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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 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?
The question is, are women "required" as in required by company policy and/or the way the job is structured? Or required as in, it's a fundamental and inevitable aspect of the job?
Think of it this way... What if an IT department didn't have women's bathrooms, because it was designed back when only men held IT jobs. So the job "requires" women to go to a different building to use the bathroom. If a women quits because she finds that annoying, it is literally correct to say that she isn't willing to accept the conditions of the job. But obviously no one would defend that situation.
Back to reality... If it's the case that IT work schedules and conditions happen to have been designed by guys who didn't mind being on call, and the company could change its conditions to make it possible for women (or any employee who's a primary caregiver for kids) to have the job and be effective, then they should change. That's not special treatment for women. That's putting an end to arbitrary conditions that create, in effect, special treatment for young, single men. (Because I'd say that not having to compete with women for your job constitutes special treatment.)
"If it's the case that IT work schedules and conditions happen to have been designed by guys who didn't mind being on call, and the company could change its conditions to make it possible for women (or any employee who's a primary caregiver for kids) to have the job and be effective, then they should change."
Why should people who don't have kids be expected to work extra hard to cover for the pampering of people who do have kids?
Look, you're hired to do a job. If you can't or won't do it, find a different job... there are plenty of people who are willing to do the job that they're hired for.
So I don't see what the problem is.
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.
Of course... Women are completely incapable of taking jobs which require you to be on call most of the day - only young men can do that.
;)
That must be why nursing is dominated by young men.
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.
There are CRT's out here still, ya know.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
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
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An entire continent of women were abandoned for the better part of a decade while their men went off to war, then came back shell shocked and broken to women who'd had their families providers ripped away long ago and weren't the tender nurturers they used to be. A unique cultural trauma in the world. For both genders.
Try to be philosophical about it. Other cultures will rise.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Essentially this will come down to a management problem. At some point, people will avoid IT as a career altogether. And when that happens, demand will go up for people, more money will be offered, and people will hold their noses and come back. In the late 1990s perks for IT were tremendous -- stock options, lots of vacation, huge bonuses. Now IT is treated like 3rd world labour...its a necessary evil for most businesses, they hold their nose and pay for it.
If you've conditioned your workplace to disinterest women, you've effectively reduced your hiring pool by 50%. That's not a problem right now, but during the next industry crunch you'd f***ed. People management and staff retention is a strategic goal, not a tactical problem...too bad most of the industry right now is being managed quarter-by-quarter.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Although I think you have gone a little far with your statement (and have become flamebaited) I must agree that all this "retribution" is getting a little out of hand. Unfortunately, a man (like myself) can say nothing about it without be called a sexist. On the squawkbox or whatever news channel that is, there was recently a WOMAN complaining about the government getting in the affairs of women and how much they get paid. The govt wants to help women have increased wages so that they earn the same amount as a man. However, what hasn't crossed their minds is that the kind of work they do is FAR different from the average work of a man. Many men work in dangerous jobs such as construction, roofing, etc. Many women work as clerks/teachers/support calls/etc and work with more flexible hours.
I do realize that there are quite a few single mothers out there (of course, one could also blame the teenagers that are having sex at such a young age). In fact, I recently discovered that two of my former gradeschool classmates (like, from 4 years ago? I'm senior in highschool now) are pregnant, and one of which for the second time!
I personally think retribution is going a little too far for sexism. I mean, look at these women who marry millionaires and famous actors, then divorce, and NEVER get another job so they can just soak up their divorced husbands money. However, these are the women that do not care about equality, but rather themselves. Many of the women that are concerned about equality are those that do not have it.
Unfortunately, some take equality to the extent of give us everything so that we dominate males.
I do not think that daycare is something the business should have to pay for. You should be PREPARED to have a child, and not already knowing of a neighbor or a daycare center in the area is a serious lapse in judgement. But who am I but a senior in highschool. I say it as I see it.
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Yes, but men have children too. Is that the scapegoat?
I'm getting mixed messages here. Women demand to become an equal part of the IT industry (the latest in a series of 'boys' clubs') so in they come. Now they're leaving because of the nature of the beast? IT == global == 24/7 requirements. Somebody has to keep the servers running, and somebody has to make the sandwiches.
Here's an idea; let's make a new set of rules. You get hired based on your experience, qualifications, knowledge, education, and willingness to come to an accord as to the working conditions and requirements. Period. Forget the pigmentation of your skin, the tone of your accent, or the makeup of your chromosomes. If you're not cut out for the job - leave.
Is this still news? Better still - why is this still news?!?
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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.
Equality these days essentially means that one group is given an unfair advantage over another: It might be women who expect to work fewer hours and get the same pay, or it is things like affirmative action. In both those cases, and others , the action is self defeating: if the group demands help to be equal it undermines the cause because it doesn't make them equal, it just gives them an unfair advantage over others, and admits that the group being helped is lesser because they need help.
"The quickest way to end a war is to lose it" -Orwell
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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I'm getting mixed messages here. Women demand to become an equal part of the IT industry (the latest in a series of 'boys' clubs') so in they come. Now they're leaving because of the nature of the beast? IT == global == 24/7 requirements. Somebody has to keep the servers running, and somebody has to make the sandwiches.
The message I'm getting in all these posts is something like this:
IT jobs treat people like shit. Women don't stay in the jobs because they don't put with up being treated like shit. Men say the women don't belong because they're not willing to be treated like shit - like they themselves are.
So I ask... why should anyone put up with being treated like shit?
It makes me so happy that I got into the company I'm currently working for. It's a fortune 500 company and everyone works their asses off. But people come and go when they need to/want to. People are always going to the gym to work out or going to volunteer for charities or meeting each other for coffee/beer in one of the several cafes on "campus". The company is always having large after-work parties, even bringing in bands like Dave Matthews; and they always have interesting guest speakers who are eminent in their fields, such as Peter Senge. It's so awesome to work for a company that really values me and wants me to be happy in my work and my home life.
That said, I've never worked harder in my life - and I really enjoy it! If you (collectively) don't work for a company that values you, your happiness, and your well-being, you should try it sometime.
That's very rarely true on a literal basis. Any "interchangeable" jobs are usually hourly, and every cog in the machine gets paid the same thing.
If you're working on salary, then there's rarely such a thing as the "same position" despite lots of folks having the same title -- and salary is negotiable. For a multitude of reasons (some historically sexist, others not), men do tend to negotiate more and harder over salary.
Much like car prices offered to women buyers (which have been studied quite extensively as it's much easier to isolate than salaries), there's a lot of chicken and egg going on in terms of where the fault lies -- do women accept worse offers in negotiations because they're conditioned to or feel they have no choice, or do worse offers get made and stood by simply because negotiators know women will more frequently accept them?
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