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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."
...others said they wanted careers with managerial opportunities. So, in other words, they don't want to work in IT.What on earth does In addition, there was little overlap among the women who reported that managers give up technical skills to develop management skills mean?
Is there any evidence that diversity in the workplace has any tangible benefit to productivity, the bottom line, quality, or employee happiness? I would think that having a group of employees working together who have similar backgrounds, cultures, ideas, and styles would work better together than a diverse group - leading to higher productivity, higher employee happiness, better communication, and an overall positive effect on the bottom line.
One will often hear the argument that diversity brings different ideas and approaches to the table. This may be the case in some fields, and may have a positive impact in some fields. I suspect that IT is not one of those fields. Somebody is not likely to have a different and helpful perspective on any particular technical problem because they have different skin color, a different gender, or a different culture.
Before you call me racist, consider what I am suggesting: that a group of old nerdy white East-coast Slashdotters and a group of young liberal social Latino SoCal women will _both_ outperform a "diverse" group. I am not discussing, nor presently concerned with, the relative productivity of the first two groups.
It would be an interesting problem if it was shown that diversity actually hinders performance in certain fields. A corporation's policy of encouraging diversity would be in direct opposition to its responsibility to its shareholders.
Conduct a study that contradicts my hypothesis, I and will gladly admit to being wrong.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
The article itself is crap, really. It doesn't seem to address anything well or sensibly, as other commenters have noted. The real problem with being a woman in IT? Shows in the comment threads to this post.
I've worked IT jobs and I've worked education jobs and I've worked retail and that whole collection of jobs that someone works getting to where one needs to be, and even as recently as, oh, two weeks ago, showing up in response to something IT-related with the audacity of having been born and continuing to be an actual female gets raised eyebrows, snickers, and derisive comments. Now, I'm all for mocking mercilessly those who deserve it, but purely being female is not grounds for deserving it.
It was originally part of Teen Talk Barbie in 1992. From the Barbie Wiki (so you know it's true!) In 1992 Mattel released Teen Talk Barbie, which spoke a number of phrases including "Will we ever have enough clothes?", "I love shopping!", and "Wanna have a pizza party?" Each doll was programmed to say four out of 270 possible phrases, so that no two dolls were likely to be the same. One of these 270 phrases was "Math class is tough!"
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.
They want to work here. They just want to be the Chief and not the Indian. Of course, in most places it is very competitive to become either lead or manager. So if they do not want to put in their time, it is not surprising that they are leaving for different jobs or family life.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've been working overseas in the Middle East and Asia and my IT workforce have been pretty much evenly divided by gender. Perhaps non-western women view IT as an unusual opportunity to gain entre to the marketplace and work with men as peers. Why it's not appealing to western women is not clear in the article although I must say not much of anything is clear in the article.
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
The best managers I ever had were the ones who had a good grasp of the expected _outcome_ of my work, but were a little fuzzier on the technical details. Not that they were completely ignorant about what my work entails, but they gave me a goal and turned me loose to accomplish it.
Scratch a manager who is interested in the nity-grity minutia of what the employees and nine times out of ten, you'll find a micro-manager.
Just my experience, of course. YMMV
I knew one woman in IT who tried various strategies to keep the guys from hanging around her cubicle all day. One was to leave a pouch of chewing tobacco on her desk. Finally she put up yellow tape "Police Line - Do not Cross" across the opening.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I'm glad you quoted "study" because it sure doesn't seem like it to me.
I don't see why 'equality' has to equate with 'equal everything'. If there are few women in IT, could it be that it doesn't interest women in general? Wouldn't true equality dictate that we all have the equal chance to obtain these positions, not that we have to have equal representation in those positions? Why are few men in hairdressing? Because in all honesty, it probably doesn't interest men, in general, enough to require any kind of schooling. Hairdressing schools, however, do not explicitly or implicitly coerce men to not take part. Frankly, IT is a unforgiving, boring, mind-challenging but body-destructive position that is quite well suited for the under-social lone male, just as Marketing is an unforgiving, thick-skinned, truth-challenged and outward-appearance focussed position well-suited for the toned hardbodies of blonde airheads.
Instead of trying to attract women to IT, try attracting IT to women; they'll naturally gravitate to those things that interest them. As TFA mentions in one of its cases, money and power can be very powerful motivators.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
You're full of shit. I work in state government and we have complete autonomy to build whatever solutions we feel are appropriate. Last year I set up two Oracle application servers for internal agency use, a public website, two large databases, a testing database, and an upgraded software set for all our employees. All I had to get was my boss' permission -- which he gave via email.
The public-facing website, for example, included single sign on, an Oracle Portal, and a complete port of literally hundreds of web pages, forms, and reports from our old website, and a coworker (female) and I got it done in a couple of weeks, WITHOUT consultants.
