February 8, 2007 at 8:02 am
(That's like saying men don't have a mind for cooking.)
If know one who cooks let me know he he.
Informix you cannot pay me enough to use it, if Wal-Mart did not lean on IBM to buy it Informix would have disappeared like most good things that is hard to understand and operate.
The questions is are women leaving it or WITI is trying to raise funds it could be both, IT is very hostile to women even the skilled are marginalized and carefully discouraged, while barely skilled men are recognized thereby encouraged.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
February 8, 2007 at 8:05 am
I have to disagree with being a woman and working in IT as extremely hard. Maybe I've gotten lucky and haven't felt any pressure from my co-workers... maybe it's the environments I've worked in the past... for me, working in IT is fun - no two days are alike and I'm constantly learning something new to keep up on it. Sure, I have days where it's rough - but you'll have clients in most fields that will get under your skin somedays.
And I've worn numerous IT hats through the years - from the programmer hat to the technical support hat to the systems administration and database administration hats. I've worked at large corporations and small companies, in a variety of settings. And I'm still doing what I can to keep up.
Though I am afraid of becoming part of that statistic of women leaving IT. I'm married (to an IT guy!), under 30, no kids yet. However, when I do become a mom, I'm afraid that I won't be able to keep up with the demands of IT. Although we're waiting on the kids part for a few more years, when the time comes, I'll definitely have to face my fears head on.
February 8, 2007 at 8:14 am
(I have to disagree with being a woman and working in IT as extremely hard.)
What you said.
(IT is very hostile to women even the skilled are marginalized and carefully discouraged, while barely skilled men are recognized thereby encouraged.)
What I said. Individual experience separate us.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
February 8, 2007 at 9:11 am
I don't mean to change the subject here.
But recently there is a drop of students majoring computer science in college, especially after the dot.com bursted. A lot of technical people got layed off, the college grad at that year did not get a job. This made the students having second thought in majoring in computer science.
Also I know some of my IT friends try to discourage their kids to go to computer science fields because of outsourcing, H1 visa and job openings. They prefer their kids majoring in biochemical/medical fields. Some even said they rather have their kids learning carpentry. At least in those fields they cannot outsource to anywhere, and definitely you guarantee a job.
One of the hot job right now is landscape design. Actually I am thinking to switch from IT to landscape design. At least trees and flowers are much easier to work with than company politics, lousy developers, unreasonable users and crazy upper management.
February 8, 2007 at 9:16 am
(At least trees and flowers are much easier to work with than company politics, lousy developers, unreasonable users and crazy upper management.)
No Loner you have said it all, the individual experience makes a big difference.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
February 11, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Is it possible that big companies just aren't providing security and competitive wages/benefits to a large portion of workers in the IT field?
It would be an interesting comparison to see how much money Fortune 500 companies invest every year in undergrad CS development programs and CS recruitment versus how much they spend lobbying Congress to raise H1B limits and recruitment abroad.
February 12, 2007 at 1:38 am
I have lots of clients who actively look for women to try to keep a balanced workforce. So if any woman - or man - reads this and is looknig for an sql server role, please contact me charles_fp:informatiq.co.uk
February 12, 2007 at 2:28 am
As a woman in IT since a computer science degree in the late seventies who's managed to have children, take a gap and get back into IT, I know it is difficult. I didn't have a problem in the days BC (before children) and I left my job to move south with my husband and got pregnant instead of finding a new job.
While I was off work I took time to keep some skills up - I really learned PCs in that time as I'd been working on PDP 11s up till then.
I found a lower paid public sector developers job which was conveniently 5 minutes from school and having got established I was then able to negotiate flexibility in working. The development and software support team we built up comprised three women (all mothers) and three men and we had flexibility due to mutual support and understanding. It only broke up due to restructuring and redundancies but it took me though the junior school years.
I'm now in another government job (still poorer paid than private industry) but full time and with flexitime for all and the development teams total 5 men and 6 women, all women being over forty!
It's very noticeable in both those jobs that the network and hardware teams are almost exclusively male whilst software development is mixed. I find networks and hardware a complete turn off. They just are not interesting to me and I prefer to leave them to others and I know other women feel the same. We are perfectly capable of learning but not interested. Women prefer to be creative and are experienced at juggling commitments which makes us good at multi project support and development.
Also a key fact is that we see the computer as a tool – a means to an end – rather than as something to be understood in every detail. Just like a car, we don’t care how it works, just that it does the job.
My fifteen year old daughter is typical. Surrounded by computer specialists – mother father brother and cousin she only cares that MSN and media player work and that she can type up her schoolwork. If you try to explain anything or talk about virus protection and email care she just switches off and refuses to listen as “it’s boring”. Yet she has the intelligence and good grades in maths and science.
