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Women in Computing To Decline To 22% by 2025, Study Warns (usatoday.com)
New research warns that at the rate we're going, the number of women in the computing workforce will decline to 22% from 24% by 2025 if nothing is done to encourage more of them to study computer science. From a USA Today report (shared by an anonymous reader): The research from Accenture and nonprofit group Girls Who Code says taking steps now to encourage more women to pursue a computer science education could triple the number of women in computing to 3.9 million in that same timeframe. Women account for 24% of computing jobs today, but could account for 39% by 2025, according to the report, Cracking the Gender Code. And greater numbers of women entering computer science could boost women's cumulative earnings by $299 billion and help the U.S. fill the growing demand for computing talent, said Julie Sweet, Accenture's group chief executive for North America.
How will we ever survive?!?!
Oh please. In my computer science classes we had 25% of the class as female. That number dropped to near 1% by the end of college....and that's with them getting constant assistance by any hopeless guy within earshot. Programming is just not something women want to do for the most part.
Breaking News: Men in Airline Stewarding Computing To Decline To 22% by 2025, Study Warns
How can we get them to be more interested!?!?!
If women choose not to go into computing fields, why should they be forced (or even encouraged) to do so?
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
How about letting people pick the field(s) they want to go into without telling them what they "ought" to do based on a pointless metric or percentage?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I have assumed that it was hovering around 10%. My personal experience is obviously not statistically relevant, but I have only once seen a team (of 5 people!) with greater than 20% participation from women (e.g., 2 out of 5).
It's probably worth noting that most women that I know get promoted out of their development roles very quickly, often going into management or PM roles and usually prematurely. If I were a woman looking at that, I would probably be less inclined to train for a job that wants to shift me out of that job as fast as possible.
More to the point, I find it hilarious that most of the "get women into tech" initiatives are driven by men at the top, effectively "mansplaining" that women should be more interested in technology. They should be interested, but clearly whatever we're doing as a society is not working for them (as a man).
humans in computing is on decline.
Putting aside yet another "WE NEEDZ MORE WOMENZ IN IT" crap, did anyone else think "H1B" when they read "growing demand?"
Companies are already doing everything they can to bring in cheaper talent. The "demand" in question has nothing to do with the number of competent and trained talent, but rather the number of competent and trained talent willing to work for peanuts. Encouraging more domestic IT/programming workers to enter the field will only exasperate that, regardless of their plumbing.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Computing is for losers, dropout and video game addicts. It's not a career.
Think it is? Here's your H1B replacement. Train him well.
Women value stability in careers often because they are the ones left holding the domestic bag when the dude flakes on the family.
IT and stability are often at odds. I happened to be in California during the dot-com bust, and had to take scrappy contracts, some out-of-state, to survive.
One's skills are always growing outdated and you have to guess the correct "new thing" to get documented experience in or get left behind again. It's like being the news weather person before satellites: guess right often enough or get booted.
Table-ized A.I.
Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves. Most people suck at programming. Most people suck at just about anything they do. Programming is hardly a glamorous job. Most people are non-technical, illogical and irrational, especially when it comes to their pathetic attempts to do whatever "business" they are trying to get done. For the most part, the only reason they're still in business is because their customers are clueless and their competition is even less competent.
A better question: why are there so many men left in computing? If I wanted to have morons yapping nonsense at me all day I could turn on the TV - no need to go into work.
Plenty of industries (coal mining, nursing, etc) are dominated by one sex, and no one gives a shit. Why should we give a shit about computer science being dominated by men?
Are women in computing declining to 22%?
Or are women in computing increasing to 39%?
http://amarillo.com/opinion/op...
Good paying jobs, and women just don't want them.
So here's what I don't get: there are some programs encouraging women to get into science, technology, computing, etc. I'm not sure how many, but this part is for sure: there's a heck of a lot more now than there were 20 years ago. So if numbers are going down compared to what they were 20 years ago...what are these programs accomplishing? Could these things actually being more harm than good? I'll be honest, I know little of them but I'm pretty sure they're mostly "Hey girls, computing is fun too! hehe" which I can't imagine is terribly effective on anyone.
As usual, no one is bothering to address why this trend may be happening. Just saying "Oh, it must be discrimination and sexism" isn't helpful because it doesn't do anything to fix why that's the case and what can be done about it--and even then, I really doubt girls are saying "I think I'll be treated badly so I won't go into that" because that's not how 17 year olds think. Heck, the acting and singing businesses are even more ruthless than computing is, telling you flat out "you're too short" or "you're not pretty enough" and there's thousands of girls still lining up for that because they believe they'll be the exception. Same goes for job prospects. Most everyone believes she'll be the exception who makes it (PhD programs exist because thousands of smart kids have this very delusion).
So what is it, really?
I suspect that one thing is true is the ratio is a bad true measure of anything. We've had an uptick of H1B's in tech in the past years and I'm guessing that the majority of those positions have gone to men brought in from overseas. That would make growth in men higher than women which would wreck the ratio.
If girls are being intimidated away from computing due to gender bias or by media stereotypes then by all means lets do everything we can to correct this.
