Women are bailing out of IT
womensenews.org
womensenews.org
Are the majority of cases due to bullying or being "forced" out of the role? I doubt it. It's more likely to be related to opportunities and different types of people gravitating to what sort of jobs suit them best. I suspect if women are crashing out of IT, it might be because it's not a particularly appealing or novel career anymore (back in the 90s it was portrayed as super high paid and "cool" - far more appealing than the very sexist financial industry at the time) and women have better opportunities to do other things than ever before (e.g. finance, management, legal) whereas males in IT are probably there because they picked it from the start as a calling rather than a career.
Update: As one of the respondents says, yes, let's make IT more inclusive. But let's not 1) assume IT is a special case, or 2) go OTT by doling out blame or restricting the largely innocent (i.e. "men" as a group) by redefining acceptable behavior to be a tiny gamut of unnatural neutrality and inoffensiveness.
1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7838273.stm 2: http://www.askamum.co.uk/News/Search-Results/Current-news/Pr...
I agree. I'm no fan of discrimination, because we all have characteristics that could be discriminated against by our colleagues and most of us know that being hated on sucks.
That said, I have two issues: 1) that IT is a radical edge case of men-vs-women, when, really, the majority of industries have this issue, and 2) the male armchair feminists going OTT with the dehumanizing "men must never say or do anything a woman could find vaguely uncomfortable" attitude.
I should stop here and mention that the counter is true with many careers. You mentioned elementary education as one example. I would add nursing to the list.
My father went to school to become a nurse. My grandfather was ashamed. When asked what his son did he would say he was a medic in Vietnam, but never mention the fact that he later became a nurse.
It cuts both ways, but neither is right. We should make the extra effort to make women comfortable. To welcome them to the field so that in the future this is not an issue.
I have a one year old daughter, but I think my bias is one of a gritty commoner brought up surrounded by gritty, strong London women. Whatever my daughter ends up doing, I'd hope she can fight, drink, argue and cuss any of her male compatriots who dare piss her off under the table.
Most of the women I know and respect in our field are ass kickers. They have strong personalities (even if they're not outgoing) and speak their mind - most don't freak out about gender issues, even if they've had problems in the past, they nip things in the bud. I love these guys not because they're women or "feminine" but because they're being themselves, getting on with life and not using their gender as an excuse for doing anything differently.
Given this, I don't think we should make an extra effort to make women comfortable. We should make an overall effort to make people comfortable (I suspect most men don't like the bawdy "manly" behavior either), diminish the concept of gender and gender roles, and be more tolerant of each other.
I dare say there are plenty of weak people in the industry having problems - it just looks like gender discrimination because men are less likely to complain about or leave the industry over such harassment due to pride and lack of options.
Merely trying to make the industry more appealing to women (rather than "people" generally) is like trying to make Detroit more appealing to the rich. Until harassment and BS is stamped out for the people already in the industry, the people who have a choice whether to enter the industry or not aren't going to be easily persuaded. The garden should be weeded before we plant more seeds.
Thanks for bringing this up. I've seen so many articles and discussions complaining about the lack/decrease/discrimination of females in stereotypically male fields/roles. And yet when the shoe is on the other foot, it's never treated like it's some conspiracy or sexism. It's treated like, "Oh, well that's just an obvious gender difference thing. Duh!"
Ask those male kindergarten teachers if they WANTED to stay in the industry, and if so, why did they leave?
I think there are lots of women who leave IT because it's a nasty, brutish and short industry, with less job security/respect than most intellectual professions, where you must constantly work in your off-hours to stay up to date, and where you're likely to be upstaged by a 16-year-old who's willing to sleep under his desk because he has no social life or responsibilities except code.
The theoretical sexism is just the icing on the cake.
That's probably why women are flocking to bio engineering, etc., while dropping CS. It was true in the day of the Microserfs book and still true now: where a degree is a true requirement, you are insulated against 16-year-old upstarts.
