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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.
"I don't think 'gender issues in computing' is important enough to merit the attention it gets,"
So why are you still talking about it?
One calm, level headed discussion about the disparity of genders in the world of computer science where everyone agrees on the solution with no emotions, personal anecdotes, gender studies, centuries of suffrage, accusations, cherry picked statistics, flamebait quotes from message boards, reverse sexism or chauvinistic undertones trumpeted.
Yep, this one sounds like it might be even as tame as your average climategate discussion.
My work here is dung.
It's still a great field with good salary, sane work hours and prospects for advancements. It's just not as compelling as during dot com boom. Women should stop making excuses and go into any good field they like.
Company-paid pizza and a soda, or fix it yourself.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
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.
I've been taking my 18 year old to tour colleges as he will be pursuing chemical engineering. Engineering starting salaries across the board (chemical, civil, mechanical, and electrical) are between $50 and $70k.
The solution for many comp sci students is to double major comp sci with one of the above "demand" areas, pass the professional engineering exam, and then the money issue is a non issue. Computer skills are now part and parcel of every engineering profession, so getting paid well to do what you love (if you love computers) should not be difficult.
The challenge for people hell-bent on starting their careers as programmers (as opposed to computer engineers) seems to be that starting programmers are not worth as much.
[By the way, the number of girls on his engineering tours seem to be between 10% and 20%. In other words, nothing there is changing. My son's solution to the ratio issue is to attend a large university where there are more female students overall.]
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
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.
As a 49 yo grandmother, feminist, and C programmer for 20+ years I feel highly qualified to comment on this. The answer is that in my experience merit alone has been the only factor.
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.
No, men just not that interested in being nurses, unless they're gay.
Shoveling bits sucks. It was fun about 10 years ago, but staring at a screen for a few years leaves one wanting for a change.
Hope is the currency of fools
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.
I am a girl. Being on call all day and all night / programming until mentally exhausted / etc. is not something I am willing to do. So yeah, I'm going into teaching. EVEN THOUGH I AM A GEEK. Thanks for telling me what the working conditions were in the field, Slashdot - you made the decision that much simpler.
Note: I was 13 when I wrote most of this. Take with several grains of salt.
On those occasions when I've been reviewing resumes for an open job requirement, it's rare for even one in fifty applicants to be female. I don't see anyone trying to keep them out, I just don't see them trying to get in.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Programmer 84k http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=programmer&l1=new+york
Garbage man 77k http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=garbage+man&l1=new+york
But the garbage man gets overtime and probably union benefits.
>better social prestige.
Only here.
Just don't piss her off Mr Bobbit.
A woman named Jeanna Bryner wrote the original article, entitled "Geeks Drive Girls Out of Computer Science" (1st link), which is arguing the fairly standard point, that women are turned away from CS due to a male-dominated geek culture. The reply, from a male blogger named Cameron Laird (2nd link), argues the opposite, that women are too smart to go into computing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Fortunately their is a comment on the blog that has some interesting insight...
http://www.itworld.com/tictacns
Not enough Women in Tech
I believe this may be the article that MSNBC was referring to:
http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=54341
"It was brought to my attention in an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) newsletter.
My opinion is that Tech is a tool, a means to get from point A to point B, like a car. I think women want to be the travelers, using Tech to achieve their goals and using the auto industry analogy, they generally do not want to be the mechanics. When we hear about tech, we usually hear about the techies/mechanics, we do not hear about the many other skills that the tech industry requires to thrive and people tend to not pursue things they are not aware of."
That.
Prior to the tech inovations of computers and the internet, we had cars and trains as the feets of an earlier generation where the people who were most into building and working on hotrods were men, but many mechanics have ladies who loved their vets and mustangs. People who have fascination with trains have mostly seemed to come from men as well, though many woman use them as a means of transportation and wouldn't think twice about hopping on a trolly, light rail or subway, though they don't care about how it works, just that it does. To some degree this affects many sciences...
Perhaps this says somethign more about differences between men and women...
Ave Molech Setting
Your reasoning is speculative, and argued against by the existence of matriarchal societies in the past. Regardless, you're arguing contingencies--the fact that our society happens to descend from patriarchal societies says nothing about whether we should remain patriarchal, or view our status quo as somehow not worth challenging.
You mention programming as a male-dominated profession due to an evolutionary trait; I'll counter with medicine, specifically doctors. A hundred years ago, female doctors were unknown; now they make up around 30% of the profession, a figure that's been climbing continuously since the 60s (women were 7% of the doctors in 1970) and is expected to continue to grow. I presume you'd agree that being a doctor is similarly demanding in terms of logic, critical analysis, knowledge, and just generally those scientific skills that are common to both medicine and programming. If your stereotype holds true, than wouldn't all professions that elevate logic above emotion show approximately the same lack of participation by women?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Too many misters, Not enough sisters
Too much time on, too many hands
Not enough ladies, too many mans
Karma: Non-Heinous
Boys grow up with computer games
I got into comp sci because I wanted to code better options into my Barbie fashion designer games, but my brother took a poli-sci route even though he played way more games then I did. In the past 20 or so years, there have been a steady slew of video games for girls, and we're still seeing the gender disparities.
open source modern art: laser taggi
It's possible to be a day-job geek who never plays video games, doesn't own an iphone, and doesn't read xkcd, yet still thrive in high-tech.
