Slashdot Mirror
Not Enough Women In Computing, Or Too Many Men?
itwbennett writes "Do geeks really 'drive girls out of computer science,' as the headline of a LiveScience article contends? Blogger Cameron Laird doesn't think so. In fact, 'I don't think "gender issues in computing" is important enough to merit the attention it gets,' says Laird in a recent post. And maybe the problem isn't that there are too few women in computing, but that there are too many men. 'I'm waiting to read the headline: "Women too smart for careers with computers,"' says Laird, 'where another researcher concludes that only "boys" are stupid enough to go into a field that's globally-fungible, where entry-level salaries are declining, and it's common to think that staying up all night for a company-paid pizza is a good deal.'"
I need a job.
Cue the moral outrage for a person promulgating deragatory gender stereotypes.
Wait, it is a woman? Nevermind.
The items he mentions are part of the reason I am trying to get out of IT.
IT workers are getting smaller and smaller salaries, having to compete with H1-Bs and out-of-country workers, have to deal with job scope creep, idiot managers, and expected to give up any semblance of work/life balance just to keep up.
It has gotten to the point where working in IT just isn't worth it because the positions just aren't respected.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Can we get over this whole sexism bullshit already? Who gives a damn if women don't work in IT? If a woman wants to do something in IT, fine. If she doesn't, fine. If you want to look for gender-based discrimination, look elsewhere.
Does the job pay your bills at an acceptable standard of living?
Are you doing what you are good at?
Are you having fun?
If the answers above are all yes, then who gives a fuck what some researcher thinks.
Odd we don't see many stories about the global shortage in female garbage collectors. Or janitors. And isn't a little bit 90's to go with the whole "Whoah, those powerful women are just too smart to go into computers! Girl powa!". It's not going to get you laid, I promise. Computers are a good field compared to most regardless of declining salaries or anything else.
Women aren't in computers because they tend not to be interested in it. Whether this is socialization or genetics or some mixture is up for debate, and of course there are exceptions but we see the ratio of men to women in computing because men are interested in or gifted in computing at a ratio higher than women.
Not just that, it works on all levels... Men seem to be more willing to work silly hours for pizza than women. Men are also more inclined to pretty much give up their personal life to go into higher management, whereas women prefer to forego a career in favour of working part-time.
Men and women tend to make different choices; I don't know if it's Nature or Nurture, but smarts or stupidity have very little to do with it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It’s almost like men and women are... well, different!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
More like people should stop trying to make the whole world average. If a particular field has more men in it, who cares?
This just in, there are more female babysitters than males. Oh no, we have a babysitter gender gap!
Why does everything on the planet have to be "fair" in a way that's really not fair at all because it's actually just a contrived view of how "things should be" in some fantasy? And a better question, when are going to stand up to such nonsense and reject the whole premise that the world should be a statistical average reflecting a cross-section of all society?
I complain about all of those things. Except one day I was hit by a realization at 4am while trying to get a workstation to function: "Hey, I could be getting paid for this." See a lot of us in IT do it, despite all of our bitching and moaning, because we really do love it. We love computers, we love technology, we love being the go-to-people whenever anything that goes "BEEP!" with flashy lights isn't working quite right. We wish we got more respect, and we wish we were better compensated. But then again, who doesn't? Who ever says, "Man, I just make TOO MUCH money!" I work on call hours, and yes it does suck. However the fact remains that the first thing I do when I get home is sit down at my computer. I'm still up til 2am (or later) working on computers. The only difference between that and being on call is that we don't have the control we normally do. But we're still doing the same work. We do it because we love it, even though we say we hate it. Its just one of those things we love to hate.
If you're going to get scared away by the negative parts, take a hard look at how you spend your time now. If you're working on computers all the time, and you enjoy making them work, fixing them, etc, then don't run away quite so fast. If you're a programmer, the same point stands. I left the comp sci department in college because the professor demanded we be in the lab 80+ hours a week. I thought he was crazy. Thing is, every programmer I've met spends easily 80 hours a week programming. Sometimes more. I see them literally pull 48 hour shifts, stopping only briefly to take catnaps without leaving their chairs. They do it because its their passion and there's nothing else they'd rather be doing. Its not like they're hourly. The prof was just weeding out the people who weren't really cut out for it, and he saved me a lot of time, energy, and frustration. Hell, maybe a trip to the psych ward too. It comes down to this: if its what you love, you learn to take the bad along with the good. Don't let other people warp your perspective.
Women act more based on emotions and feelings than guys do, whereas guys will act on logic and black & white facts
Nope.
I used to think this 40 years ago, which is about when I started my IT career (with 8 years off to teach physics.)