However if you are looking for ways to "encourage" girls to change their life goals in order to satisfy your perception of social injustice then by all means go find something better to do with your time.
disclaimer: im just a machinist who likes linux.
we had something similar to this in the late 90s when kickpress workers and fabricators were starting to get replaced by multi-axis milling machines and fluidform/laser. almost overnight we had a crisis where we needed more people who could do CAD/CAM, because while im sure managers saved a bunch of money handing out pink slips to the line workers they were losing a hell of a lot of money on trying to find a good desk jockey who didnt crash tools and wreck parts every hour. Management offered hundred dollar bonuses if we could convince someone to join the team and this worked for a while until someone started complaining about diversity and asking why we didnt have it.
we didnt have black or latino CNC or SPC guys because most of them never saw a promotion. Its not racism --nobody was yelling bigoted obscenities-- but the managers in charge of lining up bonuses and promotions came from an ancient era where brown people were still some subset fraction of an actual person. the ones that got promoted didnt see much of a raise either, at least at the North Carolina shops i worked at. When the diversity hammer started to swing too close to the portly boss-types, they made excuses until retirement. Either they promoted a hard work ethic, or they were trying to drive cost.
and women? we had women but they were all in the office stamping paychecks and handling HR claims, or in shipping. we had welders, good female welders, but management fired them once we started shipping the parts to missouri, then mexico for final weld. The management came down hard on us for creating hostile work environments, and sure in some cases that was true. The worst shop i was in had 3 sexual harassment meetings in a year. But to tell the truth, it was probably the pay or the fact that if you left for maternity, you usually lost your job. I worked at a place that ran an entire diversity job fair for a year before realizing the factory area we worked in never had a womens locker room, so incompetence can certainly be attributed..
but programming? what barriers exist? i mean christ its every day im online seeing courses or classes, or getting some handout from a government agency that encourages me to take a spreadsheet class or something. programming is an office job; is an office a hostile workplace?? why is it so hard to just give someone the damn job so long as they have enough sense not to chooch up the work? why is there a percentage to achieve?
Good people go to bed earlier.
With all the baby boomers being retired in 2030, women — and men — are more likely to go into healthcare than computers.
I would rather encourage young kids to be curious and to have other aspects that may lead to programming and other technology. Pushing programming and coding itself to young girls (boys as well) may turn kids off, where if you encourage things like curiosity, those who end up programming will have done so because they are passionate about it. People who are passionate about it end up being good at it, and we need more girls (and boys) that are actually good at programming.
"The research from Accenture and nonprofit group Girls Who Code says taking steps now to encourage more women to pursue a computer science education could triple the number of women in computing to 3.9 million in that same timeframe."
So a group that directly benefits from there not being enough women in the IT sector says there's not enough women in the IT sector and, in fact, we need to do even MORE to help? Naturally, I'm sure their suggestions for how to help introduce more women to the computing workforce will be entirely unbiased and-
"That's exactly what the research from Accenture and Girls Who Code advocates: Taking immediate steps they say could reverse the decline of women in technology ... -Sustain interest in high school by sending girls to summer camps where they study computer science with other girls. The research found that 81% of high school girls who studied computing over the summer were interested in studying it at college, versus 52% who only studied computing at school."
See? Perfectly unbiased! It's not like Girls Who Code is one of the main operators of these sorts of summer camps.
We cannot state that we need the same representation in the various fields as we have in the general population. Women and men, blacks and whites, hetero and homo, all have different interests for whatever reason. What we need is to ensure that everyone is given an opportunity to try and if they are unsuccessful so be it. Seems to work in sports where the best are hired and retained, why not try this with work and stop with the PC work force demographics BS.
I don't understand why they should be "encouraged" to study computer science
Because politicians need a way to justify their budgets.
What percentage of college students are male?
Is it below 40% yet?
Are males going to get affirmative-action college admissions?
Nothing reinforces the negative stereotype that "she only has the job because she is a girl" like trying to force education and employers to meet some perception of what a diverse profession should look like, instead of making sure everyone has equal access and leaving the rest to chance.
Information Technology and Computer Science need to be entirely split up. This within itself will virtually entirely solve the problem. The problem right now is that they're treated as one in the same, with the same requirements for entirely different jobs. The programs in school focus specifically on short algorithm design for things like tree searching or solving various mathematical principals. In the real world, however, the primary focus is on finding solutions to either business logic problems or finding new ways for users to interact with their devices and the environment around them. The CS side focuses primarily on the mathematics of computing, while IT focus more on the logical side of computing. Developing a great and simple API doesn't require much of a math background, but needs quite a bit of logical thinking. But again, as stated initially, the schools are only focusing on the mathematical side, which correlates to an extremely small part of the actual tech sector, with the logical side being the majority of the jobs in the workplace. Schools need to finally get their shit together and teach the industry, rather than teach what some particular program is more or less forced upon them by a very few companies that dont fully represent the industry.
So is all that recent pitchforking about how women aren't /in/ tech working then? Is encouraging them to "have a career in tech" producing good fruits here, or is that a factor in the decline? Are we going to be losing the percentage 5-year women in tech or are we going to be losing the percentage of women that have been working in it since the 90s that were quite content with their careers before we started making their gender the primary focus?
