The Shortage of Women In IT

Oh come on... by Frosty+Piss · 2012-05-27 15:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

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¦

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Re:Oh come on... by Kenja · 2012-05-27 15:17 · Score: 4, Funny

There should be a quota! I'm tired of having to flirt with all the gay guys in IT. I needs me some women!

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Re:Oh come on... by TWX · 2012-05-27 15:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Re:Oh come on... by carolfromoz · 2012-05-27 15:45 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Oh come on... by TWX · 2012-05-27 15:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Re:Oh come on... by TWX · 2012-05-27 16:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

Age and physical sexual maturity probably factors in, and perceptions about the maturity of those who do play with this stuff probably also factors in. If she sees boys who play with this stuff as undesirable, either intellectually finding them immature, or sexually finding them unappealing, then she might not want much to do with the hobby because of her perceptions about them, even more than her perceptions of the hobby.

Most boys who play with computers do not become appealing to females until college age if they go to college, and sometimes later if they're not in the college setting with equally intelligent females. At that point, they're not perceived as successful. Success isn't yet measured in income or in income potential- it's measured in social performance- sports, fine arts, even academic performance sometimes. The further from the artificial environment that school fosters, the less those constructs fostered by that environment matter. Unfortunately, by then many females are well out of where this hobby-turned-career track could take them.

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Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Re:Oh come on... by humanrev · 2012-05-27 16:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Re:Oh come on... by Belial6 · 2012-05-27 16:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

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... by TWX · 2012-05-27 16:57 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Re:Oh come on... by cffrost · 2012-05-27 17:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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Re:Oh come on... by EEPROMS · 2012-05-27 17:38 · Score: 5, Funny

I can see a monty pythonish like skit on this in the making

IT Manager "yes sir as you can see 80% of our staff are female"
Govt official "are you sure, to be honest they just look like a bunch of men in skirts"
IT Manager "no I can asure you our IT staff are 80% female, just ask eeer John eerr itta any question you like"
Re:Oh come on... by epyT-R · 2012-05-27 18:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

Has it occurred to you that building systemic pro woman bias into the culture actually makes any existing gender bias against women's technical abilities worse? The status quo demands that men at least wonder about the actual abilities of female coworkers/bosses/hires because they don't know for sure if they earned their way, or if they were given free rides in education and in corporate life by crappy politics. These kinds of people care more about the appearance of equality than objective measurement of relevant abilities and earning respect.
Re:Oh come on... by mwvdlee · 2012-05-27 19:00 · Score: 4, Funny

Yeah, but without more women in IT, miss Wendy Frank has to compete with other companies based on quality and price.
That is somehow totally unfair to women!

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Re:Oh come on... by janimal · 2012-05-27 19:32 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Oh come on... by epyT-R · 2012-05-27 20:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Oh come on... by zenyu · 2012-05-28 01:23 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Damn it.. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-27 15:05 · Score: 4, Funny

They shouldn't have made the glass ceiling out of that stuff they use for ipad screens..

Re:Damn it.. by Ukab+the+Great · 2012-05-27 16:56 · Score: 4, Funny

Manipulating the glass ceiling involves multiple touches, gestures, and the occasional pinch.

Bullshit. by jcr · 2012-05-27 15:08 · Score: 4, Insightful

"The IT industry is hurting for women.

The IT industry is no more "hurting" for women than the coal mining industry or the forestry industry or the alaskan crab fishing industry. There are more men than women in the IT business. There are more women than men other lines of work. So what?

-jcr

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The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."

Re:Bullshit. by ShaggyZet · 2012-05-27 16:45 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Not an IT problem... by bziman · 2012-05-27 15:08 · Score: 5, Informative

This is a shortage of female BUSINESS OWNERS not a shortage of female technical staff. There IS a shortage of female technical staff - but it has no affect on government contracts.

