The Shortage of Women In IT

CIStud writes "The IT industry is hurting for women. Currently only 11% of IT companies are owned by women. The Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) Federal Contract program requires 5% of all IT jobs to go to female-owned integration companies, but there must be at least 2 female bidders. There are so few female bidders that women-owned IT firms are ineligible for the contracts. From the article: 'Wendy Frank, founder of Accell Security Inc. in Birdsboro, Pa., wishes she had more competitors. It's not often you hear any integrator say that, but in Frank's case, she has good reason. The current Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) Federal Contract program authorizes five percent of Federal prime and subcontracts to be set aside for WOSBs. While that might sound fair on the surface, in order to invoke the money set aside for this program, the contracting officer at an agency has to have a reasonable expectation that two or more WOSBs will submit offers for the job. “We could not participate in the government’s Women-Owned Small Business program unless there was another female competitor,” says Frank. “Procurement officers required that at least two women-owned small businesses compete for the contracts, even in the IT field, where women-owned businesses are underrepresented.”'"

Comments

Oh come on...

[Frosty Piss]

There is no âoeshortageâ of women in IT since in fact there is no quota nor any particular class of IT job that specifically requires women, and so likewise IT is not âoehurtingâ for women.

Now, perhaps it can be said that few women want to go into IT, or perhaps there actually is a bias against women in IT, but this âoeshortageâ and âoehurtingâ bullshit is hyperbole.

Unless Iâ(TM)ve just been unaware of the all-nude Swedish lesbian IT shopsâ¦

Re:Oh come on...

[TWX]

Historically, boys, rather than girls, were encouraged to play with computers in the, "let's take it apart and upgrade it," sense. This encourages boys through their adolescent years to play with computers themselves as opposed to just using them. These boys grow into young men with knowledge and experience that fills though few slots above the average user, ie, the exact knowledge needed for entry-level service, like fixing PCs, setting up equipment, and other things that small service companies do for revenue.

On top of that, if those companies do field work, destinations are as varied as a nice, genteel home in a good part of town, to a dirty, grimy warehouse in a bad part of town, to a construction yard, and everywhere in between. These are those places that girls and young women are generally discouraged from visiting without an escort, which is something they're not going to have when working for a small IT shop.

Entry-level IT employees may become mid-level IT employees, and some, even without college, might become high-level IT employees or even IT managers. Thing is, probably only one in ten will be good enough to be mid-level, and probably one in a hundred will be good enough to be at the top or to be a manager or owner. While it's not essential for an owner to know the ins and outs of the IT business, I can tell you from at three experiences in my career when the boss is only a businessman and doesn't know anything about performing the duties the business provides, the business generally folds or is weak with an empty suit occupying an office.

When probably less than 20% of incoming entry-level IT workers are women, and distill that to the one in ten or one in a hundred to mid and high level jobs, and you can quickly see why there are few women owners, managers, or non-college tech workers in general. While women with college degrees are certainly better represented in IT-related jobs that benefit from college, a lot of IT still lets experience replace college, which means that men still dominate if they come up through the work-experience route.

Had women been more represented in IT work through my roughly sixteen year career my life probably would have turned out differently. The few women in IT were either so hounded or so damaged that real relationships with women who actually understood my work were essentially impossible. So many of the very few women that were in the business were sexually-harassed to the point that they didn't bother to remain in IT either, instead looking for other kinds of work. To me, the lack of women is very much not a surprise.

Re:Oh come on...

[humanrev]

Off topic, but I think the above post is an excellent example of how the lack of Unicode support in Slashdot is still retarded.

Re:Oh come on...

[Belial6]

I see this with all of my peers. They are either oblivious as to why girls pick certain things and boys others, or they believe they know why and use their children for their confirmation bias. All the while, I see every single one of them pushing their children into the predefined sexual roles that society has dictated. Even when they don't think they are doing it themselves, all of the people around them are doing it. Their relatives. The schools. The TVs. It is unavoidable.

Part of that gender message that gets ground into children day in and day out is that males MUST get a good job if they want a good life. females CAN get a good job if they want a good life. As soon as little girls begin to interact with the rest of society, it is made absolutely clear to them that they do not need to provide for themselves. There is always someone else who will do it for them.