I realize that's not the popular question set, but that's usually the best reason to answer such questions.
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
Keeping the IT lights on is a thankless job. When everything works well, few people care about IT. When SHTF, everyone blames the "useless" IT department.
Couple this with the influx of H1B workers and wage stagnation, why on earth would anyone want to do this job?
Women close to me in demanding jobs like teaching or nursing say they find those careers challenging and fulfilling. When I ask them about technology work, they make a face and say - no thanks.
Maybe it's OK that men and women are actually different and they have differing tastes in work. Maybe the SJW's of the world simply need to be OK with that.
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
Men in nursing has been increasing for a while, although the figures are still pretty small.
But rising at a pretty good rate: http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/releases/2013/cb13-32_figure1-hi.jpg
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
How is this possible. There are dozens of government programs, corporate program, and not profit programs all pushing "Women in Tech". Millions upon millions of dollars have been spent encouraging women to join the tech field. In a society the is getting ever less sexist. And for all this the participation rate is going down?
Maybe these groups should reevaluate what they are doing and try to understand why women aren't interested in joining the tech workforce. It's seems crying sexism at every opportunity is not an effective strategy.
And the only conclusion you can reach is that women are incompetent and "not interested". Have you ever pondered that people with attitudes like yours might be part of the problem?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As an avid viewer of Deadliest Catch, I am troubled by the lack of female representation aboard Alaskan crab fishing vessels. Women should be encouraged to enter this lucrative filed where they are grossly underrepresented. Of course, that would involve risking their lives and destroying their bodies like men do, while being isolated from their families for months at a time, so I doubt the women's studies departments will be pushing for this.
I get the feeling that the people who are troubled by women's underrepresentation in STEM fields and C-suites somehow view this as women missing out on easy money, when that couldn't be further from the truth. These fields typically require huge sacrifices in terms of time and stress, not to mention isolation. Men seem more willing to accept these sacrifices because we're taught to do that from a very young age. We become providers (wallets) and sacrifice our time as nurturers within the family because it is expected of us. Women can't expect to take on these roles without the downsides that come with them, and the lack of women in certain fields is likely a reflection of women valuing family time over work time.
We just need to have more men self-identify as women. Problem solved.
If other people's opinions are enough to discourage you, then you have a weak spine and won't succeed at anything you do.
maybe the constant assistance was part of the problem. ain't gonna learn if people do it for you
How to make IT/CS more attractive to women: stop it turning into a highly unstable field where competence is punished. Stop increasing the chances that years of study and dedication will lose out to anyone who can do it cheaper. Stop companies that wonder why they can't fill seats when they refuse to offer fair wages. Stop H1B abuse from allowing companies to profit from what's basically indentured servitude, and start making the field more attractive to people, not just those socialized to accept being fucked over by employers.
First off, I'm a little skeptical believing anything coming out of Accenture as a non-biased study, same way a Gartner magic quadrant rating is basically a paid-for advertisement.
Next, women are smart. They see programmers, admins, etc. being tossed out of work above the age of 40, having to constantly grind on skills training and being one mistaken specialization away from being out of a job. They also see industry offshoring every single job they possibly can in pursuit of lower costs. Women and men starting out in their careers need to be shown there's a future in tech or else no one is going to want to go into it. If you're smart enough to get perfect grades and perfect MCAT scores, there's absolutely no reason to not go to medical school and become a doctor. Medicine and some other licensed/regulated health care work is and will be the last protected, stable high paying profession left in the US. Why would you slave away in an IT or developer job only to be tossed out in 15-20 years, while your doctor friends are contemplating which boat will fit best in the dock next to their waterfront mansion? Right now the answer is that tech jobs do offer a decent salary for the work, but that stability thing is a killer. I'd rather be a licensed professional who's able to name their own price and whose competition will be kept to a reasonable number by law than be disposable.
Women are rational creatures, and want stable work for themselves and their families. I'm a little cynical, but it seems like Accenture might be trying to ensure there's a steady flow of new recruits. Their entire business model is shipping 25 year old "consultants" around the country, men and women, to project manage and direct their Indian techies to "do the needful" from remote. The company's business model is up-or-out, and it works just like school does, so it's tailor-made for fresh grads with no work experience. If that pipeline is stopped, Accenture's entire cost structure goes up because they have to start hiring experienced people.
New research warns that at the rate we're going, the number of men in the nursing workforce will decline to 22% from 24% by 2025 if nothing is done to encourage more of them to study nursing science.
This tragic result of institutional discrimination shows no sign of improvement in the immediate future. Beginning at childhood and continuing throughout the educational system, there is little incentive given boys to study nursing. Those who do are often discriminated against by employers and even patients. Legislators have failed to recognize the problem or offer incentives for equal rights for boys.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Omigod, we're going to run out of concubines! Emergency! Emergency!
30% of programmers working at(employee, contract & sub contract) Intel are H-1B visa workers from India. To get a true picture of the women in tech, the study also needs to look at women in Indian schools.