I think women, on the whole, are more "reasonable" than men with their pursuits. Whether that's a good thing depends on who you ask, and from what perspective you look at it.
(Oh yeah, and I'm a woman.)
Two things struck me about the linked article.
1: It sounds like her Midwestern co-workers were just assholes, seriously. Having asshole co-workers is a problem for men and women alike. One key distinction is that men don't immediately relate abusive bevahior to gender. I am sure it often really is gender hostility, but sometimes the guy is just a jerk.
Basically: Dear women (and men) in IT. There are jerks out there and there always will be. Sometimes the only option is to get a new job. Sad, but true.
2: I find the idea of a "glass cliff" (i.e. an impossible project set up to make someone fail) really fascinating. It's a form of harassment I've never heard of before. Anyone have stories?
Also the correlation between smarts and being a developer isn't as strong as I would hope.
On top of that, most developers tend to be stubborn because people have been telling them that they're "Special", that they're "Smart" throughout their live (a decent University CS major usually would require the students to take a lot of Math, usually up to 3rd year Math and Stats, and Science courses. Students who excel in these subjects tend to be perceived as "Smart").
It's hard for anyone to be humble when they had been brainwashed.
Whenever someone says "women are bailing," I read "working conditions are poor."
(I'm not joking nor trying to be sarcastic).
Most developers I've worked with don't have great personality and usually the women are the one who "break the ice", sharing their lunch ideas, vacation stories, etc while men are usually about video games and how .NET sucks, SVN sucks.
Maybe it's just my personal experience... but most developers I worked with tend to be more negative than their women counterparts.
That said, yes, obviously there are female programmers, and yes it sucks if a man assumes a woman can't program solely because of a gender. But from my reading of the OA, I don't think that the particular female programmer in question was necessarily having that particular experience. Instead, she may have just been on the wrong side of statistics. Some of those men may literally have never encountered a female programmer before, period. So for them, it would be like, oh say, walking into a Great Clips to have your hair cut, and you sit down at the hair cutting chair and suddenly a man comes up and starts cutting hair. It would be shocking for me if that happened, at least initially, because based on my own experience 100% of hair cutters at the Great Clips franchise are women, no exceptions so far. But it wouldn't mean that I was discriminating against him, or oppressing or persecuting him in anyway.
Summary: She may have just found herself on the wrong side of statistics. Part of life, move on.
(note: Great Clips is a chain of hair cutting salons in the USA midwest)
But agreed, sexism is bad.
I also often put a higher trust level in the findings from my own direct experience, than in what I read in an article on the web somewhere, where it's second-hand and possibly hearsay and probably had a lot of data and nuance filtered out or distorted along the path to being written up. I don't even know if the main woman talked about is even a real person, for example (probably, but who knows) whereas I know I'm real and not bullshitting, so...
Thanks for the link on Just World Fallacy! Yep, heard of that.
My pull-out-of-my-arse statistics: there are lots of men in CS and IT that I've talked to, met in person, drank with, worked with, and even slept with some. Most men I know are really nice and reasonable, and in a good way (read: good friends!). A few of them are awkward, but again, in a good-to-acceptable way (making wrong assumptions or stepping on toes, but learning). But it's the few that I can count on my fingers that I will remember as treating me like complete shit that will be the reason why I'd want to switch careers altogether if I were to work with them regularly.
Some of these can be explained away by culture differences, age differences and more. But you know what. When you're sitting in a room with 5 other people and only one is female and she's the developer working on what all six of you met to discuss...and you outright ignore her when she's trying to talk to you...that's sexism, that's bullshit, and no amount of culture clash explains that away. And that and more is what I put up with once in a while, and most of that related to this industry even though programming is maybe half of what I do on a regular basis.
