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Women Are Fleeing IT Jobs
Lucas123 writes "An alarming number of women are currently abandoning IT jobs that require workers to be on-call at all hours, according to a story in Computerworld. One study cited in the article states that by 2012, 40% of women now working in IT will leave for careers with more flexible hours. 'I think women in that regard are at a real disadvantage,' said Dot Brunette, network and storage manager at Meijer Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based retailer and a 30-year IT veteran. She noted that companies can fail to attract female workers, or see them leave key IT jobs, because they fail to provide day care at work, or work-at-home options for someone who leaves to have a child.'"
'I think women in that regard are at a real disadvantage,' said Dot Brunette, network and storage manager at Meijer Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based retailer and a 30-year IT veteran.
What a stupid name. Too bad she didn't get married to Jeff Matrix instead.
GMD
watch this
Why would companies want to attract people who aren't willing to accept the conditions of the job? If men in the same job are expected to be on call out of work hours, why should women get a free pass?
I thought we were supposed to have sexual equality, not special treatment for women.
I am not a woman. And frankly, I would LOVE to flee my IT jobs, ESPECIALLY because of the whole being on-call 24 hours, and all the after-hours work, etc. Yeah, I can move into Management, but at the price of selling even MORE bits of my life away. Honestly, if I had ANY skills other than the pretty small niche of IT I'm in, I'd be fleeing, too.
You ask me, women are fleeing IT because they're SMARTER.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
I tend to wonder if this has more to do with women having higher employment standards than men do--I know in my current employer, it's consistently more difficult to find women willing to work night shifts than it is men.
And FWIW, I got an assoc and had a couple calls for a networking tech positions.... part-time hours, and on call at times--like evenings and weekends.
Ummm,,,,,, no thanks.
Stuck trying to live off an $8/hr job with no way to even well consider a second job? Nope, forget it.
I never did get a tech job. It was kinda a bummer at the time, but nowadays I don't worry about it that much.
~
What happened to all those jobs in which you can work at home with? The training that is supposed to support via phone/internet is supposedly right down this type of work. Its not like the boss has to look over your shoulder all the time. Furthermore all e-mails and other work is easily documented isn't it?
Women and men are different, we just think different and enjoy different things. Men tend to enjoy playing with the latest and greatest toys, and IT lends itself to playing with the latest and greatest toys. I really don't see that in most women. That's not to say that many women in IT don't enjoy the work, but something tells me lots of women in IT got into the field in the late 90's when any joe schmoe (or in this case jane schmoe) in IT could make money. Now that there's not quite as much money flowing, there's much less of an incentive to stay in a career they weren't enjoying to begin with.
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So the problem is that women in IT are on call at all hours, which means that cellphones have a lot to do with this. But it goes deeper than that: cellphones are also causing honeybees to disappear. Notice a pattern here?
These women are obviously going wherever the honeybees went: obviously, a peaceful cellphone-free land, populated with women and bees, a land of milk and honey, one might say.
...in IT jobs who've never seen a woman naked outside of an LCD screen.
I am in IT and I have to take on call. We rotate it. But we also get an extra bump when we are on call - whether we get called in or not. But sometimes we end up spending all night and all weekend having to fix stuff and that does get real old really fast. I had to miss my fiancee's sister's birthday because I was on call and got called in.
Now, management sees the on call pay as an expense they would like to cut. When/if they cut it, I think the on call response is going to get a lot worse. A lot worse.
"Oh, a double-disk failure? Darn..."
You do not see a whole lot of women in the construction business either. Not stereotyping but women don't fight for jobs they don't care anything about. I would LOVE to see at least 50% women mixed in at every job stratum but face it..there are some jobs women don't give a shit about and would rather fight for other lucrative positions.
I don't see an overwhelming majority of women fight for selective service either for that matter.
In other news, scientists finally prove women smarter than men. Film at eleven.
Women have the world by the balls.
In our sexist society (biased towards the female gender), they've never had it easier. They enjoy freedom of choice in the job market, or can opt to stay at home and raise children (or do both). They are perfectly free to use marriage and divorce as businesses, enriching their personal fortunes by doing nothing more than providing sex. They are allowed to manipulate men with sex and tears to get whatever they want. They have been granted permission to usurp traditional male jobs yet still -- with bold-faced hypocrisy -- expect men to finance their social lives. They can choose to serve in the military without fear of losing their lives in combat. They expect to be able to denigrate the male gender and treat men like emotional punching bags without protest. They force men to endure "sensitivity training" to pressure them into becoming more like women.