I suppose your company totally gets it and there is never any of the mini-aggressions and put-downs that can erode a female technologist's confidence in her abilities or desire to work at your company, or in the industry in general? CONGRATS! YOU ARE NOT PART OF THE PROBLEM, however not every workplace is as perfect as yours. Can't you admit that at the very least?
p.s. the captcha I was presented was "bullies". Coincidence?
After endlessly repeating the message, "Women need to be encouraged to work in this field because they don't naturally have much interest in it", who could blame them for wanting nothing to do with it? No one wants the first thought people have of you to be, "Is this a professional or just the diversity hire?"
Could also have something to do with not wanting to work unreasonable hours just to eventually be replaced by an H1B.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
You can find all these deprecating comments, and much, much more! on just about any forum where this comes up. Save yourself some time and cut and paste.
why is it a "problem" to you? This is america, not china, we let our kids do what they want and be what they want here
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So the answer to the question is "Yes, we're a back of sexist assholes where I work, so women should just put up with pricks because 'spines'!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My Linux Meetup group has 60 members who show up on the first Tuesday of each month. The group is run by gentle university types. We meet at a student pub then a classroom with a powerpoint projector.
Of the 60 participants, 2 were women in the last meeting. One of them was not a technical person, she was a manager looking to reduce licensing costs. the other was a web programmer which is legit.
Men are the ones doing the hacking, doing the work. It would be unfair to set aside a job for somebody because of a quota.
I don't blame them, too many Libertarian Brogrammers in the business.
I wish half as much time and money was spent on men. We have male high school and college graduation rates at record lows and well below that of women which strikes me as far more important problem than a lack of women in a single field of business. Shoot, no one even talks about how few men become teachers when many studies show boys learn better from men than women (it's the same for female teachers and girls).
Dont get me wrong, having a good ratio of women in a workplace team is a good thing as it brings different perspectives, I just feel i hear a ton about the lack of women in computing and virtually nothing about a far more serious problem.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
And how many women are put off going into computing because, unlike professional sports, they're informed time and time again that computing is inhabited by creeps and weirdos?
I immediately thought of H1B for a different reason - the countries which fill most H1B slots very rarely send their young women so increasing use of H1B will inevitably lead to proportionally fewer women in US tech companies because domestic supply of women can't increase fast enough to balance the foreign supply of men.
It's not that women are not choosing to go into computer fields. It's that they are being SCARED off by being told how horrible it is for women - even though I cannot think of any field in which women are generally treated better, and respected for knowledge.
I agree we should let people choose what interest them but women currently are being painted a very false picture of what being in the computer industry is like, leading to misinformed choice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
time to cut H1B's and the 60+ hour work week!
in EU the Working Time Directive is in place.
An alternate solution would be just to kill 9 out of 10 males. (not me, you, or any of my friends and family of course)
This would open up lots of tech jobs, and other jobs to women. Plus, one man can fertilise many women, so we don't have to worry about civilization collapsing. The only major downside I can see is that Hobby Lobby would open on every corner, at least the Taco trucks will be well decorated.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Can you explain why a perceived or actual lack of females in IT matters? Is the economy worse off? Are women raped more often because of it? Is it the cause of Trump's rise to power? Is it causing the moral decay of Western Civilization?
Simple. IT and computer technologies jobs tend to be major time suckers, where sacrificing your personal time for staying late and delivering on ever reducing timelines is valued.
Women simply don't fall for that trap, while men do. Mostly because we men are dumber and because we do it for "honor" (being a team player, a good engineer, whatever).
But the ideologues believe (which is good for furthering their cause) it's because men in IT are mysoginist a*holes.
I wonder how they come across that estimate of tripling women in 'computing workforce', has there been any measurable success in the current efforts that are literally everywhere? What happens if we include only ethical means?
Look, the answer is simple. Hire women. Promote them. Stop whining about how they don't show up at your frat parties and won't be your girlfriends.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Instead of spending all this time, effort, and money convincing women they should like IT, how about we just fire a bunch of men? Bam, instant equality!
Also, the government needs to pass more laws targeted at women so that the male to female ration in prisons can be corrected. Maybe operating a car with long hair while the windows are down should be illegal since the hair could blow in your face thus causing an accident. Technically that's not a sexist law as men can have long hair too, so it should be ok.
Is there any reason to believe this prediction is accurate? Clicking thru most of the links didn't get me to anything resembling a description of their methodology.
Perhaps it's because of the feminists, who do not actually code, but are simply sexist. They've turned the workspace into a battleground, and they're making everyone uncomfortable.
When are these people going to be branded as a hate group and incarcerated? It's way past time.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
that computer workforce is some grand place to be. It's not. If the issue is income, why not increase the pay in fields where women the most employed? Wouldn't that be better than apparently rounding a square hole in order to accommodate a round peg?
This is a simple question of physiology - girls can't grow neckbeards, therefore they can't reach pinnacle of programming career.
Income disparities encourage people to enter fields they would not otherwise select. If this study is correct even with the inflated wages in a number of tech fields, is a government program or an "awareness" effort going to change that? Why do we insist on goalseeking to 50-50 gender split in engineering disciplines but not other fields like medicine?
I have no idea why the split is what it is, and neither does anyone else. But it is not de facto evidence of discrimination or improper socialization.
