

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

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petercooper
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...](http://www.askamum.co.uk/News/Search-Results/Current-news/Primary-
schools-lack-male-teachers/)

~~~
mkramlich
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
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.)

------
MartinCron
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_moto
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.

~~~
MartinCron
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.

~~~
hello_moto
I think the correlation between smarts and developer might be strong, with a
few exceptions. The thing is, people stop learning after University and stick
with what they have known and learned.

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.

------
fizx
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_moto
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.

------
mkramlich
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)

~~~
MartinCron
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.

~~~
mkramlich
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.

------
Tycho
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

------
skybrian
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-...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/06/ncwit-report-
examines-womens-d.php)

"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
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.

~~~
hkarthik
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.

------
dotBen
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.

