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Fortune.com: Blame Tech Diversity On Culture, Not Pipeline
FrnkMit writes: Challenging a previous Code.org story on tech diversity, a Forbes.com writer interviewed 716 women who left the technology field. Her conclusion: corporate culture, and the larger social structure, is the primary cause for these women leaving the industry and never looking back. Specific issues include a lack of maternity policies in small companies, low pay which barely covers day care, "jokes" from male coworkers, and always feeling like the "odd duck." In reality, there are probably many intertwined causes: peer pressure at the high-school and college level, female-unfriendly geek culture, low pay, a lack of accommodations for pregnant/nursing mothers, the myth of "having it all," stereotype threat, and repeated assertions that women aren't biologically suited to writing software and therefore there's no problem at all.
We have two female programmers on our team of 10 devs (total). They are paid equivalently to the males, receive the same training opportunities, and each holds expert status in some region of our offerings. The men do not joke about about them (I would know, being one of the male devs and all, I would hear it). If that kind of thing started up it would be nipped in the bud......as it was a few years ago when we hired, then shortly thereafter fired, a guy who turned out to be outright misogynistic.
I am not denying the trend in the industry, I am just pointing out that there *are* places that refuse to hire unprofessional jerks, and will treat all their employees with respect.
There's plenty of design work at the lower levels where you don't need to know what appeals to the masses. In fact, that's going to be most of the work. Squeezing an extra 0.1 dB of sensitivity out of the RF receiver path, for instance.
This is now mostly just sour grapes on the part of women. I should know, I'm a woman who went into tech almost 40 years ago. Things have improved so vastly over those years that it's become clear to me that we women are the ones holding ourselves back now.
Why do I say this? Because it seems like all we're doing is complaining these days. We even ridicule our own kind just as much as the men apparently do. Hell, I still get exasperated looks from younger women who can't believe I would get a job with computers... and not because they're worried about sexism. I even get dirty looks from girls who think that me joking around with men diminishes me, without even realizing that I've just met the men halfway, and they've responded in turn to accommodate me (no one ever seems to care about that part of the equation).
No, the real problem is that not enough women are willing to get tech jobs. If you want to change a culture you have to change the culture, not wait for it to change for you. Men and companies have played a tremendous part in changing themselves over the years, and now it's time for women to stop blaming others and pick up the slack themselves. Come on sisters, some of us have been fighting this fight for decades. Time to join Rosie in numbers, or just drop the charade that we would, if only we could.
Girls in tech, if you think you have it bad, think about all the crap I went through back in the day in addition to what you're dealing with. And I'm not exactly the most tomboyish adrenaline junkie out there, I'm just a gal who looked past societal gender roles and decided that I'd like a decent wage working with computers, because they were actually pretty interesting. If I can do it, so can you. If you don't want to "suffer" the lowest levels of sexism in the field to date (and lots of other male-dominated fields) that's fine, but don't just pretend it's someone else's fault that the field isn't changing as quickly as you'd like it to.