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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?"
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...
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.
"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.
Apply patches first.
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...
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.
Women _are_ smarter than men.
May the Maths Be with you!
I don't think it is a concern if women are leaving IT because they can get better jobs elsewhere or because there are less IT jobs or something.
What is a concern is if they're leaving because they're being driven out by sexist attitudes or working conditions (not deliberately sexist perhaps, but more likely designed by single men, for single men and with a "you have to change your life, because we're not changing our conditions" attitude). If this is the case then a) that shows a deep ingrained prejedice that belongs in the 50's rather then a 21st century cutting edge industry, and b) we're losing lots of very talented people who can bring whole new ideas and ways of looking at problems into the industry because they were born with a particular set of physical characteristics rather then for any worthwhile reason.
Diversity is good, not just in the operating system and software market but also in the people that produce that software.
Where you stand depends on where you sit...
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.
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
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).
new pool
:
i am
() male
() female
() i dont know
() CowboyNeal ??
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'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? :)
Frankly, my gender very rarely has anything to do with my comments at Slashdot, so why would I even bring it up? Though, my name may give it away if anyone were to notice.
That said, I suspect there are a lot more women reading and replying than most Slashdotters give credit. What should we do? Use a sig that says "I'm a chick. Please regard opinion accordingly?"
You see the look on my face, and yet you keep talking.
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.
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)
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.