What the hell does any of that have to do with being a sneering, arrogant, sexually inept bully?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Actually from what I've seen, it's the rigor of the academic program that tends to drive away female students (i.e. they're not capable in either math/logic, or programming, or both). And I'm saying this as a female computer science undergraduate observing my fellow peers. I'm not in it for the money; I'm in this field because (a) I like computer science and (b) I'm good at it.
Being driven away from a field purely because of the fact that it's "too geeky" is too generic of an excuse to explain this disparity. For all we know, this disparity occurs for the same reason that nursing has a similar but opposite gender mismatch (as mentioned by countless commentors above me). I am sure personal background and skills have a lot of say in this (both parents were in engineering programs).
I have known way too many girls who display this superiority complex yet have absolutely no idea what they are doing.
Not this bullshit again. We all know that women can do whatever they want because they are superior to men in every way (except for bad things like starting wars and committing murder, then of course men are superior).
If there are less women in IT than men it is because the women want it that way. I think there were at most 5 women in my entire graduating class that were in the CS program. Most women (and to be fair, most people) just see computers as gadgets and expensive toys and don't really care about how they work on the inside. Again, just being honest here, most men get excited when you ask them about their plasma TV, surround sound, network setup, etc but I've never known any women that could be considered technophiles. I'm sure they exist, it just isn't as common.
Another serious problem I've noticed is that there are not enough women working in construction. Living in Houston, I drive by a lot of construction throughout the city on a daily basis and I have never seen a single woman working at a construction site. Talk about a crisis!
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
...that in the 21st century we'd moved away from this kind of sexist nonsense.
If there aren't as many women in computing ("enough women" is a nonsense term: what's "enough") then it's because women don't want to be in computing.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
The government should work for the good of it's citizens: that *should* be it's sole purpose.
Letting H1-Bs into the country works directly against this, regardless of any (often fraudulent) claim that there is a short-term shortage.
We're supposed to be in a market economy - shortages of skills should result in increasing wages and an increased incentive for employers to train staff. Yet whenever the market begins to move in that direction the government starts shipping in the foreigners: which only benefits the global corporations.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Teaching is hard work, low pay, and often very thankless. My mom was a teacher for about 25 years and I really wouldn't wish that on anyone. While it is the sort of thing that certain people thrive in, particularly those that are very caring and have a "Save the world" mentality, I think most skilled people would be better off doing something else. The pay is just not in line with other jobs requiring a master's level of education. Now that might be ok if it were easy work, but it isn't. Teachers have tons of homework to deal with, it is very much a job that is not 9-5. Then there's all the problems. You WILL have parents shout at you, try to get your fired, you'll have kids that come from broken homes, you'll have to be a babysitter as well as a teacher.
So, if you are the kind of person who thrives on helping others, the kind of person who saving just one person can be a worthwhile reward for a lot of work, then look at it. However if you think that it is going to be less work than IT you are kidding yourself. I work so much less than mom did it isn't even funny.
Just make sure you know what you are getting in to.
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?
http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=621
How often does this have to be said? Yes, there are more men than women in IT. Why is that? Um, because?
Disclaimer - I'm a woman and I've worked in the IT field for almost 20 years.
Yes, I've found that in general IT is a boy's club. I'm used to being the only woman in the group. And I'm used to the crap that I have to put up with being the only woman. I've been ignored, talked over, dismissed (well, they tried that), and generally excluded. It happens. Grow a pair.
No one is going to go out of their way to make women feel all warm and cozy. So you can't use traditional female tactics to carve out your place. And unfortunately that's what most women fall back on when faced with a difficult situation.
My way of making things tolerable is to take my place on the totem pole relatively early on. I watch the personalities and, sad to say, make the weakest one my bitch. Once I do that then I'm on my way to acceptance. It's how they play, it's how I have to play. YMMV
I've mentored women in IT and it isn't pretty. But if they learn a few tricks they can at least stay long enough to find out if they like the work and can work in the environment.
Many women are too smart to bother working, that is what men are for. The world works in such a way that women do not need to work, provided they are attractive to enough males. Women are taught this from an early age - hence why women mature socially years earlier than men (on average). Easily 50% of women are "kept" in this way, unless they choose to work or are really ugly or have other deficiencies according to men. From age 18 - 33 or so, women have tremendous power over men based on appearance alone.