To appeal to young women, the industry will have to promote the creative aspects and the role of producing solutions to satisfy customers and that it is very much a person to person job not the person-machine job as it is currently promoted by men and perceived by women.
February 12, 2007 at 5:33 am
charles - and that's what's wrong with it all - this is reverse discrimination of the very worst type and if it were the other way around would no doubt be in the law courts by now!
Now I do paintball now and again, this doesn't atract many women players, perhaps we should be asking ourselves why women choose not to play and taking steps to resolve this, maybe each male player can only register if he also registers a female player?
It's fun to take the the extreme view sometimes, but perhaps women just don't want to do IT and that's the end of it, who cares to be honest and why should we assume there is a problem in every male dominated industry/activity. Taken to extremes this means UK football is bad as it is predominately male ( it was 40+ years ago when I went to football - I don't actually like football btw - but it was a long time ago ) , let me see the garage I take my car to be serviced has no female mechanics, the supermarket I visit has very few male staff members, when I surf in cornwall the majority of surfers are male, should we be allocating wave space by gender ?
It's an interesting discussion but I feel the childbirth issue is a red herring merely because men can't actually do the child bearing ( just as well I'm sure my wife would say ) so the criteria don't give a level argument. Technology does move on and keeping the skill set up to date is sometimes tricky - but this is the same for both male and female. working from home and flexible hours may be a part solution - the actual IT role is important too and I think it's unfair to expect anything but 100% if you happen to provide 3rd line support, I expect that I must be available almost any time - but I knew that when I chose to take the production DBA route, it's wrong to take this route ( or similar ) and then complain if an employer seeks commitment.
[font="Comic Sans MS"]The GrumpyOldDBA[/font]
www.grumpyolddba.co.uk
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/grumpyolddba/
February 12, 2007 at 5:48 am
The fact is that men and women are different. Men have higher testosterone and this affects the way their brains grow, giving them an advantage in mathematical/logical thinking. Women have more estrogen and this also affects brain structure, giving them an advantage with empathetic thinking. This, for example, is the reason women love to chat so much (compared to men). Chatting is a form of social bonding, and this releases serotonin in the brain. This effect is pronounced in women. "Male" brains based on testosterone gain pleasure from the release of tension that gets built up easily in a testosterone brain. Which would explain why men enjoy sport, which is based around spatial skills (another testosterone bias) and the build up and release of tension. Same goes for male orgasm, shouting, solving a difficult problem... the list goes on.
This isn't to say that women can't be good at maths and men can't empathise, but it does mean that in technical industries you will always have a "disproportionate" ratio of men to women, because women are less likely to have the propensity, and men are more likely. The figures in employment just bear this out, and if anything, the numbers for women are actually far higher than would be expected considering these conditions. It's likely that many women have decided they'd like to try I.T. and found they just don't like it, and I'm sure that's why a lot are leaving. Women are better with people (in general) and enjoy working with people as opposed to machines.
Before anyone flames me for being un-pc, I studied psychology at university (along with physics where there were no girls, and computing where there may have been the odd girl but not many), I used to want to be a neurologist (and it's still a pipe dream) so try to keep up with things because I'm interested, and my sister has a maths degree and used to program but gave it up to look after her kids. Because she enjoys it more.
I've nothing against women working in I.T! It's just the way our neurobiology works. Personally, I think if people accepted this and understood that people might have different skills due to their propensities then accurate appraisal of people's *real* skills and desires could be made.
Lots of I.T. dept's have trouble communicating with non-I.T. people. Is this down to their lack of understanding or our propensity *away* from an empathetic/communicative brain structure? Is what makes us good at I.T. what makes us bad at communication?? Surely if women are better at this there could be a niche in the industry acting as a buffer between the two sides. They'd enjoy it more because it's more people orientated, everyone would work better together. Win win.
February 12, 2007 at 7:45 am
"The fact is that men and women are different. Men have higher testosterone and this affects the way their brains grow, giving them an advantage in mathematical/logical thinking. Women have more estrogen and this also affects brain structure, giving them an advantage with empathetic thinking. This, for example, is the reason women love to chat so much (compared to men). Chatting is a form of social bonding, and this releases serotonin in the brain. This effect is pronounced in women. "Male" brains based on testosterone gain pleasure from the release of tension that gets built up easily in a testosterone brain. Which would explain why men enjoy sport, which is based around spatial skills (another testosterone bias) and the build up and release of tension. Same goes for male orgasm, shouting, solving a difficult problem... the list goes on."