Maybe that's not what they want to do? Maybe those that do want to do it find that even after spending thousands of dollars can't actually program their way out of a paper bag?
Why should anybody need to be "hard" to have a fucking job in an IT department? Why does one need a "spine"? Are you fucking incapable of treating coworkers decently? Do you have some sort of mental disorder that requires you to be a fucking twat?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The truth of the matter that often goes ignored is that in countries with HIGHER gender equality, fewer women go into tech.
Why? Because when women have options, they'd rather do different things.
When women don't have options, they go in to tech, and do well.
The fact that we're supposed to deny that men and women enjoy different things is what's most offensive about this entire debate.
Men's TV shows, magazines, books, games, activities and music are *all* notably different across the board than their female counterparts.
The notion that this is the product of the "patriarchy" is what is offensive.
Men and women have different bodies. Different brains. Different chemistry. Different emotions. Different illnesses. Different goals.
Why on earth would we have the same career choices?
In and of itself, it may not be an issue, but when the justification for the lower number of women in IT is "they need to grow a spine", then maybe, just maybe, there are actual job place factors involved.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I am all for equal opportunity, and that means those women that _want_ to go into computing should not face greater hurdles than the men that want the same. But why aim for 50%? That strikes me as a "cargo cult" approach where not any potential issues are targeted, but merely statistical numbers. This will, rather obviously, not solve any issues and it will push women into a field where rather obviously most do not want to go. How that could be perceived as a good thing is beyond me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And the only conclusion you can reach is that women are incompetent and "not interested". Have you ever pondered that people with attitudes like yours might be part of the problem?
I'm a guy. I can program competently. But I hate doing it so I don't have a programming job. In my life experience men and women tend to enjoy different things and in different ways, the two genders are equal but obviously different. What if the majority of women who could be competent programmers just don't want to do that job because (like this guy) they find programming uncomfortable and unpleasant? How do we find the truth of the matter (especially with so much political correctness muddying things up)?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
That we should trust women to make their own choices? Was that it?
So women aren't interested in programming without being "convinced". Fine by me. Let's work on male teachers in elementary schools, female janitors, women in american ninja warrior, male housekeepers, female chefs, and, oh, I don't know, construction workers, painters, general contractors, babysitters, brick-layers, landscapers, fire fighters, lumberjacks, and film directors.
...but it's difficult when the rest of the world (including the people who are ostensibly trying to solve the problem) is busy conspiring to convince them that IT isn't for them.
Girls tend to as much of an interest in math and science as boys until fairly early on in grade school (I feel like it was 3rd grade or so). It seems to me that there's a lot of cultural pressure -- much of it from women -- pushing young girls away from STEM fields and into other areas of study. The aforementioned people who are ostensibly trying to solve the problem are blaming the IT industry, when in fact this happens much too early for the supposed culture of IT to have much of anything to do with it. Get girls and young women interested in IT and get people used to seeing them interested in IT, and the cultural issues will age out of the population as young IT professionals grow up used to being surrounded by both men and women.
The trouble is that the primary group of people looking into this issue is that they start out with the conclusion that men are uniquely at fault for the gender gap in IT and then go looking for evidence to support that,
Why would women specifically want to go into a job where you work long hours and at all times of the day and for mediocre wages for the required skill set and are forced to compete for a shrinking number of opportunities with foreign workers whose cost of living is 10% of yours and for corporations who get tax breaks to hire them?
Like every four to six months in the Seattle area, either the Sleaze-attle Times, or the Sleaze-attle Weekly, runs some such story about Only white males being in local IT, but there's a major problem: one looks at those companies they reference, and you see mostly brown-skinned doods from India. (Perhaps they consider themselves white, but they certainly aren't Americans yet, still foreign visa workers from abroad!
When I was in IT, before they stopped hiring me, I worked around plenty of women and minorities, but they were by and large American, while I look around at those companies now, all I see are foreign visa workers, and since around 50% or more of all new IT hires are foreign visa workers, I believe the real data bears me out.
Alright, anecdotal evidence is always dodgy, ... She was talking to one of the HR types and they felt the need to inform her that there were multiple generations of engineer there, and that some of the older engineers sometimes said things like, "Women don't belong in programming." ...
I'm perfectly willing to accept isolated incidents. But the widespread existence of such a sentiment, I have to call BS. As you say, its just an anecdote
I am an old engineer and in 30+ years of software development at various employers, small, medium and large I never saw that sentiment. Were there occasional inappropriate jokes, well from a PC/SJW perspective yes, but the women I knew could give as well as take. And when in a female majority environment the non-PC jokes targeting men came from the women occasionally too, All these jokes whether from males or females, while admittedly not PC, were not offered with malicious intent and were more in the nature of friendly teammates joking around with each other. Everyone, male and female, had their day where they thought something was not funny. Even so, when a team transitioned away from an all male team as that first female member joined, there was either indifference or a supportive sentiment, not a hostile sentiment, when we males got together and talked when we got the news; even in the old days of the mid 1980s.
Were there excessive dating invitations, excessive as in "how many times do you need to hear no", yes. One time I had to have a serious talk with a peer from another team about taking "no for answer" when I found a team member in her cube obviously pissed off about something and she confided in what it was.