In short, they are pampered, coddled to, and told that they deserve everything without any implication or obligation of giving anything in return.
what women want
Modern women demand all the privileges afforded their sisters in bygone eras, yet still insist on the freedoms granted by a liberated society. In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it, too; they want equal rights until the check comes.
At the heart of this mess is so-called "feminism." The post-war culture of the 1950s and '60s spawned an affluent, egocentric culture of "consciousness-raising" and liberation, spurred on by such seminal feminists as Betty Friedan (who saw the traditional wife and homemaker as a prisoner chained to the stove, hobbled by men from achieving success in the business world).
Almost overnight women wanted to work and go to college; they decided their husbands should help with cooking, cleaning and child care. Liberated women lobbied for gender equality: equal pay for equal work, equal educational and career opportunities and equal treatment under the law.
They no longer wanted to be seen by men as "sex objects," but instead as individuals independent of their gender; persons in their own right.
On the surface, this was all well and good. In a modern society, women should be treated with equality; they should be allowed to pursue whatever course they choose.
But feminism made one crucial mistake -- it failed to take into account the fundamentally self-serving nature of the female gender. For the average woman, "feminism" shortly became nothing more than a convenient excuse for getting what she wanted (usually from a man's hard work). Women began expecting to have things handed to them on a plate just because they were born female.
The battle cry of "feminism" abruptly changed from "equal pay for equal work" to "you go, girl -- you deserve it" (no matter how you get it). Suddenly it was all about "me, me, me" -- the self-indulgent bawl of a spoiled brat.
And this is exactly the problem. Modern women have demanded -- and won -- equal rights and equal pay. But they're too greedy, too materialistic, too self-absorbed, too immature, and too accustomed to using men to do anything with these rights but shoot themselves in the foot with them.
It's all come too easily for them, and, like children who have been handed everything on a plate, they've matured into abusing their privilege and demanding more and more and more.
from the mouth of a feminist
Feminist author Susan Maushart (What Women Want Next) writes: "Now that women have been more or less successfully mainstreamed, the achievement feels unexpectedly hollow. For one thing, we are tired. If doing what men do on top of what women have always done is Having It All, most of us have decided we'd prefer a smaller portion."
Feminism has fizzled; it's crumbled under the weight of its own shaky foundations. So does this mean that women should go back to the kitchen? Is this where they belong, forever chained to the stove and the bedpost?
The answer -- fundamentally -- is "no." But a very cautious "no."
It was unfortunate that you had to re-work the code of your colleague - but incompetence knows no gender bounds.
I have worked with women in IT who were dedicated, technically adept, and most importantly, customer-focused. Mind you, this was at a nuclear power plant, which is a machine that is continuously operating for up to two years, and this places some serious demand for IT support (yes, it was/is an MS-based house, but that's another issue). Approaching it from a cultural standpoint, operators (mostly male) are required to have the utmost confidence that they can handle the beast at all times, and this often manifested itself as massive chips on shoulders, and demands of flawless execution on just about anything. Having women in IT 'gentled' the testosterone-charged atmosphere, and that helped just getting the job done. In comparison, the IT departments at other plants in the fleet were male-dominated, and for some reason were a lot less effective. Could have been a competence issue - but IMHO, it was cultural.
Finally, regarding the quest for a prospective partner: I believe it unwise to date someone at work. Think in terms of consequences if things go awry.
Science never settles, never rests.
Because civilization depends on having children. How many new workers entering the workforce will you have in 20 years? Well it depends on how many kids are born today. Workers, citizens, et al, have a 20 year pipeline. And yes we can import immigrants but how many? And can we assimilate them?
You bitch about offshoring and H1-B visas. Well the solution is to have more kids. The ideal solution would have been to have more kids 20 years ago.
Demographics is destiny. If you don't reproduce your world view won't be around when you are not.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours
To quote Philip Greenspun:
"Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men... A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls...
What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory."
- Women in Science
Tweet, tweet.
But in all honesty, my computer work was 24 hours before the Internet, too. It was just called a "BBS" and I didn't get paid for it.
What is the big f'ing deal with the whole "lack of women in the IT industry" fad? Why doesn't the hair salon industry get this much publicity for it's lack of men working in it? Seriously, it's stupid. Women do what they're good at, and men do the same. Everyone meets in the middle eventually in executive and management land.
A number of my friends with children are looking to get out of the drudgery of abandoning their families for 60% of their waking hours.
