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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."
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.
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.