My observation is that in general, men are much much more likely to get emotional in a business setting when there are differences of opinion. The way that they express emotion, from raised voices, blustering, filibustering to even stomping out of the room are somehow found to be socially acceptable. Men are the first to start emoting and are often the only ones. I've found that it is quite rare for a female to express emotion while in a business/professional setting and usually only after extreme provocation. On the other hand, it's almost a matter of course for men, especially those in or seeking to be management.
Is there anyone who is not aware that that raising your voice, shaking your head, pointing fingers, crossing arms etc are expressions of emotional behaviors?
Indeed. You want to look at the last place institutional discrimination is tolerated by society, go ask a man in a 'working with young children' profession.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The government is hardly "shipping in the foreigners". Their normal involvement consists of forcibly keeping said foreigners out, which works directly against the market economy by maintaining artificially high prices for labor. On occasion, when they deign to notice a shortage of certain skills, they reduce their interference in the market economy and graciously permit a few more well-qualified foreigners to immigrate.
I'd be the first to admit that their policy as a whole favors certain influential individuals—e.g. shareholders of large corporations—over others, but the solution to that inequality consistent with our market economy is not to further block immigration by refusing H1-Bs, but rather to remove the requirement for H1-Bs entirely, permitting free and open immigration. Naturally this would require that the current welfare system to be significantly reduced in scope, if not eliminated entirely; otherwise the existing citizens would be forced to subsidize the new immigrants' "benefits", a most unjust circumstance. Any nation with open borders, as ours was intended to be, must insist that individuals pay their own way (not counting private, voluntary support, e.g. charity).
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
When I graduated CS, 75% of the students graduating were male. The CS program has all kinds of incentives, grants, scholarships, programs, and other things to try and get more female students. They consider it a "problem" that needs fixing that its slanted.
Right in front of me was the nursing graduates. 97% female. They have no such programs for males, and nobody considers this a "problem". They consider it a choice of men to not go into nursing.
Oddly, nobody questions that, while people constantly question women in CS. Go around ask them. I work with lots of women all the time, none of them want to be programmers. They're doing what they actually want to do, which is something else.
This isn't a real problem. This is stats not lining up in a way some people think they should, so they create a problem out of it.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
It's the feminists who are making excuses
I'm not sure I agree with your whole post, but I have to give you props for this quote here. I'm a women in computer engineering and honestly, the place I feel the most uncomfortable is around so-called feminists. In university I avoided the women's center like the plague because every time I went in there with my eng books or wearing an engineering sweater or anything I always got the LOOK and a lecture about how I was just as bad as all the rest of those engineers and why are our songs so disgusting and blah blah blah.
There's sort of a delicious irony about someone claiming they are this huge feminist and then going into women's studies, the MOST un-evenly gender balanced and stereotypically female subject available and then having the gall to give me shit for singing stupid songs and drinking too much beer. You want to fix the gender balance in computer engineering? Well, the computer is right over there, stop doing stupid sociology studies and learn to code.
...no two people are not on fire.
No one is going to go out of their way to make women feel all warm and cozy.
Noone does it for men either. Men generally treat each other like crap, and all men get ignored, talked over, dismissed etc. until they prove themselves. Women often mistake 'equal treatment' for sexism.
And as a woman in a computer discipline, I can say:
1) There can be some vicious treatment sometimes, but it's not terribly often. Most of it is a immature junior-high remark, or getting excluded from a group. I have yet to encounter anything physically threatening, though (unlike my last job, which wasn't computing related). I can tell there are some people who don't know how to react to my presence, or get embarrassed if they technically slip on a PC issue. If the intent is well-meant, or if they're generally polite, I don't take offence.
2) It's up to me to deal with it. In general, acting like a professional, keeping your cool, and politely letting people know where your boundaries are goes a long way. Picking your fights helps too - don't get uppity at the smallest thing - everyone, male or female, has pinches at their workplace. Nasty stuff like a company that hires you to do tech work and instead makes you their coffee bitch gets an immediate vote of new job hunting and my feet out the door ASAP. Actually, something like that happened to a coworker, and it was a big factor to me leaving... I'm not about to argue with several members of an old boys' club. What's the point, for any of us, if I stay there?
The summary basically is: crap happens, deal with it. Get a backbone, treat yourself with self-worth, quit acting like a victim, and you won't be as one.
(My favorite incident was a guy who told me I shouldn't go back to school because it would be difficult, and I was approaching 30, so I had better have children while I can because all women want children when they're around 30, and I'll regret it if I don't. This coming from a fat, balding, divorced, childless middle-aged guy. This could have "scarred me for life", but instead I decide to spend time with people other than him. Problem solved. n.b. - Taking a MCSE & CCNA college program starting in January. I guess I had better drop out now, because of some nasty things four people have said to me in the last few years.)