OTOH, males are trained from an early age that if you want a woman (and all that entails), you need to have a high paying job, power or both. The better the job, the better the woman you will likely attract. Better can mean all sorts of things - family, status, beauty, smarter, fertile, cute, famous, etc. There's almost zero chance of a man being "kept" although I'll keep trying.
In a male-dominated world, rage and petulance are not considered emotions. That's why men are "less emotional" than women.
The problem with people in IT is that they don't know how to say NO.
I do know how, and that has ensured a long career while having a fulfilling life outside work.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"it's just saying a male dominated environment turns off women"
That would have been the situation with most jobs during most of human history.
It is the typical "blame the victim" mentality, putting the onus of improvement on the oppressed part rather than the oppressor. Truly despicable frankly.
Any men worth the name should be doing soul searching instead of trying to find excuses for the unacceptable low amount of women in certain careers.
.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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.
Because women really deep down just wanna 'make home', while men really deep down just wanna get away from the nagging wife a bit ;) (I keed I keed, mods don't kill me)
But I write software, and I stay employed all the time, despite my unwillingness to work over 40 hours per week, and despite my insistence on a healthy six figure salary. I have done this for 16 years.
Females tend to help each other to feel good.
Go ahead and take this with a grain of salt, since this is only one person's experience.
Here is the timeline of my experience in basic training in the air force (not too long ago):
-Put your bag down! Pick your bag up! (equal response)
-Goddammit you need ta march with yer feet hitting the same beat HUP TWO TREE FOR (women win by miles)
-You need ta help your bunkmate get 'is SHIT TOGETHER! (men win by a landslide, as the sister flight is already getting into micropolitics)
-I want your shirts aligned to the micrometer and I want your marching to be in step to the yottasecond! (by this time, the women are falling into factions)
-Graduation is tomorrow, don't f*&^ing embarrass me! (and by now, the women have split into camps while the men have unified)
I agree with what you said up until about 3 weeks into a project. After that, the men catch up on the unified front level and the women fall behind because of the clique thing. I'm not going to say that one side is better since both genders have their strengths, but ask any drill instructor: Women hate each other by the end of boot, and men create life-long bonds. That's generalization but one that fits 90%+ of the people I've known.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
The fact is, more young boys than girls will treat any kind of toy or stick or whatever they can find as a weapon, and more young girls than boys will treat any kind of toy or stick or whatever they can find as a doll, and I think most people who are parents and truly think about it realize that this happened at an extremely young age for their kids. If there is a "nurture" side to how this works, it is exerted very early and in a round-about way.
I don't know how to do paragraphs, so I'll keep this short. Do you think women might fight 'acting' emotional in the business setting to avoid men thinking of them as 'typical' emotional women? Honest question, as a young (21)female in another male-dominated industry (logistics), I've seen a bit of boardroom meetings and agree with your assessment, women tend to be more 'cool' as opposed to the somewhat 'arrogant' males. Note, yes, personal anecdote, this is a generalisation blah blah blah.
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.)
I first got involved in computing when I was 8yo, and typing, doing excel and tinkering with hypercard.
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
Never really entered my mind at the time. It seems to me that at the time a girl would not have been encouraged to take such an interest in computing at that age, if not actively discouraged.
The time that most of us at /. really developed our interest in things geeky were before we started noticing the fairer sex, and it would appear that we managed to bypass that altogether. I don't think that geeks tend to drive off women from the profession, I think that the initial interest is never truly engendered there to begin with.
It would be an interesting survey to ask women who have worked in computing for 5+ years, why they initially joined the profession. Then run the same survey on a comparable group of men, and compare why they are where they are.
I admit, my data is a little stale - I graduated HS/College in 95/99.
I work at a defense contractor. There's a little bit of sexism that seems to be primarily from older former military types, where I think it's less that I'm a female programmer than I'm a female programmer working on artillery software. And the one time that I overheard a co-worker who got passed over for promotion in favor of me comment that to get his promotion he would have to change his gender.
In college, I was in the first class of women that they admitted. (It was an all engineering and science university.) To placate people, they accepted additional students equal to the number of women so that no one would whine that they could have gotten in, if it weren't for those girls. The most sexism I had to put up with was actually from my Psych prof, of all people. Other than that, I think the divide was more between the merely-geeky-enough-to-go-there and the ubergeek types. Anyway, they opened up their pool of applicants and the average GPA went up quite a bit.
I was very lucky; we had conversations about this in college, given our environment. I knew someone who's own father didn't want her to go to college because "you'll just get married and waste all that learning". We all had to deal with teasing in high school, etc, but it's difficult to tell if it's the same as what other geeks went through, or worse for women. Personal experiences are difficult to compare.
What do you expect? A Harvard president says what you did, more or less, and because he has a penis, he's forced to resign. There's no way to have an honest debate on the subject because of the feminist extremists who crucify anyone that suggests a biological basis. You want women in computers, fine: it's a bad idea with jobs going overseas, but if your plan is thus, you have to start a whole lot earlier.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"