To stop being sexist, stop being sexist by SuperKendall · 2012-05-27 15:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley

Re:To stop being sexist, stop being sexist by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-05-27 15:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

Affirmative action == discrimination.
The only business that government has here is to ensure that no-one is unfairly discriminated (i.e. people are turned down because of their race/sex/...). The moment government starts discriminating itself, by instituting quotas and other privileges, any pretense of equality goes out of the window, and divisions between all those artificially created groups only deepen.
Re:To stop being sexist, stop being sexist by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-05-27 15:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:To stop being sexist, stop being sexist by SydShamino · 2012-05-27 17:43 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Women owned, veteran owned etc = junk by MobyDisk · 2012-05-27 15:15 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

eh? by Lips · 2012-05-27 15:15 · Score: 4, Funny

"The Shortage of Women In IT"

How tall do they need to be?

Quota system = degradation of standard by Taco+Cowboy · 2012-05-27 15:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

When quota system is imposed on anything you will see the effect - end product is almost guaranteed to be inferior

No matter how the quota is applied - by race, gender, nationality, religion or whatever - when quota system is enforced, competition stops

The IT industry is the very last place where quota system should be enforced - too much is riding on the robustness and stability of IT products

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Re:Quota system = degradation of standard by InspectorGadget1964 · 2012-05-27 16:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

I like them (women) in my private life, but for work, I like to be working with people that are capable, gender is superficial and irrelevant.
Re:Quota system = degradation of standard by serviscope_minor · 2012-05-27 18:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Re:Quota system = degradation of standard by digitig · 2012-05-27 21:35 · Score: 5, Interesting

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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Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Re:Quota system = degradation of standard by jimbolauski · 2012-05-28 00:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Re:Quota system = degradation of standard by digitig · 2012-05-28 01:03 · Score: 4, Informative

There is still a greater social expectation upon men that they must have a career. I would not expect clse to fifty-fifty participation in the absence of hiring bias as there is always a greater proportion of women who choose to focus their lives on other areas than work. The social pressure - of being valued only by what job you have - tends to drive men up the career ladder as they have little other option. (A woman who focuses on her family is "a valid choice"; a man who does so is assumed to have failed in his career.)
Pinker addresses that. In particular that about 80% of women are primarily motivated by intrinsic factors such as job satisfaction and a sense of community and cooperation at work, whereas this is only about 40% for men. About 60% of men are primarily motivated by extrinsic factors such as money, power and status, whereas that's only about 20% for women. That alone accounts for the disparity in the boardroom -- it's not that women don't have what it takes to run a company, it's just that lots of them would rather be doing something else. Pinker complains that measures such as pay or presence in the boardroom are actually buying into a male model of success, and that women are right to reject them if they want to, but with a 60/40 split amongst men it's not all that much of a male measure either. It's just that those with power and status tend to set the agenda, whatever their gender.

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Genetics probably does play a role by Sycraft-fu · 2012-05-27 16:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by TWX · 2012-05-27 16:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Re:Genetics probably does play a role by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-27 18:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

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:Genetics probably does play a role by AK+Marc · 2012-05-27 21:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

Sexual harassment can't factor in. Why? Because career choices are made before "sexual harassment" exits. Harassing girls because they are girls isn't "Sexual harassment" (in the original definition, as the new one includes bad body odor, regardless of gender, as sexual harassment, making the phrase useless, which is why I refuse to acknowledge it.)

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Re:Genetics probably does play a role by misexistentialist · 2012-05-28 00:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

That's because you define harassment as something men do to women. Women are equally likely of harassing men, just in a more passive-aggressive female way. The difference is that their behavior is entirely accepted. Women are also overly invested in their feelings and entitlements and when they don't interact enough with men in the real world they become wilting flowers and PC harpies. In a male-dominated office they can never feel comfortable unless the whole thing is rearranged around them personally; on the other hand there is no way for a male to fit into a female-dominated office.

Re:Slashdot... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-27 16:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

There are a lot of problems with the "Women make less than men for the same work", but I'm going to point out the easiest and most obvious here.

Basic logic dictates that if women made $0.77 per hour, while men received $1.00 per hour, then businesses would hire ONLY women to save on salaries. In this age of businesses trying to shave PENNIES off their bottom lines, do you really think they'd continue to pay an extra $0.23 per hour just to maintain the "Old Boys" club. If such a "club" actually exists anymore, do you think that a man that has to worry about his pay against what a woman earns is going to be a part of it? Explain to me how men get any jobs, anywhere, given what you're shoveling right now, then I might give your point some attention.