Irrelevant of gender, you will get a lower percentage of people that have been told they don't have to work, working hard and taking less than desirable jobs. The fact that women as a group tend to gravitate towards jobs that pay less and require less sacrifice is not surprising. They are not underrepresented in these jobs because of their gender. It is because their gender is under represented in the group that is raised to believe that no one is going to pay their way through life.

It isn't a genetic problem, and the solution for under representation of women in IT isn't to do more of what caused the under representation in the first place.

If you want to see this whole thing really laid bare, look at plumbing. In IT it could be argued that everybody is equal, and thus it must be discrimination. When you look at plumbing, there are jobs were particular genders have a distinct advantage. While there are some jobs that require physical strength so a men as a group have a genetic advantage, in residential plumbing, it is incredibly common for the plumber to need to squeeze through small places. Many houses do not have enough clearance under them for an average sized man to fit. This is a field where equally competent little petite women should really shine. Every plumbing company in the country should have tiny little size 0 women working for them. Do we see this? No. Because tiny little size 0 women don't need to crawl around under dank insect infested crawlspaces. They don't need to literally crawl through human feces. So, they don't.

Again. This isn't a genetic problem, and it isn't an industry problem. It is a cultural problem that starts before the kids can even walk. (Of course, that is only if one considers it a problem at all)

Re:Oh come on...

[epyT-R]

So what? you want legal protection from stupid comments/people? I don't think that's really attainable without a police state, and even then... Stand up for yourself. If they think less of you because of it, they are stupid fools. If they're groping or touching you, I have no problem with you defending yourself, physically if necessary. However, your discomfort does not justify bypassing due process like VAWA and other nonsense allows. You were harassed? prove it...and if it's so bad that you're ready to sue, this should be fairly easy. Unfortunately, the definition of 'harassment' keeps expanding every year as women's groups demand zero tolerance for male behavior in growing numbers of contexts. Men will not be eunuchs for the same reason women won't be, no matter what the feminists say about social constructs.

If you've got a lot of guys harassing you, maybe your behavior is playing a role too. See this is another area that irks me: apparently men are the sole proprietors of sexual non-verbal cues and women are just helpless, molested bystanders. This just isn't true. Women started it when they set themselves up to look attractive in the first place (which 99% of women do, of course). From what they do in the morning before work, to the way they carry themselves walking down the hall or sitting in a meeting, to the way they speak, all play into this. As a male, I can tell you this: when a woman is interested, it's very obvious. when a woman is not interested, but is flattered, she is obvious, even when she vehemently denies her interest. men can see that, so they pursue. they have their nature just as women have theirs. Since I don't know how you dress or any details of your situation, I can't comment further, but this is generally what I've seen go down. This is the same thing as the highschool cheerleader that complains about guys staring when she's got nothing on but low cut shorts and a tight tshirt. She's been taught that men owe her whatever behavior she wants, when the reality is that we can't control another's behavior, only our own. Of course, what she really wants is the attention of the 'hot guys' and not the 'losers.' It doesn't work that way.

I happen to find women who take advantage of this mandated upper hand even more inappropriate than a stupid comment. I've seen more than one woman manipulate her way out of trouble she's caused by blaming a man for it (and of course the feminist trained males just believed her and he was raked over the coals for it). Another even held threat of accusation over a man as a means to gain advantage in bonuses. The more attractive the woman, the more likely this is to work, and these sorts of women use this to flatter the men whom they are sexually attracted to and/or are useful idiots, while sticking it to the guys they find unattractive/contemptuous (eg the hs example above). I have zero respect for this. If victimization is claimed by a party, it has no business opportunistically victimizing others, especially when the victim's victimizing occurs in the same context, in this case being gender discrimination.

To stop being sexist, stop being sexist

[SuperKendall]

I take offense at the notion there is a "shortage" of anyone by race, gender, or sexual orientation in IT- or anywhere else.