I have to admit that one day I made one of my female team members cry. I got her to follow me out of our cubicle farm and into an empty office and I closed the door for privacy. I then told her that of all the people I had worked with these last four years at the company she was the most reliable person I knew. That if it were possible to get something done she was the person I learned to trust more than any other. And the fact that she did this while having to juggle hours around occasionally to take care of things related to her two kids, school events, doctor's appointments, etc made her even more impressive. She cried, gave me a big hug, and then I went for my exit interview with HR since that was my last day. By the way, this was not my unique opinion, she was a highly respected engineer among her peers and management. As I was getting ready to leave I realized I had never shared my opinion with her.
I agree that women have faced challenges over the decades. For several years I dated a female engineer, she worked on embedded software, so I have her perspective to add to my own. And while these many challenges still exist to this day to one degree or another, the "women don't belong in programming" problem is not something I've seen myself or had 30+ years of coworkers mention that they had seen. I'm sure it happened somewhere but such a sentiment is an anomaly not a widespread problem like being asked out on a date too many times.
My opinion as to why the low representation of women exists, I think it is simply that fewer are exposed to it. I initially imagined programming boring, then I had to do a little in school and I discovered it to be a lot of fun, interesting and that I was also good at it. It was literally a life changing revelation. I expect that fewer females are given the chance to make such a personal discovery. So maybe there is a "women don't belong in programming" sentiment, but it would seem to be at home with their family, parents, aunts, uncles, etc than in industry. FWIW that girlfriend I had who did embedded software, her dad had a small manufacturing business and her and her sister grew up around people who made things. Both had the same opportunities to explore, but only she had the curiosity, her sister did not. Programming
Stop giving our jobs to people from India.
At present, women are a significant minority, and they still will be. 20% is enough, but 5% is not. Managing % figures is not the way to go.
John_Chalisque
Girls born today are 75% more likely to go to University than boys. /idontwanttoliveonthisplanetanymore
That's not alarming.
But Women in (death boring to many) IT going from 24% to 22% is.
It's common on tech forums to see "females naturally don't like tech or math". When and how did we prove with undeniable certainty the "natural" inclinations of a person, based on their gender? Considering many of these professions are hardly "natural" anyway, how do you make that determination? Are females born with a propensity to like purses rather than wallets?
Personally, I welcome diversity, and while many people will clamor that it forces unqualified people into workplaces, I'll show you many people who are simply "making it work" and are nothing special. In fact, I'd argue the most damage of keeping unqualified workers exists in "they know (or are related to) X". Many female developers I've met are just as skilled as their male counterparts and usually tend to be more organized in my experience. I've seen less female "rock stars" but that may be due to the fact that I've worked with WAY more men (sample bias).
While this is an anecdote, I feel like it has some truth in it. I was at Target. A mother and her daughter were shopping around. The young daughter begged to be Spider-Man for Halloween and the mother continually said, "No, that's for boys. You can choose something else." My experience tells me that is far from a rarity, and that's simply concerning dressing up like some fictional character. I feel like many people in the tech community who are decently rational will say, "Who cares what costume or choice a child makes based on their gender" and then attempt to apply that to how others react to the same situation. Well, there are many people out there who still apply genders to the most minute of decisions, and they are parents. :)
P.S. I'm not a SJW, at all. Please stop overusing the term. However, I just don't see what's worth whining about. Who the fuck cares? Your job is not at risk by a certain discipline attempting to be more inclusive. If it is, then that is an HR problem at your company or your skills aren't that great. People who are upset are either severely overreacting (for whatever reason) or are just play the protectionist game.
Except:
In countries where women have *more* choice, most women don't go into math/science related fields.
In countries where women have *less* choice, many more women do.
The conversation is not about career capacity. It's about choice.
Ironically, what people seem to be worried about is that when women have greater freedom of choice, they don't choose the same thing as men do. ...And apparently that's a problem.
We live in strange times.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
We're whining and spending a ton more money on ' correcting' gender imbalance because it is inherently wrong for some reason and supposedly the problem is only worsening according to these studies from the mouths of progressives themselves so it looks like its just making the problem worse so why bother? If anything, doing nothing will improve gender balance if you buy all the logic.
The very worst thing you can do for women is ironically what the companies have been doing: hire them as "diversity" hires and promote them because they're female. That automatically and implicitly labels any woman, irrespective of the actual merit, as a "diversity" employee who is hired and promoted not because of merit, but because they don't have a penis. This, counterintuitively to some, makes it much harder for them to earn the respect of their male peers.
So if affirmative action is your idea of how to improve the situation, I suggest you reconsider, and instead turn to the only thing that works in high tech: strict, unyielding meritocracy, and high hiring bar irrespective of gender, race, or sexual orientation.
...law and medicine in particular soared straight towards 50/50 with no dips, whereas women avoid IT with every downturn. The first downturn was after the dot-bomb, and now the larger financial slowdown.
What's the diff? The other three are real professions. This gives them some protections from the members being turned into commodities when there's a surplus of them. There are reduced openings, even job losses, but a floor on how badly they're paid and treated.