Quick primer on Bell curves by Okian+Warrior · 2012-05-27 17:11 · Score: 4, Informative

If you look at people from almost any perspective, you get a bell curve.

If you separate people into male/female, you get 2 bell curves... but are they the same?

It turns out that the bell curve for women is, comparatively speaking, tall and narrow, while for men it's more squat and spread out.

This means that there is less variation in women than there is for men. There are more women are average height (for women) than there are men of average height (for men). More women of average intelligence than men, and so on.

This also means that there is more variation in men than there is in women. More men are at the upper end of the curve than women, **but at the same time** there are more men on the lower tail than there are women. More men have the highest level of income than women, but at the same time more men are homeless than women.

This is a reflection of basic biology. Because women bear the biological expense of childbirth, they tend to be conservative and take fewer chances. Because men have to compete for women, they tend to take chances in an attempt to succeed.

This is reflected in the bell curves - women have less variation than men. This is why more boys are born than girls - more boys die because they tend to take chances growing up.

So if success in business requires risk, it's no surprise that there are more men than women. It doesn't mean that men are in general better businessmen, because at the same time more men are unsuccessful at business too.

Prejudice against women shouldn't be allowed, of course, but thinking that women are equivalent to men in abilities or temperament and legislating around it is a losing proposition.

Women are equal to men in the eyes of the law. Women can be firefighters so long as they can beat other candidates (both men and women) in the physical endurance trials.

A shortage of interested women by Grayhand · 2012-05-27 17:48 · Score: 4, Insightful

In truth how many women do you know interested in IT? I've known quite a few so they are out there but the ugly truth is the percentage of men to women that show an interest in IT is 10 men for every woman. Just a wild guess but not far off. It's not women being shut out half as much as not that many women pursuing it. It's not like there are large numbers out there unemployed that can't find work. Maybe it's not being encouraged at a young age or women are less inclined but there are simply fewer women interested in pursuing IT careers. I come out of special effects and the same percentages applied. Few shops hesitated to hire women and most would seek them out. Women with any talent found it far easier to find work than men. How many young women did you know that built models or played with stop motion animation? I know lots of men but very few women. Unless young women become more interested in IT don't expect the numbers to change.

I've done ~60 interviews so far by melted · 2012-05-27 18:22 · Score: 4, Informative

I've done ~60 interviews so far, that is, the kind where _I_ interview people. The number of female candidates? Two. The number of times I gave a "hire" to female candidates — one. The number of offers extended to female candidates I interviewed — zero (other interviewers disagreed with my "hire"). Truth is, finding great engineers is incredibly hard, and women just apply far less often. That having been said, giving them special treatment in the interviews is unfair, to both them and men. Either you can design and code, or you can't. That doesn't in any way depend on the shape of one's genitals.

Re:Slashdot... by serviscope_minor · 2012-05-27 20:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

Bullshit.

You call bullshit, then you go on to freely state that you simply don't know.

Congratulations. You are one of those rare intelligent, motivated self startes who can drag yourself up from poverty and become a success. That's great and the world could do with more people like you.

Because, most people aren't like you.

Perpahps for you, being poor taught you to be resouceful. That's good. You're one of those that can learn very easily. But have you kept in contact with all those single-wide trailer park dwellers that you grew up with? I'd bet that for almost all of them, growing up poor taught them one thing: how to be poor.

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Re:Evidence? by icebraining · 2012-05-27 20:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Re:Evidence? by TheRaven64 · 2012-05-27 21:02 · Score: 5, Interesting

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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Re:Evidence? by AmiMoJo · 2012-05-28 00:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Paternity leave by Aqualung812 · 2012-05-28 14:13 · Score: 4, Insightful

The answer isn't pinning this on women, the answer is expecting men to step up as well.

In some countries, men get almost or the same amount of leave to care for a newborn.

If they did it this way, I could see many companies that have young women AND men who take anywhere from 2-3 days a week to 2 weeks at a time to take shifts caring for their newborn.

I would have *LOVED* the chance to take care of my children at that age. Even though I contributed the same amount of genetic material as my wife, because I have a penis, my country (USA) doesn't think I should be able to spend the same amount of time with my newborns.

Fix this, and the whole issue you illustrated (very well, I might add) goes away.

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