If you want to stop division and hatred the first step is to stop pretended some people need assistance and others do not. Let people be hired based on their own abilities and they will rise to the challenge - as individuals, not part of some arbitrarily defined group of "victims".

The great thing about IT especially is that it is VERY open to anyone working, probably a lot mores than many other more established professions. If women want to work there, they can and will. There's nothing more we can do as a society to try and convince women to work in IT - so let go the notion that we need some percentage of women and just keep accepting whoever wants to work.

Re:To stop being sexist, stop being sexist

[shutdown -p now]

Yeah right - that worked out REAL WELL for the non-whites in the USA in the 1950s - right? Slavery was ended in 1865 and yet it wasn't until affirmative action was introduced under Kennedy in the 60s that real change began

After slavery was ended, discrimination of blacks was still institutional - Jim Crow laws were just that, laws, enacted by state governments. The turnaround happened when federal government intervened and declared those laws unconstitutional, not because of affirmative action.

Furthermore, I have explicitly said that governments safeguard the rights of citizens, even in private deals between each other - i.e. you can't be fired or denied a job because of your race etc. But that's not affirmative action - that's just enforcing equal opportunity.

What the governments shouldn't do is announce specific groups of people protected, and enact quotas and other ways to promote those groups ahead of other groups, on the basis that they have been historically discriminated against, and now need an unfair advantage in order to "even out" things. That is segregation and discrimination, and it is no less evil when it's done in favor of the minority rather than the majority. That is what affirmative action is.

Women owned, veteran owned etc = junk

[MobyDisk]

The whole system of "veteran-owned" and "women-owned" businesses getting special privileges is a farce. I know of some companies that appoint veterans to certain positions just so they can be veteran owned. Or the veteran may have nothing to do with the company any longer. I know a company that is "woman-owned" because the owner put his wife on the board so he could get special privileges when bidding on government contracts.

Genetics probably does play a role

[Sycraft-fu]

People (Americans in particular) want to discount genetics, pretend that we can all be anything we want to be, that we have no inbuilt limitations.

Of course we know that is false. Most simply it can be seen (and strangely the one area it is accepted) is athletics. Some people have the genes that allows them to become top athletes, the rest don't and that is that. We also see in athletics the difference between men and women, that the genders are not equal at the top, they have areas they are better in.

Well, this carries over to mental, emotional, and other differences as well. Your genetics don't dictate who you are, but they do define some limits on you and also what you might be interested in.

So you are going to see differences in the interest of the genders, even without any societal forces. One interesting example I see is veterinary medicine. Since it has become a field that was acceptable for women to work in (used to be teaching and nursing was all that was considered "ok" for women to be in) it has become very popular for women. The vet office I use is ALL female. All the vets, all the vet techs, all the receptionists, all women. From what I've learned, the heavy amount of women is not an anomaly, it is a field that women have a lot of interest in.

Now why is that? I'm not sure, I've never seen any research on it. Perhaps it is the nurturing aspect that appeals to many women. Whatever the case it certainly isn't something where there's a big push in society to "get women in to veterinary medicine" yet it is happening. It appeals to women, so they go in to it.

None of this is to say that culture and childhood encouragement don't play a part, of course. If a girl is interested in computers but continually told that "girls don't play with computers" that can well change the course of her life. However we have to be open to the idea that just as different individuals have different predispositions, so do the sexes.

We may always see a situation where there are less women interested in IT than men. Frankly I don't think that should be a concern, so long as we make sure it isn't because women are being unfairly forced away from it. I would think it far worse to try and start pressuring women in to careers they don't like all with some misguided idea of "balance".

I guess I feel pretty strongly about this because computers were something I always wanted to do, since as long as I can remember. This wasn't because of my family, mom, dad, grandparents, none of them are technically savvy. However I loved computers and electronics and was fascinated by it from age 3. Clearly it is just one of those things about me, a genetic predisposition. I'm glad I got to follow that, and I wasn't told to do something different because people decided that I should have interests other than that.

