Slashdot Mirror
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.
Here we go again. This topic is becoming horribly redundant.
Blaming corporate culture is bullshit because most women from birth are told to not go into tech. The problem isn't graduating millions of female computer scientists and then they all get their first jobs and quit because of misogyny. They never studied tech to begin with. The problem isn't a office policy one, it's a cultural and societal problem that discourages women from pursuing careers in tech from about the age of three when they're given their first barbie doll.
Being good with tech is not the ability to play with a smart phone. It's the ability to design one.
Did they try to find men who left the field as a control group? The reasons cited in TFA also applies to a lot of men I know that have left the industry. I would like to know if it really affects women, also whether or not a higher % of women leave the tech industry vs men, esp. if you control for being a parent.
Monstar L
Jobs in order of % male.
I find it strange that we talk about discrimination in high tech, when we have literally dozens of fields over 90% male, with and only a handful of niche tech fields even in the top 100. Hell, from that chart, we have sixty-one fields more male-dominated than CNC programmers (at 93.5%), the highest of the male-dominated tech fields. And general purpose coder only pushes 78.5%, with over a hundred non-tech fields higher on the list.
Yes, Slashdot has the byline "news for nerds". Until I start hearing people whine about why we don't see more female pipefitters, however, fuck right off about the "culture" in IT as somehow magically the core of the problem.
More relevantly, if we have a problem, that problem comes from human culture, not tech culture. Women don't do construction and men don't teach (at least not below the HS level), simple as that. However - And this counts as the simple most important point you will read in this entire discussion - They can! If a woman wants to get trained as a master pipefitter, she could have a well-paying job a week after completing her apprenticeship (usually 4-5 years); and even the apprenticeship phase doesn't suck all that bad, they make enough to live on in most of the US.
But we - as a species, not as a niche community of high-tech misogynists - view fitting pipe, welding, roofing, well-drilling, etc as "dirty" jobs that women don't want to do. We view dealing with disgusting snotty little 6YOs, much less trying to cram facts into their head, as something males don't want to do. Does that come from the fact that each side really doesn't want to do "off-gender" jobs, or the fact that society has conditioned us to believe that?
Short answer: it doesn't matter. Do what you want. If, however, you discover that the conditions in your chosen profession don't agree with your personality, don't blame the job, blame what you see in the mirror.
Swap the sex of the pronouns and it reads with exactly the same amount of worth.