I've even got a story about a dev at one office that wasn't even an acquaintance that stared at my tits all day long and tried to grope me. :P Him I'd have to categorize as a general creep more than geeks-gone-stupid though, it doesn't happen often and it was probably just coincidence.
Anyway....it may be part of life, but it doesn't mean I have to put up with it more than necessary. It's pretty funny people explicitly mention other fields like bio-anything being women friendly and women heavy...chem and BME are some of my other interests, and I sure don't get that crap there. It's very tempting to go specialize/switch to something where I get less of this discriminatory behavior from others.
I'm sure sexism and other factors have an effect, but people have a knack for overcoming things like that... I think the problem is much deeper rooted.
Anecdotal evidence, but ten years ago the pupils in my year at school were asked to pick from Computing or Administration as one of their subjects for the next year. We ended up with about 2 girls picking computing in the whole yeargroup, whereas the Administration class (secretarial work) was much more evenly dividied.
Computing was a harder subject but the girls in my year were just as academically accomplished as the boys (if not more). So what gives? That is the root of the problem IMO
There's another article here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/06/ncwit-report-...
"The NCWIT report contends that 56% of women in technology companies leave their organizations at the mid-level point (10-20 years) in their careers, a costly loss of talent."
Maybe this is just Silicon Valley bias, but I have to wonder about who stays with the same organization for 10-20 years! I would expect most people to have worked at two or three companies by then. I wonder whether they addressed that?
What I love about any statistics-based argument or complaint regarding gender differences is that they always seem to start from a mindset that there are NO differences, physically, between males and females. Then they see a difference somewhere in their statistical data set (a 17% versus a 31%, or a 57% versus an 80%) and suddenly the hunt is on to try to find some way we can blame the difference on sexism or a conspiracy of some kind. It's like, "Hello, did you get the memo? Can we say: Breasts! Babies! Different body parts in the nether regions! Brain structure differences! Skeletal! Different hormone mix! Metabolism diffs! Maturity rate diffs! Aging diffs! Hello!"
If you're a developer, think of what difference 5 years makes. 5 years ago Rails was just a blip on the radar of web frameworks. 5 years ago, JQuery had not been released. 5 years ago, the Motorola Razr was a high end mobile phone.
So much can change in 5 years that your skills could be completely irrelevant. I couldn't blame anyone (man or woman) from switching careers completely after a multi-year hiatus. IT moves quick and the barrier to re-entry can be very high.
EDIT: Here's the pertinent section. They are saying they leave the field, not company, mid-career:
"In 2003, only one-third of women with a computer science bachelor’s degree were still employed in a science, engineering, or technical (SET) job two years after graduation. According to a study by the Center for Work-Life Policy, 74 percent of women in technology report “loving their work,” yet these women leave their careers at a staggering rate: 56 percent of technical women leave at the “mid-level” point just when the loss of their talent is most costly to companies. This is more than double the quit rate for men. It is also higher than the quit rate for women in science and engineering."
http://app.post.hbsp.harvard.edu/athena/athena13/landingpage...
There's a summary here:
http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v9/n10/full/embor2008178...
This might be a more accurate summary: "Although SET companies are struggling with a shortfall of skilled workers and can ill afford such a brain drain, roughly 52% of women between the ages of 35 and 40 leave their jobs largely because of 'hostile work environments and extreme job pressures', according to the study." Regardless of whether they go on to another company, it's alarming that there are that many hostile work environments out there.
1) In this specific case, I wonder if the geographic location (she moved to Mid-West) had a lot to do with it... ie workers not accepting of a strong woman in the workplace. In other words nothing particularly to do with IT specifically.
2) In general, women just don't particularly gravitate to IT related fields, perhaps because behaviorally logic-brained people are statistically more likely to be men than women, and those are the type of people who get ahead and successful in IT-related classes and careers.
Here in SF, I do think we could do a lot more to be accepting and encouraging of women but I think things are a lot better than other places and the main issue is lack of interest by women rather than them being pushed/kept out.