These are the people working a 55 hour week in a "9 to 5" job, with an hour of commuting each way. They are typically engineers or other professionals working in jobs where technology companies demand that the product be in the market yesterday. Their (ex) colleagues have been "downsized" and the company is too tight to employ replacements or there just aren't the qualified people out there. Consequently they are each doing one and a half jobs. Flexible hours policy is "We don't mind what hours you work as long as the job gets done", which translates to "55 hours".
These friends are figuring out that they are missing out on being part of their family growing up while earning 2-3 time the average wage. Often they are concluding that they are better to move to a part time job, earn a little above an average wage and be part of the family growing up. If the change requires a change of employer or profession then they are prepared to do it. When pushed the better employers realise that they are better to have a part time expert than no expert.
Utility companies need to have staffing for 3 shifts and pay overtime when they call extra people in for emergencies. IT techs just suck it up. Guess who's unionized?
I saw an article by a woman talking about why women are paid less than men. She figures it is because women go for the quality of life jobs while men go for the money. Women will take lower paying jobs with higher job satisfaction, better hours, etc. while men will kill themselves for the big buck.
No surprise that women are leaving IT when the jobs suck more and more.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
This was my fault. I'll take more showers.
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
If women want freedom and equal rights, then they have to grow up. Equality does not mean self-entitlement, and liberation cannot be just a convenient excuse for unbridled narcissism. Men and women should be equal partners in this world, but such a lofty goal can only be achieved if women start acting like equal partners -- that is, giving instead of constantly demanding and taking.
Although I don't necessary agree with many of your premises, nor your conclusion, I do agree with that particular statement (well, not the generalization that all women today are necessarily "constantly demanding and taking," and I think the tone is a bit strident -- did you just get out of a bad divorce or something?).
I think the people who get screwed worse than just about anyone, under our current system, are the women who really want to compete on a level playing field; either they get hobbled, or they get tossed crutches they don't need and don't want (and which cause them to be discriminated against).
An easy example of this is with child-care policies at work. Some workplaces have very biased policies surrounding parenting; they have maternity leave without any corresponding paternity or adoption leave, etc. What this does is make women, in general, much less attractive employees to lower and middle management. If you're taking on someone into a management or competitive career track (think junior partners in big law firms), who are you going to pick: the male employee, who's going to work his ass off, and then work his ass off some more, or the female employee, who's going to work her ass off, but then quite possibly go take six or nine months off to have a kid, and then only want to come back on a reduced schedule? It's a no-brainer, and this is why there's a culture of discrimination in many of those workplaces.
The people who this really hurts, though, are the women who aren't interested in having children, and aren't going to ever exercise their maternity leave, and are going to work the same 60-hour weeks for as many years as their male counterpart would, and not expect any quarter on account of sex. They really get hosed, because they get discriminated against without any good reason, due the cultural stereotype that all women want to be nurturing mother-figures, when there are definitely women out there who have zero interest in it.
I've met a lot of aggressive, careerist women in my life, and a whole lot of them are pretty bitter that they always get pigeonholed in the "so when are you going to get pregnant?" box. Conversely, I've met a few men who are pretty clearly looking to be primary caregivers and bitter about the flack they get for asking for child-care and leave, or for not being as aggressively career-oriented as others around them. So it cuts both ways.
I think there are really two fair solutions: you can make all policies gender-neutral, and encourage male employees to take the same sort of leave, when they're adopting or their partner is pregnant, that a female employee would take for a pregnancy, so that in hiring or placing people, managers can't just assume that "male employee = no leave" and "female employee = leave" (although if you have more female employees taking leave, then you'll still have discrimination). Or, you pick some sort of well-known, performance-based metric to do your advancement/firing based on, tell people they can take as much leave as they want, whenever they want, but if their performance suffers too badly, they'll get canned, and let the pieces fall where they may. Since I think the latter plan is probably illegal in the U.S. and other "pro-family" countries, I think we're stuck with the former.
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"An alarming number of women are currently abandoning IT jobs that require workers to be on-call at all hours,"
;). After all, how many people actually like such jobs? And how much do such jobs pay? So to me it's a good sign that women are finding better things to do with their lives than being "on call" just to make the 1-2% rich (who own 50% of the wealth) richer.
;)
I think it's only alarming if the number is zero
And what's with everyone trying to encourage women to move into IT, when:
1) Most women aren't interested in the first place
2) The jobs aren't valued highly by Management and tend to get outsourced.
3) The jobs aren't that _wonderful_ in terms of pay, security etc. (They're ok if you actually like IT stuff a lot, but see 1) )
4) An "alarming number" are moving out.