Re:Genetics probably does play a role

[TWX]

Veterinary medicine for pets is a fairly new phenomenon, and if the books of James Herriot are to be believed, evolved from livestock veterinary practices. Livestock practices were extremely difficult, dirty, and outright disgusting at times, with veterinarians literally stripping nude to the waist to avoid destroying clothes or leaving clothes bits inside animals when they had to reach into digestive systems or reproductive systems to perform. Obviously for a long time, even men weren't generally socially acceptable while shirtless, and women have been even less-so, continuing to this day. This, plus the physical nature of working with very large, very strong animals that might violently resist the veterinarian would certainly cause problems for women in the industry.

Small animal care, on the other hand, does not favor strength or the ability to get one's upper body into a large animal's cavities. If anything, like your plumbing example, there are situations where surgeries and other medical operations would be better carried out by small hands and small fingers due to working on small creatures.

Back to IT, and your comments on women potentially being unfairly forced away from it, I feel that sexual harassment is a major, major problem with discouraging girls and women from being interested. Unfortunately when boys don't get a lot of interaction with girls, it's difficult to regulate their behavior so that they don't harass. In non-workplace environments it's extremely difficult to control sexual harassment. Schools, clubs, Internet discussions, etc, all very, very hard to prevent sexual harassment if those present choose to do it. Can't fire them, can't really discipline them, etc. So, they drive girls and women away.

Re:Genetics probably does play a role

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel that sexual harassment is a major, major problem with discouraging girls and women from being interested. Unfortunately when boys don't get a lot of interaction with girls, it's difficult to regulate their behavior so that they don't harass.

The problem is that our society has decided that it's OK for a female to engage in a Mating Display and expect the males to not respond. So the women are driven away by the unwelcome responses. The other problem is that in many cases the males involved are not the Alpha's who draw the female's primary interest- those guys are out playing football or working in management. So regardless of harassment, the females are drawn out of the profession because there aren't any suitable candidates for mating.

We vastly underestimate the role of sex and Mating in our society. We pretend it doesn't matter... it does. We pretend that a couple who are dating or married have "eyes only for each other" but that is also bullshit; despite traditions and cultural taboos, both genders are constantly on the lookout for a different partner. The females are always looking to trade up for a better Male, and the Males are always looking for more females to mate with. It's the elephant in the room that nobody wants to address- the idea that we should all become asexual drones seems to be the current thinking on how men and women should act in society.
There seems to be a lot of people promoting the idea that the male should have to "control himself" in responding to sexual triggers, but that women should NOT have to control themselves in sending them. Until we get such double standards addressed in our culture, we'll continue to see gender gaps in a lot of professions, not just IT.

Re:Evidence?

[icebraining]

So, let's have some examples, Taco Cowboy - unstable products produced by companies with a large number of women versus stable and robust ones produced by all-male companies? Did Microsoft put all the women on Windows ME? Is Facebook's security department an all women shop? I think we should be told.

So fucking tired of this bullshit. Parent spoke against quotas, not women. That argument is a complete strawman.

The point is that if you put quotas instead of fixing the underlying issues, you'll make the problem worse. Women in general still won't want to go to IT, and the ones that already do will be even less respected than they are now because they won't be able to prove their value by competing with all their peers.

Re:Quota system = degradation of standard

[jimbolauski]

The point is that claiming a quota system "always" leads to degradation of standards is a blanket statement that ignores the fact that some quota systems are designed to cancel out inefficiencies that already exist. The original Taco Cowboy point is based on an over-simplified view of reality (that the "default" lacks any sort of biases).

But I think it's incredibly obvious that there's a bias against women in any male-dominated field, just as there's a bias against men in female-dominated fields. No one can reasonably claim that society doesn't apply a lot of gender roles in every aspect of a person's life, so any task dominated by one gender will by nature be harder to get at for the other, because the context the minority group has as less applicable.

That is not bias, bias is not hiring a female in the IT field because they are female, it's impossible to determine if the reason there are so few women enter the field is because of societal pressures or simply because women are not as interested in the field. The claim that society steers women into other fields early in a child's life is irrelevant because once they are adults they will not have the skills of their male peers, and thus would be inferior. A quota system can not undo these problems, you simply can not make up for a decade of missed education opportunities and fix it by making the path easier.