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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.
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.
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.
I've worked in IT for over 2 decades. This may have existed back in the late 80's, possibly even into the very early 90's, but since about 1995 has been a fallacy perpetrated by those with an agenda to cast this industry as somehow sexist or backwards. If there are any people left who are still truly hostile to females in IT that haven't been weeded out through attrition, harassment claims, or other HR procedures, they must be really good at hiding how they truly feel and therefore it isn't really an issue anymore.
Stop being disingenuous and perpetrating "what if" scenarios to further a divisive agenda you know is going to lose, anyway.
Outside factors are not an issue.
Bullshit they ain't. Summon Captain Anecdote!
I was talking to my officemate a couple of months ago about relational databases (she was doing a course on them). I prefer to think about things in a quite mathematical way, and I was trying t ooffer some insight in that direction. Turns out she apparently used to be decent at maths but dropped it after being told repeatedly in school words t othe effects of "maths isn't for girls".
So perhaps you'd like to go and explain to her how outside factors are not an issue.
. Outside factors help influence a decision
Wait... didn't you just say they're not a factor? Please do try to make up your mind.
It's just not the choice they prefer.
Aaaand we're back to it not mattering.
Honestly, you seem to be trying to rationalize something or other to me.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
He's not complaining about choice, but that we're apparently telling women they are making the WRONG CHOICE.
And, oddly, blaming the men for making them choose wrong too.
The barrier doesn't exist. Computers are ubiquitous. There are tons of free development tools, tutorials, forums to ask questions. If you really want to get into it, you'll already be playing around with code.
The fact is that programming is a shit field over the long term. If I had to do it over again, I would have just kept it as something to toy around with.
Doesn't matter how many women you try to push in the field - the vast majority change to another field within 10 years.
Over the long term, it's better than being forced out in 20 years by the beancounters because you're perceived as too old (both sexes) and they can get someone younger cheaper.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Obviously you are going to define this as a problem that society has foisted upon women. No matter what the other arguments may be.
The opportunity is there. There are tons of programs to support women in IT. If there has been some boogeyman out there keeping women from programming, then we can't really do anything about that.
My daughters have had their interests supported as much as my sons. Even more so. I have never seen a 'get your BOYS interested in STEM' while my daughters have been exposed to many of those programs.
Those 'outside factors' you speak of are the boogeymen. You are putting the entire burden on us proving that women don't have these factors. But if the goal is to have equal access to these careers, it exists now.
You are asking us to prove a negative.
No reason to lie.
That's a fair point. I don't know if there is much research into women in refuse collection, but it is worth identifying why so few want reasonably well paid jobs. It's not like they are averse to getting dirty - cleaning and various forms of nursing/care are dominated by women, literally cleaning up other people's shit.
Could be an image thing (like with men in nursing), could be a cultural thing.
The thing is though, it's a tough nut to crack. The starting percentage is low, historically there was little interest (women used to make up 38% of the CS workforce as recently as the 1980s) and it's typically not a field that attracts intellectuals who see the benefit of correcting the situation. Not that we should give up, I'm just suggesting why there is more effort being put into tech and science.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Any problems that still exist in IT still exist in any "traditionally male" industries and occupations. And it's not just females that are affected, it's any special snowflake.
We can't single out IT and say how sexist and terrible its constituents are when I'm sure there are still much worse places (harassment-wise, etc.) for snowflakes like refineries, steel mills, oil rigs, railroads, heavy equipment repair, and probably almost any other blue collar job where you get dirty or risk your life.
Saying that the snowflakes get treated worse in a cube farm full of programmers than literally any of those other places is doing a disservice to the real women working in those other fields every day busting their asses. The difference? Your average millennial snowflake doesn't want to be a millwright, work on an oil rig, repair railroad tracks or become a tradesman. Why? Because (unlike tech) it isn't perceived as glorious, you have to deal with extremes of temperature, you can't become famous doing it, you can't sit on your ass and tweet all day about how oppressed you are while doing it, you probably won't get rich (but you'll earn a very comfortable living) and you sure as hell can't be a SJW idiot if you want to survive (literally, in many of those places) the first month on the job.
Yet, women have been working in all of those jobs for generations now. The problem isn't sexism or discrimination or harassment (which again, the HR departments and years of sensitivity training have pretty much taken care of), it's the softness of the last two generations of humans. They've been taught that feelings must be preserved above all else, above self, above country, above safety, and above security. In the traditional blue-collar industries I've mentioned above, anyone who makes it past training and the first week on the job will realize, right quick, that the safety of you and your crew is the number one priority. Feelings be damned. Does it matter if someone hurt your feelings if they got you out of a serious jam alive?
Now, in IT, it may not be life or death, but you might make a bad decision and decide to preserve someone's feelings and lose your career or promotion over it. You might lose your business a ton of money if a critical system goes offline or worse. And that isn't cool, we shouldn't have to lie to people and tell them they're good at something they aren't if they actually aren't good at it because of some protected status (or worse yet, feelings). There are plenty of women throughout history who have found great success in traditionally male fields. There are probably a lot who (for whatever reason) couldn't cut it and decided to move on. We are at a critical juncture right now where we decide what's more important: feelings or honesty. Hurting someone's feelings isn't always malicious, unwarranted, nor is it discrimination, in fact, it's one of the few things that even to me (as a man) can reach me when I'm sure I'm right and I'm really not. It's part of growing and being an adult.
So, are we going to embrace being an adult, growing up, and being responsible for making good decisions? Or are we going to embrace a permeating culture of perpetual adolescence where everyone gets a trophy and we base someone's worth not on what they produce or they can create or build, but on how many oppression points they can collect for themselves or how many times you signal your virtue to those holding those points? Women should work wherever they want to work, it shouldn't matter what percentage of them work where, it's their decision to determine whether they can cut it or not in a certain field. And saying they somehow shouldn't be left to decide their own future and destiny for themselves is positively the most sexist thing I've ever heard.
Women's bias seems less about stability and more about work flexibility:
http://freakonomics.com/podcas...
Bye!
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