From the article:
"I had a 14-year-old daughter that I didn't want to leave alone at 3 a.m.,".
Oh wow, an alarming number of women have got their priorities right?
Compare this with:
"I have to babysit these flaky 24/7 app servers at 3 am"
It better be something like a wonderful charity's donation server at say "tsunami time" for you to have a greater chance of being proud of doing that at the end of your life, when you choose to do that instead of being able to have normal hours and thus spend more time with your kids (and try to brainwash them before MTV etc do).
Whereas if it's just to make a bunch of Machiavellian rich guys richer and more powerful, you better know what you are doing and why.
Wow. She sounds like the female nerd version of Jack Bauer. Imagine if she loved her job so much, she did answer the phone in the middle of sex. And left too! Pinnacle nerdness!
Except that there's nothing idiotic about it -- it's the entire point of the article!
Companies want more women. Women want X. Companies who want women have to offer X. If you disagree with X, feel free, but that doesn't make the article or comment any less accurate.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
If women don't want IT jobs that require you to be on call literally every moment of the day, everyday, all year without some assistance, I think they're pretty smart.
Yeah, yeah, "global economy means new requirements for business", "give the client their value's worth", etc... bullshit.
America has one of the most -if not the most- unhealthy work ethic in world. The IT and web-tech fields reign as king among the most grueling professional jobs out there. When I was working contracts for several years, the vast majority of the companies burn out their employees within two years. I worked with a lot of permanent employees getting paid 45K a year in the Detroit area to work 14-16 hours a day M-F and at least 20 hours over the weekend with no overtime pay. And this was for a web design firm. For myself and most of the people I've worked with, no amount of perks can account for giving your life to your company. Loyalty is one thing; indentured servitude is quite another.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
my how hyppocritical you are, comming from a political position with pundits like bill "STFU" oreilly, whose debate technique consists of shouting people down, and fox news, which apparently operates under the strategy of "speak a lie long enough and everyone will think its true". I think its time for you to actually read "lies and the lying liars who tell them" instead of WSJ's reviews of the book.
I'll give you rational liberal arguments against conservatism major point by major point:
1 - reaganomics, also known as "supply side" economics.
any economic policy which benefits companies or owners at the expense of their workers ignores two important economic concepts(which are not stressed enough in econ curriculi). The first is moral hazard. Conservatives call liberals "blind idealists" but ignore the fact theyre giving huge financial gains to the wealthy and idealistically counting on them to pass that along instead of hording it in their own circles (these people make more than they can ever spend.. giving more to them simply drains that cash from the economy). Moral hazard asserts, and correctly so, that given the opportunity to abuse someone's trust with little to no consequence, a party will.
The second is the GDP equation. The most important factor to economic expansion in that equation is consumption, because once you boil it down it's only consumption which contributes to profit. When you try to "boost" the economy by adopting these policies you attack consumption by pushing wages through the floor, and in the process attack your own long term profits. Thus the reason why every time reaganomics is put into effect a recession follows shortly (a couple years) upon it.
2 - smaller government.
we had a smaller government for about 170 years before basic safety nets and proper labor standards were put in place. The result of complete government nonintervention was a horrible standard of living(median housing didnt have insulation or indoor plumbing), gilded age political machines, and eventually horrific depression. The provision of basic safety nets and labor standards gave rise to and keeps preserved the most important factor to economic growth and a healthy democratic state, a large and stable middle class (who have both money to consume and free time in which to spend it on things like education). Additionally, it reduces the disincentives for those who might otherwise not risk starting a company for fear of becomming one of the statistical 2/3 entrepreneurial failure.
Granted, it's being abused (by both government and the public), but the solution is not to toss it out. When your computer gets infected with spyware, you fix it, you don't just reject technology and go mennenite.
as for pork.. i think both parties can get behind elimination of pork.
3 - religion.
contrary to popular conservative belief, spirituality does not require religion, nor does morality. religion should not be enforced by or even endorsed by the state, it should be treated like eating habits.. that is accomodated as is necessary and otherwise left alone. most importantly it should be divorced from all state actions. the government is not a person, it is a mechanism for governing the nation, and unlike their human counterparts machines do not worship god.
4 - "family values"
in a nation premised around the idea of every individual's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", no amount of legislation or government action will magically make those you consider "amoral" change their way of life. this thought brings us to...
5 - foreign policy.
republican approaches to foreign policy are the real reason our government is so huge and expensive. military spending, even for wwII, was breaking even within a few years of a war's end, and part of this was because we only went to war when we actually were threatened, rather than just paran
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