That includes my boss, and 2 people that went through the CS curriculum with me.
Now
There's a gender difference in teaching though. Men tend to get called on more than women in classes, and also tend to get taken more seriously than women, all the way back into elementary schools, by both male and female teachers.
Caplan and Caplan's "Thinking Critically about Women and Gender" has a good chapter on educational differences.
Ultimately, the women in IT are just as good as the men, but they're a far smaller sample. There's a lot of piss-poor programmers and sysadmins and support people who are men, and a smaller number in the same positions who are women. If a man screws up, it's more likely to be blamed on his incredible incompetence, where if a woman screws up, you're more likely to draw the attribution that it's because she's a woman.
social desirability theory says that, in general, women percieve themselves as less desirable if they're good at math, or involved in the sciences. If they're not 'normal' they're different.
Women in science aren't in science to "hook a man". They're there to study science.
The women going to college hoping to get married along the way and be a dependent for life are the ones that go into gender-typical classes (ie: elementary education, liberal arts, to a lesser extent management or nursing).
You say that men spend more time in the basement with computers in their adolescence while women don't. First of all, I do not see an argument supporting this, maybe your own experience, which has not enough statistical weight anyway.Second, suppose it was true. Then, what do women do in their adolescence? You'll perhaps agree that they have a more social life (this argument does not have statistical validity either). Well, if so, then they are probably more aware of what a certain customer might need while developing software. Also they'll be more efficient in communicate with the customer to achieve better results in the software developed. This is as important for IT as the programming itself. Therefore, the fact that men spent more time in their basements playing with computers in their adolescence does not make them more suited for IT. They are just more specialized in certain tasks, while women are specialized in others. The mixture if the two specialities is crucial in the proper running and development of an IT company. BOTH are important.
"Gazeta Wyborcza", it's the Poland's biggest newspaper. Not a tabloid, too.
/. article is related to this proportion.
It was a two-page big article, a couple of months or so ago.
I'm afraid I don't have the paper anymore.
I also didn't intend the grandparent post to be a troll, even though it includes a rather extreme view. A typical woman is not interesting in anything other than clothes and the last soap opera, while the typical man cares about nothing but beer and viewing a mindless football/baseball/etc game on the TV.
I'm not interested in your typical person. People I want to talk to share a mindset -- a mindset that's typical to hackers (in the non-tabloid/MS FUD sense of the word), some scientists (most often in physics) and some related groups. People of this mindset often get labelled "geeks" -- and they are around 0.1% (a completely wild estimation) of the male population and 0.00001% of females. This very
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
that's not just a "French" viewpoint you were taking. And that's a lot of the source of the problem.
Those things that many men hold true, many women also come to hold true, at least on some level.
Your belief in "what women were for" came from somewhere, and more likely than not what indoctrinated you indoctrinated someone of the opposite sex just as deeply.
And more likely than not, the women who were raised believing that are living out those beliefs, hunting for husbands, working dead-end jobs, and trying to look good, instead of trying to build careers.
The managers, hence fuckwits (just like men.) Very few managers are not fuckwits. Unfortunately, with one possible exception, on which the jury's still out, the female managers I dealt with were as bad as the usual male manager. By virtue of having contact with more male managers than with female ones, the chances of meeting a non-fuckwit female manager was greatly reduced.
The uninterested--as another poster described, these were the sort of trend-drones seen during the dot-com boom. Once again, fuckwits. Fewer women percentually means fewer non-fuckwits, absolutely. In my case, the non-fuckwit female trend-drone share was nil.
The intimidated--because of the (real or perceived) disadvantages faced by women in IT, these were the mousy, quiet types who never had anything to say. Happens with men too, but as men usually tend to be at least a bit more assertive, it's less common. Not unpleasant to work with, mainly since you never encounter them (they're hiding.) "Oh no I could never do this, I might break it."
The intimidating--taking the previous class a step further, these are the ones who treat every personal encounter as a confrontation. Not man-haters, just insecure people afraid of being fucked by god-knows-what, or unsure of their ability to deal with people trying to fuck them (in a professional manner, mind--no, not that kind of professional manner.) See managers.
The officious--an offshoot of the last category. One of my dearly held stereotypes is that women care more about rules than men do (as in Dilbert's Wally vs. Alice.) These are the types who will throw rules and roadblocks in your face out of principle, because you COULD BE TRYING TO PULL A FAST ONE OH MY GOD. See managers.
The cool ones--don't care, are professional and competent, have the self-confidence to ignore harassment or hit back with wit and style, and understand that there's a job to be done and hey, can't we all just get along. Very rare, but oh so incredibly appreciated. They get things done, are more responsible than the guys, come up with cool, creative solutions, and basically combine all the good sides of a "typical" female personality with a few characteristics making it easy for guys to work with them.
