January 7, 2010 at 8:33 am
david_wendelken (1/6/2010)
Forgot to mention that when I want to tell someone privately, one-on-one, that they're being a jack-@$$ and need to stop whatever they're doing that's making everybody mad, that the "female" modes of speech work extremely well.But if I want to get a course of action adopted in an open meeting, "male" modes of speech usually work much better.
I get in trouble because I do not tend to use 'female' modes of speech. On the other hand, I do always seem to get my opinion heard.
I find small talk irritating when i have something to accomplish.
January 7, 2010 at 8:35 am
It might be a numbers issue, and it's hard to get statistics that are widespread, and good to point to because this is a hot point. Do we have statistics in the US on African Americans in IT? I can imagine issues there as well.
If there are less women in IT, it's worth examining. Despite Jeff's portrayal, most of the IT jobs I've seen are pretty good, and on par with the efforts of my friends in many other businesses. If there are less women, it could be a problem, or it could be that less woman are interested. However trying to get a better representation of the population in IT, or most businesses, is not a bad thing. Especially in white collar businesses.
January 7, 2010 at 8:53 am
cmcc (1/7/2010)
...Women, you know how rewarding this field is. Please reach out to the ENTIRE next generation and teach them that this is a great field to be in, and that 'playing well with others' is the best way to build and keep great teams. Excluding people, whether by unintentional gender bias, uber-techiness, language-superiority, alpha-male tactics, firefighter syndrome or anything else that we've seen in the workplace does more harm than good.
Colleen OUT.
Why does it just have to be the women that do this? As an IT professional (and a male) I probably should be out there doing this as well. I know I have talked to my own daughters about the IT field, and so far they don't have much of an interest in IT.
January 7, 2010 at 9:08 am
Antares686 (1/7/2010)
Many times pay has nothing to do with fairness, it simply boils down to what you are willing to fight for.
You are absolutely correct, and at the same time, this logic has been used to discriminate against women, minorities, ethnicities, etc. There has to be some way to appeal for those that are stuck with un-equivalent pay.
Life is not fair, but we ought to be looking to eliminate abuses of power.
January 7, 2010 at 9:12 am
Lynn Pettis (1/7/2010)
cmcc (1/7/2010)
Why does it just have to be the women that do this? As an IT professional (and a male) I probably should be out there doing this as well. I know I have talked to my own daughters about the IT field, and so far they don't have much of an interest in IT.
It ought to be anyone that feels women deserve a place in their field. There are men and women doctors that seek to attract other women. Same for architects, accountants, etc.
Nothing wrong with encouraging women and other minorities with an interest to try the field. Not to exclude men, but It can be harder for other groups, and giving them a little more effort is not a bad thing.
January 7, 2010 at 9:18 am
Steve Jones - Editor (1/7/2010)
Antares686 (1/7/2010)
Many times pay has nothing to do with fairness, it simply boils down to what you are willing to fight for.You are absolutely correct, and at the same time, this logic has been used to discriminate against women, minorities, ethnicities, etc. There has to be some way to appeal for those that are stuck with un-equivalent pay.
Life is not fair, but we ought to be looking to eliminate abuses of power.
Very good counter point. Abuse of power in any form needs to be found and removed, but how do we do that is the question? :unsure:
January 7, 2010 at 9:30 am
So we lost a large portion of female programmers as they had no place to go and had no knowledge of alter laguages such as C++, VB, C#, and Java commonly in use on distributed systems.
The above can be changed by removing the platforms from the base languages, then add ANSI SQL and the existing RDBMS vendor extensions.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
January 7, 2010 at 9:49 am
I don't know how we fix this. You can have people report things to HR, but that often has repercussions. So many men overreact the other way when there is some level of sexual harassment or abuse reported. Even if it's not towards them, they shy away from the person reporting it. Same thing happens in terms of whistleblowers.
We could include this in a review, like the accounting review, that examines salaries and jobs, and determines if there is systematic abuse in terms of pay. If all women in a job classification with similar levels of experience are being paid less, that's an issue. If there is some distribution, it's OK.
We could also open salaries. I wouldn't mind that. Let people stand up and prove they're worth more.
January 7, 2010 at 10:01 am
Steve Jones - Editor (1/7/2010)
We could also open salaries. I wouldn't mind that. Let people stand up and prove they're worth more.
This has been proposed by the government to get rid of companies being able to say that information must be confidential and cannot be discussed. I am sure at my job now there are people I would consider as subpar making more than me.
And as for review, that would be a tought process, I do think if all the women are below then you have to question but even with distribution somone will find a way to abuse the system. I mean consider how many people hire illegal immigrants to do jobs with sub par wages and noting reported on the books. Many people will look for ways to get around the system if they can. ANd even with fines, sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fine in their opinion.