Be honest - did you copy and paste this out of a middle school biology book from 1928? I think it's been established that the human body (male and female, and especially the brain) is more complex than can be explained by the simple quantities of testosterone and/or estrogen pumping through our veins.
Then again I could be wrong and maybe it is that simple: maybe we are no more than the simple sum of our chemical components?
February 12, 2007 at 8:01 am
Wow, can't believe I just read that from iain. I'll agree that male and female biology is different, but we aren't slaves to our biology. Propensities for things are specific to each person and even when there may not be a propensity to do a particular action that doesn't mean a person won't be good at it if they tried. My co-worker is female and she told me that one of her main reasons for getting into IT is because the guy she had the hots for was pursuing an IT track. Since this started while she was in school she ended up on an IT track as well. (She ended up marrying him BTW.) Her natural propensity, from talking to her, is more oriented towards teaching math and designing software solutions as opposed to actually implementing them by programming. Despite her natural propensity for these she's a good developer, even though she freely admits she doesn't like it as much as the other things I mentioned.
Last year she gave birth to her second daughter and this child has been much more troublesome than her first. She's extremely fussy and gets sick a lot, requiring her to leave early from work frequently. Being worried over her daughter's health she seriously thought about quitting just so she could be home with her daughter. There were financial matters that came into play as well causing her to interview at other jobs solely to make more money. At a university we can't compete on salary so my boss offered her extreme flexibility in working so she could take any time she needed to take care of her family while still keeping her job. She's that good of a developer he didn't want to lose her.
She's still here and the only reason is because of the flexibility in working she has. She now works about 2 hours less per day than any other person, but comes in on the weekend to make up for most of it. My point in telling this story is that a person's biology doesn't have to rule their actions, the old nature versus nurture argument. I'd wager nurturing has played more in my co-worker's success.
February 12, 2007 at 8:51 am
Wow, can't believe I just read that from iain. I'll agree that male and female biology is different, but we aren't slaves to our biology. Propensities for things are specific to each person and even when there may not be a propensity to do a particular action that doesn't mean a person won't be good at it if they tried.
There is a difference (which seems to be overlooked in discussion). There are (with strong evolutionary reasons) some overall tendencies to differences in behavior -- however the human species is so varied that we know that any individual can be anywhere in the spectrum. It is important to keep those two concepts separate.
Having said that, however, it is not surprising that there are some overall statistical variation, and while some of the variation may be do to societal pressures, there is a distinct possibility that there are other forces at work. It's not so much a matter of ability, but more of preferences. It has been quite firmly established that, overall, females have somewhat better social instincts and prefer subtle group dynamics... and, to be honest, DBA and network work is not really a social job. In fact a while back there was a report from a group of women computer professionals in England I believe, suggesting that the solitary character of much IT work discouraged women from that career track.
Think back about the background of many DBAs and network geeks. Most all of them were obsessive hardware and softare nuts through their developing (?) years, often to the exclusion of all else. How often do you see teenaged girls doing this? This is largely a male behavior pattern, most everything is viewed as an object to be taken apart and controlled (whether computers, games, cars).
As previously quoted doesn't mean a person won't be good at it if they tried,-- that hits the issue right on the head. It's not that men and women are that different in ability, but they are quite different in temperment, and are likely to choose (in the overall) rather different career paths.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
February 12, 2007 at 9:36 am
so being an antisocial miserable git is fine for a DBA then ? phew - thank goodness, thought i was in the wrong job < grin >
I must be honest I have encountered awful treatment of women in IT, thankfully not very much, and I hate that I saw it, I did get into trouble for sticking my oar in ( against what I guess you'd call bullying ) , however, I felt that the males were unable to relate to the females- very cave man attitude, but as one was the boss there wasn't much I could do - we got rid of the other guy but not before the lady left to run a bar in spain.
ah well.
[font="Comic Sans MS"]The GrumpyOldDBA[/font]
www.grumpyolddba.co.uk
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/grumpyolddba/
February 12, 2007 at 10:26 am
I hope any non-IT women reading this thread doesn't leave thinking IT as some lonely profession. I'm an application developer and not a DBA or network guy, so I can't speak with knowledge on any other profession type, but I don't know if I would characterize it as a solitary field. The work to be done does involve solitary time, when you're actually typing on the keyboard doing your work, but to do your job effectively often involves consulting with others, even just other developers. At the very least you can just chat with your co-workers. I'm in an office of two and every now and then throughout the day we'll take breaks and chat about whatever.
I guess I don't really like characterizations of IT as guys hacking away on a keyboard all day long in some dimly lit room with mounds of Mountain Dew. People who like that may be disproportionately male and drawn to IT, but IT itself isn't inherently anti-social. Sociability can be woven into almost any job.
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