Once again, I realize that most of these stereotypes apply to men as well. I love working with women, if they fall into the latter class. It's just been my experience that a far higher percentage of men tend to be competently agreeable to work with than women.
The main points that I make to women (as with anyone) when talking about IT careers are: (a) don't be intimidated, and (b) don't do this job if you don't love it, and can deal with technical and human shit a lot of the time. Rule #1? Relax, it's a job, get it done and that's it.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Mail-order brides, man. Mail-order brides.
I could equally say that there's plenty of shallow men out there, interested in little more than:-
Cars
Toys. Including iPods and the like.
Babes/Porn Particularly with ludicrously inflated breasts.
Beer
Crap sci-fi movies and series
Maybe they're not too interested in you. Perhaps, because you show little interest in the things they might be interested in (eg Clothes).
Actually, there's plenty of bright, interesting women, but the way your carrying on, I think the real men are more likely to get a share than you.
When people start worrying that there aren't enough men going in the dental hygienist field (I've never in all my life seen one), I'll start worrying about the lack of women in IT.
--Good morning fellas; Hand me that thing; Boy, this work's hard; Guys, break's over.
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
As much as I love women (after all, I'm a man) why is it a concern that women might prefer work that's a little less tedious and a little more rewarding. Maybe we should worry a little bit more about improving the quality of IT jobs and software engineering jobs in particular rather than sexist or racist issues of why we don't have equal numbers of every sexual and ethnic group in IT jobs. Is it a concern that most garbage collectors are men????
Given any particular male in IT, and any particular female in IT, the male is much more likely to be proficient in what he is doing.
Yes, the male is much more likely to be proficient in what *he* is doing. But is he more proficient in what *she* is doing? Women tend to prefer information management rather than information technology or algorithmics. My experience tells me that women are often better getting the "big picture" in IM than men who just like cut the crap and go write some code.
Then again my sample of fellow geeks is too small for my observations to carry any real weight.
I think it's a lot more likely that women are leaving IT because of attitudes like this.
-mkb
I was trying to explain male geekery to my wife the other day.
Her: "Women aren't encouraged to be nerds. If they are interested in geeky things, they are teased and degraded."
Me: "What do you think happens to male nerds?"
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
Okay, so i'm the first 'barbie' to reply. I'm a 31 yr old female and i've worked in IT since 1998. As always, i'm in the minority as a chick, varying from 10% to 40% women of the workforce of the company (and the 40% was in a web/graphic design company). Don't forget that career choices are motivated by social stimulus and peer pressure which begin in the perambulator all the way thru educational career. It's still not hot for girls to go for science/technical careers. My dad always told me how good I was in languages. My tests showed that I had a natural affinity for mechanical insight. I ended up studying English lit. and autodidacted my way into IT. This illustrates how girls in general are hence less confident of their abilities. Recent studies actually promote the separate education of girls from boys in computer and science subjects at grade/primary school to counteract this not genetic, but social issue... Because of the growth in specialisms, and different programming languages, girls i reckon "perceive" IT to have become more difficult. And besides, how much fun is it to be the only girl out of a 100 geeks in CS? :)
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
And besides, how much fun is it to be the only girl out of a 100 geeks in CS? :)
Well, it's great if you want attention, I suppose. I'd rather be the one dude in a French class...
-mkb
Agreed.
Honestly, the answer to the question of precisely why there are so few women in computer science, physics, math completely eludes me. I'd really like to know why. I can't find any one good reason why not, and nobody else seems to be able to agree on a reason either.
Maybe it's a combination of everything. Overall, women and men do seem to have different distributions of personalities, aptitudes for certain skills, etc., just as any two distinct groups will. You can just as easily qualitatively compare the residents of two cities or Americans vs. Canadians, or anything else.
But it's always hard to point out some specific REASON that would explain the differences, be it genetic or upbringing or social expectations or hormonal or anything else. Maybe the fact that these distributions change over time serves as some sort of hint. Say, I haven't heard of many women physicists a hundred years ago, but today we at least have some.
From personal experience, though, I've observed that a sort of segmentation of the mind, whereby one can think about something while completely forgetting everything else (e.g., the ability to concentrate on a math problem after a nasty fight with your best friend) seems to be more common in men. I really might be wrong. But not being able escape your personal life while concentrating on hard abstract problems would make a technical profession rather frustrating, I think. Just a guess, maybe.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
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.
