Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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!
I don't understand why they should be "encouraged" to study computer science to just keep up some random statistic vs. encouraging them to do whatever their hearts tell them they should be doing? Stories like this make me so angry because it casts women as unable to decide for themselves and we should be "correcting" their life choices. Whatever...
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.
http://amarillo.com/opinion/op...
Good paying jobs, and women just don't want them.
Stories like this make me so angry because it casts women as unable to decide for themselves and we should be "correcting" their life choices.
Well, perhaps you should calm down, stop and actually think. Humans, ALL humans are influenced by outside factors. No man is an island etc etc.
Funnily enough that includes women.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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
That is literally racism you are describing. Racism is more than yelling bigoted obscenities. Regarding non white people as not fully human and denying promotions and raises is racism.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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 what if the conditions of work are preventing them? And I'm not just talking about the "usual" conditions like a lack of affordable daycare and the like which often keep women from better employment. What if there are certain groups within this industry, or in any industry really, who are hostile to women being there?
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.
It is, in fact, the very worst kind of bigotry, and it has a name; institutional racism. It's the kind of racism that even people who consider themselves non-racists can exhibit, where they, often unconsciously, stack the deck against some employees based on racial, ethnic or gender cues.
And then all the white males in the IT department show up on Slashdot and say "Well, maybe the woman and blacks don't wanna be computer programmers!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Outside factors are not an issue.
If every role model of a programmer you see until you're a teenager is male.
If computer programmer Barbie involves the girl doing some design, but the actual coding being done by boys.
If every children's TV show that includes both women and computers has the woman saying computers are hard and the man solving the problems.
If all of the clever boys at your school are encouraged into extracurricular activities involving computers, but the girls aren't.
I'm sure it would have no impact at all on you.
If you don't think that this is real, then sit down for a couple of hours this evening and watch two hours of children's TV. Count the number of male vs female lead roles. Count the number of times anyone builds anything and whether it's done by a male or female character.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So if there were outside factors that biologically predisposed men and women towards different career paths or interests would you accept that those might result in something other than an even distribution of employment in certain vocations?
This doesn't make sense. The differences are either innate (biological) or the result of external factors. If they're the result of external factors (i.e. not biological) then they're likely to be amenable to change. The fact that the participation of women varies hugely between cultures (for example, in India, Korea, Israel, Iran, and Lithuania, Romania, it's a lot higher) implies strongly that external factors are far more of a reason why we have so few women than anything biological.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No problem of this nature is fixed by forcing people to change. The only way is to stick it out in the hostile environment until you are a majority. Then you can change the situation simply by acting differently. When you're the majority, you set the tone.
That's assuming there's a problem to begin with, of course.
The Civils Right movement says otherwise. Sometimes you have to force people to be less of an asshole.