I know you corporate types just HATE us civil servants, but you're full of shit on this one, pal.
NO CARRIER
You don't need a technical degree to get into IT at all. I work at a large IT shop and would guess that about 30% of the staff have degrees in Computer Science, Math or a science. I'd estimate that about 40% of the staff is female. Other workplaces have been quite similar.
The reason why women aren't in IT is that an ever-changing environment is something that only works for young and older women, leaving this huge career gap. Middle class women have children around age 30 and a statistically significant percentage of mothers either stop working or reduce their hours. So if you were a Novell superstar in 1992, have two kids and come back to work in 1997... guess what... you're an NT 4.0 newbie.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Plus, three the four professional organizations she claims on her CV are sexist, discriminatory and exclusionary - yet if anybody ever suggested to her that there should be an organization for "Men in the Sciences and Engineering" what do you suppose her reaction would be?
This is nothing more than yet another sexist, feminist ivory tower denizen who believes that advancement at the expense of others is a noble pursuit. Some of the best IT workers I've ever known were women and some of the worst were men - and I, like just about everybody else, really don't care who does the work so long as the work gets done. Sex should have absolutely ~zero~ consideration in IT hiring practices. Hire the best person for the job and get rid of that person if their work-life balance is always tipped towards life at the expense of work.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Before I focused my career 100% on the technology aspect, I helped with recruiting and interviews because it was the eaisest way to get promoted and stay technical but avoid the management track where I had to do employee reviews and firings. The seminars about interviews and recruiting tell the truth about "hiring demographics" or whatever the PC term for it is now.
I quit the recruiting ASAP though because applicants, including females, at the job fairs would actually admit to me they didn't want to be doing IT, but felt it was the best financial hope for their future.
It doesn't matter what career path you're on, if you're just in the interview stage and already admitting you don't want to do it, then I'm going to put your resume in the "NO" pile even if I smile and thank you for your time. Unhappy workers are not productive or good for other's morale.
Not all the women specifically mentioned why they didn't want to do IT. A few asked me up front if I had to deal with sexism or what it was like working for and with all men. I even remember one asking me if there were any technical women at the company. When I explained that I was actually one of them, that does recruiting part time she let loose and explicative and something about how I really break the typical stereotype of "technical women". (I was pretty PO'ed at this because we have some really hawt ladies that are very competant, but I kept her resume anyway.)
The OP's question is going to generate different answers. Especially with the generations of late. I wanted a job in IT that I enjoyed with enough compensation so that I could afford the enormous cost of living in the area I chose to live safely as a single female right out of college. Along with it I wasn't going to sacrifice any of my integrity.
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
Or am I the only one with that problem? It's really annoying to be frequently reminded that people need to be convinced that you can do what you spend your life doing. No one is surprised when I make good cookies or get a small child to stop crying! Why must they be shocked when I do good math?
The closely related phenomena is that people feel the need to tell me I'm good at this stuff. It's as if they expect me not to realize I'm good at it, since it was such a shock to them. I swear it's as if they caught their pet gerbil building a rocket, completely unthinkable but kind of cool.
I think I understand what you're getting at. The women are sick of the "trying to react non-stereotypically" when they break stale stigmas that are sadly still present.
If so, thats a good point. In highschool, I was the only person in my graduating class that took more math classes than were offered at the school. (No, I did not graduate valedictorian or fit in any stereotype from The Breakfast Club.) We just had no Calculus, in fact, we had no AP classes. My senior year I didn't feel like taking "Baking Deserts III" (don't laugh, it was a real class) and fought the "football is all that matters" public school system to let me take my two empty slots to go off-campus to the local university and take a Calc I course, instead of being an office aide and learning to bake pie.
When I did this, a women from the university used me as a research subject in her psychology thesis entitled "Women Can Conquer Math Phobia". She interviewed me for hours asking me how I got over my fear of math and science, etc... Then she showed me a bunch of data about how women are born with brains that are physically different and have to overcome hurdles to understand math. My mom is an ardent feminist, both parents are liberal, open-minded archeaologists that told me I could do whatever I wanted to do with education despite gender. Before I met this woman who told me about "math phobia" I guess I never even thought about gender applying to how I studied. I blew her off because one of the best teachers I ever had was my high school math teacher who was an older lady that didn't take any crap from anyone and taught math like no one's business.
In college, to help buy groceries, I tutored math. I don't recall having a significant number of guys who hated math and whined about Calculus anymore than did females.
Yet I was sick of the "Oh wow, its a chick that can code in C and she compiles her own Linux kernels too!" in the senior/grad Math/CS classes. The first time it was kinda flattering, then it got condescending fast. It was like I was performing for an audience at a circus.
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos