Women are bailing out of IT

http://www.womensenews.org/story/women-in-science/100623/it-jobs-offer-growth-women-are-bailing-out

by Mgreen • 16 years ago

13 30 16 years ago

fizx• 16 years ago

IME, the presence of women has mostly been a signal that the workplace is healthy. For the most part, women won't put up with the same shit men will to get ahead.

Whenever someone says "women are bailing," I read "working conditions are poor."

hello_moto3• 16 years ago

I don't have data, I don't do research, I never read news regarding job/working environment in IT industry, however, I have a very strong feeling that you are correct sir

(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.

mkramlich5• 16 years ago

I'd say less than 1% of all programmers I've met/seen have been female. About 50% of the project managers I've known have been female. In about 90%+ of the cases where I've been in a meeting at work with programmers and a project manager, IF there were only 1 female in the room she was the project manager, not a programmer. So, extrapolating... assuming enough other males have experienced approximately the same thing in life, that could account for why they tend to expect any unknown new female they encounter in that situation to be, well, not a programmer, and very probably a manager or project assistant of some kind.

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)

MartinCron3• 16 years ago

The article also mentioned her manager suggesting that she play up her feminine side and not let the men think she was smarter than them. That's not being on the wrong side of statistics, that's being on the wrong side of a sexist asshole.

mkramlich5• 16 years ago

Good point. But I'd say maybe. Not necessarily. Maybe he thought he was being helpful or practical. None of us was there so context and nuance are lost. Many programmers/engineers/geeks, especially when younger, tend to be defensive about being Smart (tm). For some, it's part of their personal sense of virility as a man. That may be what the manager was thinking about when he said that.

But agreed, sexism is bad.

skybrian4• 16 years ago

Since we weren't there and don't know the person, all sorts of interpretations are plausible, including that the person telling the story got it right. Why do you choose to assume they got it wrong? Sounds like the just-world fallacy to me: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/07/the-just-world-fallac...

mkramlich5• 16 years ago

Neither of us knows exactly what happened, that's true. My comments are based on direct experiences I've had in life, personally, over a large number of years, and from that I'm guessing as to what kinds of factors might be at play here, since we all live in approximately the same world.

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.

silencio• 16 years ago

But surely you encounter women outside of Great Clips. Maybe there's even one or more living in the same household as you. The context is changed, but the women are still women. Why should the context dictate how sexist someone should be to someone else? (And I say someone rather than 'a woman' because men face the same thing in other industries that women feel in CS/IT.) A reasonable reaction is being surprised/shocked that a man is cutting your hair at Great Clips. That is not discrimination. Unreasonable and discriminatory is to then start to say derogatory things about him and his work in the context of his working in a majority female workplace and then tip him like shit afterwards. It's pretty fair to say the woman in question was encountering some of this at work.

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.

MartinCron3• 16 years ago

This is a subject that I care about, as my wife is also a software developer and has felt out-of-place in a male-dominated field.

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?

hello_moto3• 16 years ago

Contrary to popular beliefs (that business people are assholes), there are plenty jerks that work as developers and they play quite good "politic" games in the office; they are smart individuals after all.

MartinCron3• 16 years ago

Yeah, I have been around enough to realize that smarts and virtue aren't in any way linked.

Also the correlation between smarts and being a developer isn't as strong as I would hope.

skybrian4• 16 years ago

The report is apparently not online, though you can give them your email address here: http://www.ncwit.org/resources.thefacts.html [Edit: actually it is, just click "no thanks"]

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?

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

I read that as 10-20 years since the beginning of their career (i.e., age 30-40 if it's their first career). Makes me wonder whether women are more likely to switch careers (though they say men trend to less risk-aversion), or more likely to take parental leave and not return. I agree that many years at a single tech company would be very surprising, even outside the valley.

mkramlich5• 16 years ago

guessed pregnancy/parenting was a possible factor too.

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!"

hkarthik• 16 years ago

I'm sure that taking a time off to raise small children until they are school age plays a big part in these stats. From birth to kindergarten that's about 5 years of being a stay at home parent.

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.

minus14• 16 years ago

You can skip the email request (click "No Thanks") and it starts the download for the "Women in IT: The Facts" report.

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."

skybrian4• 16 years ago

Thanks, skimmed too quickly. But after reading it, I see that all their statistics comes from another paper: "The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology" by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, et al, which Harvard Business Review will sell you for $300:

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.

petercooper4• 16 years ago

Only 2% of kindergarten teachers in the UK are male (1). Further, the overall number of male elementary school teachers in the UK has fallen significantly in the last 30 years (2) - men have been "bailing out of primary education" for decades.

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...

minus14• 16 years ago

I think we should be careful not to get too defensive over this issue. I don't think most women are bullied out of their role, but neither do I think there are gender differences that account for the full disparity between women and men in IT. If there is a way we can make the IT field more inclusive, that is a good thing.

petercooper4• 16 years ago

If there is a way we can make the IT field more inclusive, that is a good thing.

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.

mkramlich5• 16 years ago

Yes, clearly the female kindergarten teachers are discriminating against them!

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!"

ahoyhere• 16 years ago

I am so anti-crying-sexism it hurts, but your logic and the OP's logic make no sense.

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.)

skybrian4• 16 years ago

Compare "I doubt this is a problem" with "Alarming if true. How can we determine whether this is really a problem?" Both are expressions of skepticism, but one shuts down further inquiry and the other encourages it.

dotBen• 16 years ago

For me it comes down to two factors...

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.

Tycho• 16 years ago

If you calculate some sort of mean aptitude for IT work for each gender, you end up with a meaningless statistic. All men and women are individuals capable of individual contribution and for any large 'group' of individuals to be discouraged/lost is not a good thing for any profession. For selfish reasons I want more women to consider applying their talents to IT/computing.

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

Women are bailing out of IT

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