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Study Reveals What Women Want From IT Jobs
amigoro writes "Ever wonder why there are so few women in the IT workplace? It turns out that the typical recruiters sales pitch, which emphasizing job promotion and security, acts to keep women out of the information technology jobs. While about 30 percent indicated they valued careers that afforded them opportunities to perfect skills in technical areas, others said they wanted careers with managerial opportunities. In addition, there was little overlap among the women who reported that managers give up technical skills to develop management skills."
Government scientist say womens have brain size of squirrel.
When I interview people for very technical programming jobs and the interviewee focuses too much on managerial opportunities it's definitely a red flag. A simple question about moving up the ladder is fine, of course. But if the intent is only to work up to management that's usually the sign of someone who's not going to enjoy the programming, and therefore not be very good at it.
Developers: We can use your help.
The problem is not what the recruiters are pitching, it is the recruiters themselves. In most if not all IT-centric organizations that I have worked in, recruiters are young, good looking woman. This is entirely intentional, as a means to attract the young, generally not so good looking geek guys. Often the HR department of a Software company is the only department with a signficant number of females. Perhaps a few young hot guys in HR would help attract more women to IT.
As a recruiter, I can tell you that my sales pitch has nothing to do with the number of women working with IT. I can only work with the talent that's out there on the market, and the reality is there are at least 25 men in IT for every woman.
In the last 2 months I've found 3 women looking for work in IT in my market area. One was a help desk candidate fresh out of college, one was a more experienced desktop support tech, and the last was a mid level Unix admin (who rode her harley to the interview). I placed all three of them in less than 36 hours over male candidates with more experience.... not hard to guess why.
Too easy, I hope the Stanford Business School is up to snuff for you.
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http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/podgend
Second research item down: Diverse Backgrounds and Personalities Can Strengthen Groups
Really, history is full of the dangers of group thought. You need to show why IT is different, not the other way around.
I'm not sure if that's that same study I heard about, but my understanding is that prevailing research shows the homogenous teams tend to be more efficent (for the reasons the gp intuits), but a diverse team tends to be more creative.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
Sometimes it works out differently. I'm the female IT manager for a small company. I don't program, but have handled just about everything else since I've worked here. I started out as the receptionist after a post-911 layoff, and was promoted less than a year later because I was able to resurrect a dead DOS-based voicemail system. Over time the IT duties have been split between myself and a co-worker (also female), and I now do the design, production and webmastering of the company website, and design ads and other printed materials. I still set up and rebuild machines, diagnose network problems, make software and hardware purchasing decisions, and other general IT-related stuff. There's not much management involved, what gets done by whom is usually decided on the ride up to the office.
I enjoy the variety of my job. I'm not on a straight 8-5 schedule and wear a t-shirt and jeans most of the time. At times, if I have a tight deadline, I just load everything onto my laptop and finish it off at home. I've got a great office and great people to work with. I live in an area where salaries have never been great, but I guess there's always a trade-off. At least I enjoy what I do for a living.
If there's one field in the entirety of industry where the gender wage gap is narrowest if it exists at all, it has to be IT. This field is populated by (on average) the most logical, objective people the entire planet has to offer. It has to. If it weren't, none of these systems would work.
In other sectors, if there's a wage gap for reasons other than skill, experience, energy, and commitment, I could believe it.
But not in IT. At least not in my city.
If you're making less in IT, your gender has nothing to do with it.
On a somewhat related note, if there's a field where people need to be the most "dialled-in" to what they do, in terms of having been "born to do what they do" as it were, it is probably IT. There's just a certain something, a something that has nothing to do with gender, race, whatver, that makes or breaks someone in the IT field. It's there in varying degrees in varying people, but it has to be there. *cough*high-functioning autism*cough*
Well thank God you aren't the manager. You'd obviously suck at it.
How is the female "running the place" when she wants to work without horny guys harrassing her all the time? Do explain.
Also, given beauty is in the eye of the beholder, no one ever sees their code as 'disgusting'.