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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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
This is a simple question of physiology - girls can't grow neckbeards, therefore they can't reach pinnacle of programming career.
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.
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
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.