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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.”'"
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.
I don't know if it's as simple as childhood encouragement. As a 42 year old female who's been working in IT for more than 20 years you can imagine I encourage both my son and daughter to be interested in maths, science and computers. Boy loves it all and is very interested; girl does not want to know. Why is this? Maybe just natural tendencies - I don't know. Wish I did.
I don't know that I was lucky- when I broke toys I didn't get new ones. After awhile, my parents stopped fixing them for me, and I had to fix them myself. The computer was the same way, when I messed up DOS I had to figure out how to reinstall it. When I wanted a modem, I had to learn what an ISA slot was (as I only had one serial port for the aftermarket mouse), what COM ports were, what IRQs were, etc. When I wanted a 3.5" floppy, I had to learn, the hard way, that the 8088 couldn't address more than a 720K disk, so the 1.44M disks had to be taped and reformatted 720K for me to use them until I finally got a better computer. All of this expansion was purchased with my allowance- I had to save up for many months for each component.
My parents encouraged me to play to learn.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The problem with this statement is that historically and on average, female dominated industries (like nursing and teaching) don't pay as well as male dominated industries (like engineering). And when they start to, like nursing did a few years ago when there was a shortage, more and more men go into them.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this, it's the free market at work, but government contracting isn't the free market, for various reasons good and bad.
Expressing interest while otherwise remaining professional in the environment isn't the problem- limiting one's contact to expressing interest a majority of the time is. That's what I've observed in computer clubs, computer classes, and workplaces. I've observed women who aren't physically touched, aren't directly solicited for sexual acts, aren't threatened with demotion or termination for a lack of sexual acts, but instead aren't respected professionally and instead are simply hit on. Their technical opinions are not solicited, their technical experience is considered irrelevant. It doesn't matter how good at their jobs they are- coworkers can't see and will not acknowledge the work they can do. It's the attitude that those around them are only going to value them for their gender difference for making a pass, regardless of what they have to contribute in the particular field.
That's the worst kind of sexual harassment of all, in my opinion, as it's the most insidious and is what truly creates "glass ceiling" and fosters the environment where egregious personal violations happen.
To me, honestly, it's okay to flirt with a coworker. Just respect that coworker's abilities and relevancy to the job, as well as any desire on their part to be left alone in this way if they request it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't know if it's as simple as childhood encouragement. As a 42 year old female who's been working in IT for more than 20 years you can imagine I encourage both my son and daughter to be interested in maths, science and computers. Boy loves it all and is very interested; girl does not want to know. Why is this? Maybe just natural tendencies - I don't know. Wish I did.
It is definitely (in part due to) natural tendencies. The same response is observed in at least one other primate species. I can't remember the specific species with which I saw this demonstrated, but when these young primates were presented with a selection of toys to play with, the females preferred dolls, while the males preferred to play with toy vehicles.
I'm pretty sure I saw this in an episode of BBC Horizon, but I don't have a reference to the particular episode. However, here are links to two articles that discuss primate toy preference:
Dorothy Lepkowska on Gender and Toys
Chimp "Girls" Play With "Dolls" Too—First Wild Evidence
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
My house, I just bought, was built in the 1940s. The filed covenants are pretty rudimentary from modern standards - can't subdivide, house must be at least 750 sq ft and worth at least $9000 - but still in the paperwork I was given is the restriction that "negros and other non-whites" can't own or live on the property - except as a servant.
In the 40s, simply no one wanted to allow blacks to live anywhere but on the east side of town. Later when such covenants were voided, income disparity kept it that way. And with income disparity comes less time with parents/grandparents at home to help newborns get the jump start they need in education. Now the state closes schools that don't perform well - you guess it, in the "traditionally black" areas - so those kids end up getting bussed around further. Obviously there are some people so naturally gifted that they can succeed in any situation, and those people have "escaped" this cycle and do fine. But on average I don't think we've evened things up from institutional discrimination yet, so we still have to keep pushing on things to get them aligned.
The people who wrote and signed those original covenants are long dead and buried; not buying the house from its Nth owner because of that would have been pointless.
Also I'm posting to fix a mistaken moderation elsewhere in the thread.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
When quota system is imposed on anything you will see the effect - end product is almost guaranteed to be inferior
What you say is true, unless there is actually a significant bias present. If it undoes the bias, then ti won't necessarily make standards go down, it could even make them go up.
[citation needed] below, but I've lost the reference.
I did read a study about geneder discrimination in academia, normalizing out for all different subject areas. Bottom line, everywhere except the USA (which has significant positive discrimination), women need significantly better track records to get the same job. In the USA with all its quotas etc, it's about the same.
It would be tough to argue that standards have gone down as a result, as hiring is now done from an effectively larger pool of applicants with the same qualifications and skills.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The primates argument is a strong one against social conditioning. My wife and I both believe that women are genetically less apt to like certain types of work than men. Her IQ approaches a mensa measured 200 and she used to be far better at maths than I ever was, but she couldn't care less for maths or computers. She places the reason for it in that she's more interested in things she can directly apply to her life and to people she interacts with. Evidence of the superficiality of her not liking computers is that as soon as computers became a social tool, she began taking an interest in them more. She has always pushed for a better smartphone, and now she's doing a .com startup. She just isn't doing it for technical reasons, but for the interaction that she can get.
I'm the opposite: I enjoy making airplane models, or thinking up abstract things I think it helps me to understand the world, but she's right to say that I don't work at the level, where the result of my work has a direct and immediate effect on life. This post, for example is a veritable waste of my practical time.