Women are just being rational and evaluating it as a job and career - and their tendencies should be read as the canary in the coal mine: coming in from the outside, they have a clearer view. Make IT a real profession like law, medicine, engineering, with state level licensing requirements, and you'll get rid of a lot of the industry's worst features, have a buffer against H1-B outsourcing, and the gender issue will go away as with the other professions. Women
And maybe they just need to grow up and stop expecting special privileges wherever they go. If it's the same environment for males, it's not discrimination. Demanding unilaterally defined special treatment would be the discrimination. It's not different when women do it...
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
You can't outsource or replace with robots services catering to humans and their bodies.
Nor can you outsource or robotize salesmanship, leadership and all the other -ships.
And there will probably always be legal reasons why legal services and public administration can't be out given out to foreign employees or machines.
But speaking of services for humans...
Education and health services are about as female dominated as manufacturing tends to be male dominated.
Actually, slightly more... 74.65% for E&H vs 71.9% for manufacturing.
But much more important is that there are more than twice as many jobs in E&H services (33,678 thousands ) than in manufacturing (15,338 thousands).
Education and health services is actually the BIGGEST industry in the US, making up more than a fifth (but not quite a quarter - 22.62%) of ALL JOBS in the USA.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat1...
You can't outsource child care or health care cause you can't outsource people. And robots are nowhere near to be able to do that job.
Making those E&H jobs safe and secure.
Amazingly, that category has the most humans who, thorough a quirk of biology, tend to have the need for a safe and stable environment in order to gestate, give birth to and raise the next generation of humans.
Whodathunkit, right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
After endlessly repeating the message, "Women need to be encouraged to work in this field because they don't naturally have much interest in it
I see your debatig strategy is more or less:
1. Make up stupid shit
2. Reach conclusions based on 1.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It is up to you to demonstrate there is evidence of a 'problem'. A statistic that simply says that there are less women than men in a given area is not evidence of a 'problem'. You've suggested there is a 'hostility' to women working in a given field...PROVE IT.
OK, start with these:
http://www.unwomen.org/~/media...
http://www.marieclaire.com/car...
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/2...
http://journalistsresource.org...
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/19...
Instead of the field of computing, why not work in the field of LEA dragnetting? In Yakima, WA, LEA decoys routinely troll all neighborhoods, parks, and business districts. Seems like a popular line of work.
thats a lot of white guilt you got there. try pulling your head out of your ass.
Garbage collection requires quite a lot of upper-body strength
Nope. Modern trucks have mechanized lifts that lift garbage containers into trucks. At the dumps all of the work is with heavy equipment, which a three-year old could drive...
There is no requirement other than being in generally good physical condition.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In other news, men still at 0.0% birthing rates. When will we be able to get these numbers up? Since the dawn of time, women have given birth to 100% of all babies. This is rank discrimination against men to deny us the wonder of childbirth. /sarc off
In all truthfulness men and women are different, and while there are outliers among both (men who WANT to stay home to raise the kids or women who get all excited about writing code or mathematical theorems) stereotypes exist for a reason, because in most cases they are true. On top of that, we are dealing with basic, biological differences in men and women.
What if I told you there was a job that only women could do, and that the employer injects the employees on a daily basis with an addictive drug (oxytocin) that makes the employees want to stay at the job, even though the job entails sleep deprivation, severe body modification and even intentional infliction of pain on a frequent basis? That is essential motherhood. And everything I described is biologically done to the mother over the course of pregnancy, childbirth and nursing.
Conversely, when you watch the Olympics, in the physical strength events (running, throwing etc.), the women you see taking home the gold are at about the level of your average high school track star. If we integrated the sexes in those events, no woman would ever medal again, it is basic biology, which is why Olympic cheaters have been trying for years to pass off men as women.
The real, government sanctioned discrimination these days is inflicted on the white male, and indirectly on his family. Thus we have the rapidly shrinking middle class. It is shameful and there is no excuse. The white male is Boxer the horse from Animal Farm. The white male built western civilization and defended it with his blood for generations and when he is gone (i.e. unemployed/broken/welfare recipient, etc.), it will crumble (we already see the cracks).
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
https://imgur.com/gallery/CfDz...
America should import some H1B Politicians maybe then your government will get serious about the H1B visa issue.
Except then you'll be fired for lacking "people skills".
Logic skills and people skills are almost mutually exclusive in my observation. Soothing (typical) humans is the art of hiding or bending the ugly sides of their reality. You have to essentially half lie to get along.
It's almost like mastering Newtonian physics, and then having to switch to quantum physics: you have unlearn or put aside most of what you mastered, and switch back and forth between them as needed.
It's doable, but not easy. But humans are even worse because at least quantum physics has documented formulas and rules. Humans don't, or at least it's inconsistent between humans, and YOU have to figure out how each varies. Thus, you must master the physics of hundreds of different undocumented universes.
Table-ized A.I.
Semi-side story: In college I had to take a CNC course as part of my minor. We were given a drawing of a part to be produced on a CNC lathe as our final class project.