First of all, I'd like to say a little bit about myself and what I've observed around me. I'm a second year student at Dalhousie University (that's in Halifax, if anyone cares), and I've only been an official computer science student for this past term. Before that, I was a biology major, so I'm really behind in my cs courses and have to take both first and second year classes concurrently. I've noticed that while my first year Java course has quite a number of girls in it, most of them are from other faculties and, quite frankly, wouldn't cut it in any IT-related field. These are the kinds of girls who got it into their miniscule brains sometime in highschool that boys only like stupid girly girls, so they seem to make a sincere effort to not learn anything about computers. In my second year classes, the girls are more like me -- perfectly ordinary geeks who just happen to like computers and want to learn more. Of course, there are far fewer girls in those second year classes because the aforementioned bimbo types have already been weeded out by the insurmountable challenge of writing a Hello World program in Java.
My question then becomes, how do we get more intelligent girls in computer science? Not just girls in general, but ones who actually have some kind of talent for it and aren't going to make the rest of us look bad with their antics. I don't think there's an easy answer to this, but I suspect that the current initiatives are doing more harm than good.
For example, when I see a job ad that says "We encourage minorities like blacks, Native Americans and women to apply!" I'm sitting there thinking to myself, "Uh... OVER 50% OF THE FREAKIN' POPULATION HERE! How the HELL are a minority?" But for some reason, we're treated as if we're some kind of endangered species. Doesn't it occur to anyone that we might not like that treatment? Doesn't it occur to anyone that we just want to be treated like ordinary human beings, no matter what's between our legs? I mean, I'm not going to refuse if somebody throws money at me for having a vagina and using a computer, but it's really not a good way to encourage other girls to join the field. It's hard to see myself as successful when I so often have to wonder if everything I've "achieved" is only because I'm female (and thus have to be specially encouraged and rewarded to keep me from running away.)
Oh, and another thing: I never see any similar initiatives to get more men into... say... nursing, or even regular biology. They're definitely in the minority, but either people are afraid of being called sexist for favouring the sex that's supposedly in power (even though it hasn't been for decades), or they've figured out that the best way to get men into something like nursing is NOT to say "Oh, don't worry! It's not just for women! You won't be less of a man if you're a nurse! Not feminine at all! Trust me!" because they know that any man will look at something like that and think to himself "So wait, nursing makes me gay?" thanks to the wonders of reverse psychology. I just wonder how long it will take for the faculty of computer science to figure that out as well...
(Yes, I know I'm bitter.)
"A signature always reveals a man's character - and sometimes even his name" - Evan Esar (1899-1995)
I have worked for the various government agencies and departments for 8 years now, and the number of women working in IT is definitely above average for the IT field. I attribute this to the fact that they are not being driven out of the field here. As a government employee, we have steady and predictable hours with little overtime. Vacation time is quite generous, and family related leave is available. These working conditions are not only attractive to women, but also to the men that I have worked with as well. I knew one guy who took a 20% pay cut (transferring to government from the private sector) so that he could have dinner with his family on a regular basis. I know another who is taking parental leave shortly so he can raise his daughter while his wife goes back to work early (in the private sector, she also works in IT).
I think the problem here is that the expected working conditions in the (North American private sector) IT field are atrocious. Long hours, unpaid overtime, arcane technology that is constantly changing is what's wrong with the IT industry. Women leaving the field in droves are just a symptom of a deeper running illness.
You kids with your ogling. Back in my day, it was gold fish swallowing and sitting atop a flagpole that was all the rage.
Well, it's time for my morning prunes, so 23 skidoo! (23 skidoo is what we used to say.)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
...they made me nervous anyway. They kept wanting to talk and stuff.
She has NO desire to go into IT. Nor do her friends.
Why?
These girls have seen all the "girls can do math/science" stuff their whole lives. They KNOW they can. They will take that else where.
When IT becomes people friendly, the women will come back. Many men are leaving for the same reasons.
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."
People say that university was the best time of there life.
I wouldn't recommend computer science to my worst enemy.
Not only do you not meet any girls in any of your classes you carry around the stigma of comp sci.
On top of that I graduated at a time when there were no computer science jobs.
I was forced to take a job as a bartender.
Let me just say bartending was fun.
The stigma for girls is even worse in comp sci.
It's got to be hard not having any peers of the same gender.
They are surrounded by a buch of sex starved guys.
But look at the other side of the coin for example nursing.
Not a lot of guys there.
You never really hear studies about guys not going into nursing.
Even though there is a huge shortage of nurses.
The stigma of being a male nurse is a lot worse than comp sci.
If you look at country like Korea, The stigma of comp sci doesn't really exist.
I would imagine there is a high enrollment rate for women in comp sci there.
Technology is very much a part of their society.
Simple, women are smarter than men, and they already see that IT is a dead end field, like making buggies after the Model T came out.
Although there will still be IT jobs (unlike the buggy makers) from here on out IT will be drudge work, and not a desireable field to be in anymore. It is just that women noticed this first.
==>Lazn