Our conclusion is that women tend to fields that somehow include a large amount of social interaction and pragmatism, while men are perfectly fine doing things in which they can be alone and where the practicality is more removed (although not necessarily absent). More than that: women can relax in highly social work, while men are more able to relax in loner work. The ability to relax and enjoy doing something is the biggest indicator of how we are wired, as opposed to conditioned, to behave.
IT is a lot about working alone. Even though you work in teams in IT, the large majority of guys who go into IT do not like to interact with others (the typical developer drives me nuts, when I try to get him to understand how what he's doing is practical). When I build IT teams, I find that I need both social types and loner types, with an emphasis on universality of each. The team ends up consisting of someone who speaks business and is responsible for communication and a team of folks who prefer to work semi-alone and develop based on the documented requirements. It just so happens, that it's easier to find girls to fit the business analyst role than the lone developer role. The girl analysts do like IT projects, but they like them for different reasons than the guys. The girl's ability to think logically, work hard for their money and like the IT systems we produce tends to be similar to guys, but with different emphasis.
I think the resulting small amount of women in IT is simply because IT requires less social interaction than project management or sales. I find that women are no less driven, intelligent, and capable than men. They just gravitate to more social types of work, which IT often isn't.
Wow, way to miss the point. If you have 10 applicants for 2 posts, 8 from one group and 2 from another and you have a quota that says you have to hire at least one from the second group, then what is the result going to be? If you have no quotas, then you will hire the two best qualified. If you assume that there is no intrinsic difference in abilities between the two sets, then there is a 20% chance that you will end up with one from the second set. If there is a quota, then there is a 100% chance that you will end up with one from the second set, meaning that there is an 80% chance that you will end up with someone less qualified with the quota than without.
This then leads back to an ugly feedback cycle, where people are aware that the person in the second group is there instead of someone more qualified (see the caste quota system in India for examples of this) and so they grow to resent people from that group and, importantly, don't trust the competence of anyone from that group. This then makes it harder for the competent people in the group, because now they have an extra layer of prejudice against them.
Now, if you want more members of the second group to be hired, then you need to look at the causes and address them. For example, do they encounter the relevant skills later? Are there hidden prejudices against them in hiring? Are they excluded or discouraged from participating in some relevant educational prerequisites?
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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.
The "Sexual Paradox" Pinker talks about is that as women get more opportunities the number of women in traditionally male roles increases, then as they get more opportunities still it falls again, though not to original levels. My interpretation of her analysis is that the downturn happens when women's choice outweighs the effect of the bias, and this has happened in most professions in most developed countries. So although the bias probably still exists in places, it is not the dominant factor in determining the male/female ratio in most professions. Yes, it's good to tackle that bias where it exists, but the effect is unlikely to be significantly more women in those jobs (which is what tokenism attempts to address) but is more likely to be a better working environment for women. In other words, we're using the wrong measures and the result is that we're drawing the wrong conclusions and formulating the wrong policies from them.
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The problem with this argument is you are looking at a ridiculously small group. There are hundreds of thousands of IT workers in the US, filling hundreds of thousands of jobs. With such a large sample size the "default" should be a 50/50 mix of men and women, but it is actually hugely biased one way and that deserves some scrutiny.
The problem isn't actually with women being unable to get IT jobs, at least not more so than with any other male dominated field where there are always a few "lads club" outfits. The problem is that very few women want to enter the field in the first place. Fewer than want to become mathematicians or some kind of scientist. There has to be a reason for that, and it isn't just that "computers are boring and not pink enough".
It works both ways too. In the UK we have a massive shortage of male primary school teachers. All sorts of theories have been put forward. Women have a natural maternal instinct. Men are worried about being accused of being paedophiles. I honestly don't know enough about the problem to comment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As the father I see how hard the community pushes boys and girls into their gender roles. My daughter doesn't love pink because of the color, she loves it because no one calls her a boy when she wears it. She plays with cars at home, but she won't touch one when another kid is around. When she wears any dress she gets constant compliments, not so when she wears a very cute outfit consisting of a shirt and pants. And whenever we talk with other parents the talk of the "inate" characteristics of girls and boys is usually constant, even when the characteristics are obviously universal.
It doesn't just stop at childhood either, as an involved father that stayed at home for a 18 months after my kids were born I met the most sexist women I've ever encountered on the playground. Now there were many women who weren't and I wasn't the only dad around, but even a woman I knew before, who had a kid around the same time, couldn't stop herself from saying men can't do X and women always do Y when I was doing those things everyday by choice before and after my wife went back to work. Mom's groups were also extreemely unwelcoming. I understand that they might not want to talk about their breastfeeding problems with a man around but there are a plethora of things to talk about when cooped up all day with a small child. For any mothers-to-be out there, taking a vote on whether do admit me and my kids to a playdate makes you appear about as democratic as an apartheid jury deciding if I looked white enough to join you at the pool; I won't really care which way the vote goes, I don't want my children around bigots.
FYI I also see sexism alive and well when hiring in IT. At work we'd been interviewing for a programming position for months and finally found a decent candidate. I wanted to hire her and kept getting resistance and unqualified alternate prospects pushed at me. When I finally found out what the reservations were, it came down to "she'll be the only woman on the team and will be lonely" and "this job involves working late and it's dangerous for a woman to go home alone at night." I reminded them that as a woman in IT she is surely used to a male dominated workplace and the position rarely involves working very late, we could call a car service when it does as is company policy for all day-shift employees anyway. Luckilly she was hired, but we could have easily lost her to another company with the delay these unstated concerns caused.