It was generally assumed we were to generate the coordinate list by hand. It was a lot of grunt work so I wrote a Pascal program on the side to compute the delta's, do some basic range checking, and draw a rough plot via "ASCII art". I only had to enter the raw coordinates. Using this program I got the delta list done and and it all checked out in theory and I thought I was a real hot-shot.
Then came time to actually machine it. A teacher's assistant inserted a raw aluminum block, loaded my punched tape, closed the transparent lid, and pressed "Go".
The CNC lathe started shaping the part according to plan. I started smiling as it got near the finish, for the part forming before my eyes looked just like the assignment drawing.
Then suddenly aluminum started spraying out like crazy from the cutting tool, making a sharp jarring "neeeaaarrr" sound. Internally I thought "Oh shit!" Mentally, that was my grade being shredded before us.
Soon the horrible noise ceased, and the machine completed the action. There was a little rough patch near the end, but otherwise the part visually looked good.
Not knowing what to think, I glanced at the teacher's assistant. In a monotone voice, he said, "You had some excessive delta's, but otherwise the shape is correct. You get a B- on it. You almost broke the blade. If the blade had broke, you'd get a C-. You got lucky". (They were used to broken blades for students.)
Turns out my Pascal delta distance checker only checked the "x" distance due to a bug, not the Pythagorean distance.
Had I done it all by hand, I'd probably avoid or catch that mistake because I'd be "experiencing" the direct data details. Automation is not always a free lunch.
(Arguably I could have also spent more time checking the software, but that could take approximately as long as hand computations.)
Table-ized A.I.
You have it backwards :-)
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Bending over backwards isn't enough apparently.
Women already make up nearly 60% of all college graduates. They already receive favoritism for things like financial aid, grants, and scholarships (except for sports). There are TV ads, commercials, and companies doing everything they can to get more women into STEM and it is all failing. So what, coercion and extortion are not working so we panic?
People should stop trying to bully people into a field and forcing an ideology that people simply don't want. There is equal opportunity, in fact it's white males who today are treated like shit by politicians, academics, and media and every other racial group and gender is receiving preferences.
Also, people in general need to stop pretending like biological differences don't matter. They do, and facts matter.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This is because - as we all know - the secret to great code and efficient programming is evenly distributed genitalia.
You have it backwards :-)
So, instead of making up stupid shit, then reaching a conclusion based on it, you jumped to a conclusion first then started making up stupid shit?
Sure, OK, I'll accept that.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
With increased automation and clever third world countries on hand, the last thing I would encourage my daughter into is IT. Maybe into a cushy management job that won't get sent abroad or given to a robot?
It is, in fact, the very worst kind of bigotry, and it has a name; institutional racism>/p>
Yea, that's far worse than centuries of enslavement, beatings, and murder based solely on skin color. /s
Do you truly believe for a nanosecond that being passed over for promotions is anywhere near as bad as being lynched by the KKK?
You are, in fact, an utter moron.
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters No one has ever shown that have different color people of different shape changes anything if any significance over any meaningful period of time. Take for example the number of Europeans and their dominance of the planet. The amount of time and number of individuals is infinitesimal. When did we scientists start to care about anything other than large and meaningful datasets and conclusions. Who of us Engineers cares anything more than reaching for the stars? I would gladly sacrifice myself and anyone or anything I have ever encountered for us to escape this provincial backwards looking mindset. Ad Astra per Aspera
It's good that you know how to admit when you were wrong.
Why bother? Why would a woman want to go into tech these days, considering that they will likely get passed over in favor of foreign, male H1-B visa holders any way.
Oh no! Let's pour more money into women so we can force them into tech careers.
The number of women in computing is a statistic, not necessarily a problem.
This article is suggesting that we solve a statistical different without first proving that the statistic indicates a problem in need of solving.
Personally, I want more women in computing, especially dev, because, well, women are awesome. So awesome, I married a woman. :-)
Also, I personally feel that a feminine perspective can be beneficial to many dev projects, but I have not data to back up my personal feeling.
...I can't help but wonder how much of this is due to the government and industry emphasis on women in engineering. Maybe they should - Oh! The HORROR! - encourage EVERYBODY who might want to get into engineering? No...no, that can't be it...it's not PC.
I've working as a developer/programmer for 20 yrs, and recently transitioned to teaching programming --- the comments pretty much show why women don't want to go into programming, it's not has nothing to do with 'self-selection', innate gender differences, etc., it has to do with them dealing with a bunch of d1cks.
I have karma to burn, so all those people in denial can mod me down -- but I've seen this shit firsthand for years, so justify your sexism and bias all you want, but most people posting hear are part of the problem. So go vote for Trump, and enjoy your Nov 8th meltdown
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
The fact that you can choose what to buy from a preselected and limited set of items, whose every single element is being actively PUSHED at you doesn't mean that EVERY... SINGLE... ONE of those items is actively being designed, packaged, promoted, priced... etc. etc.in order to SELL IT to people.
Should say:
"The fact that you can choose what to buy from a preselected and limited set of items, whose every single element is being actively PUSHED at you doesn't mean that EVERY... SINGLE... ONE of those items wasn't actively designed, packaged, promoted, priced... etc. etc. in order to SELL IT to people."
Serves me right for watching a quiz show while slashdotting.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens