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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."
While women represent almost 60 percent of the workforce....
I question this number. Does it seem fishy?
also...
Human-resources personnel need to recognize that women have diverse values and motivations throughout their careers and tailor hiring and retention practices to fit those needs
Since when do employers tailor jobs for their employees? Don't employers post what they want the person to do and the job seekers decide whether they want to apply or not? Or is this only if employers "need" to employ more women in their IT departments.
www.joshferguson.org
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.
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!"
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.
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