January 7, 2010 at 10:04 am
P Jones (1/7/2010)
What do other women think - do you want to work with operating systems and networks and hardware or with programming and web applications and databases??
To be honest, I'd LOVE to do more work with hardware than I do. Don't get me wrong, programming is where my heart is, but it annoys me to no end that I don't have the knowledge to deal with hardware and operating systems.
On the hardware side, I hate being dependent on our infrastructure team if my hard drive decides to go belly-up or the version of SSMS that I need to install requires more memory than my machine has. Not sure if my desire to learn hardware is more closely related to not wanting to have to depend on others or because I just like building things (my tastes when I was a kid ran more towards Lego and Erector sets than Barbies).
At my first job I got dumped into a SysAdmin role at the same time as I got dumped into a DBA role, and I wish I knew as much about the various flavors of Windows as I did about AIX by the time that company got bought out because that was just plain FUN!
Jennifer Levy (@iffermonster)
January 7, 2010 at 10:06 am
There will always be abuses. I don't think we ought to aim for a 100% correct solution. Mostly because I'm not sure what that would be.
However I think we ought to be able to call things into question anonymously, and without repercussions against those that feel there is a problem. I've seen plenty of people thinking they were paid less when they performed substantially less. I've also seen people paid less that performed well.
I like this system: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-employees-negotiate-pay-raises.html?partner=fogcreek
January 7, 2010 at 10:19 am
As a female in the field, really as a mother, the complications occur because I have so many family obligations. Management still tends to be male dominated and they have wives to take care of the details. Word has spread though that it isn't a family friendly career if you are a woman.
Easy thing to fix though. Allow telecommuting. IT work is largely flexible and much of what needs to be done needs to be done after hours.
There is also the reputation for much longer hours than a 40 hour work week. Not many women are interested in that if they plan on having a family.
I love my career in technology, but there are humps in it even for me. I would recommend the field to any female, but I would give her the list of caveats as I see them.
Be prepared for longer hours. Be prepared to go the extra mile. Be prepared to have your schedule change on a moment's notice. Be prepared to miss some soccer games or band performances or stage performances. Talk straight with your employers about flexibility if you need it and get it in writing. Get it in writing. Get it in writing. Don't believe the 'oh that won't be a problem' for an instant.
It is a great career area for women in general. I see the only problems are logistics.
January 7, 2010 at 11:40 am
Steve Jones - Editor (1/7/2010)
We could also open salaries. I wouldn't mind that. Let people stand up and prove they're worth more.
I don't think comparison of salaries always works for women, post child-rearing break.
There's a number of women I knew in Project Management who, before their first baby, were scaling the peaks determined to break the glass ceiling (not me, I wanted the 'technical' career path). Once they had the baby (if they bonded) they re-prioritised their lives, and as one said "I really don't know why I slaved so hard for that promotion".
As I said in my previous post, a number then leave at the nursery-starting school stage to work in education to get around the nightmare of school holidays. So their salaries would then be lower, especially if they became class room assistants instead of teachers.
Myself, I have compromised my salary (badly unfortunately) to work for someone (a man in his twenties) who I have confidence will let me go on the too-frequent occasion I have a family crisis. I want to be able to walk out of the office without worrying about what will be said when I come back the next day; I can just contact him when the crisis is over and arrange when I'll make the time up.
It's also important to me, to get the home-life balance, that I work 5 hours (eat your heart out here!!) SHORTER than everyone else so I can do two afternoon school runs a week. This means I keep in contact with other mums who will then help me out when I need them (no relatives).
So in my case, my salary might be rather compromised, but it's a result for the quality of my life - I can meet the family's needs and be paid for having the pleasure of developing software in a team.
Oh, and on the logical thinking argument: I spent years concealing the fact that I don't debug logically; I have dyslexia and it's given me the gift of debugging intuitively.
January 7, 2010 at 11:50 am
I think that any kind of bias should be eliminated. Maybe one day humanity will get to the place where people are people and skill is skill and it will not matter what shape or color or nationality or whatever package the skill came in. We have lots and lots of work ahead of us to get there.
Reading the posts made me realize something about what I had thought was a quirk of a female programmer I used to work with. She would keep every e-mail, document, etc. about a system she worked on to the point that I thought was obsessive until reading these posts. I now realize that she was probably protecting her work and reputation. I find it unbelievable that someone would trash a person's work for any reason much less because they were of a different gender. :sick:
January 7, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Here is an interesting article out of the University of WA that talks about why there are less women in the tech field....
http://uwnews.org/uweek/article.aspx?visitsource=uwkmail&id=54721
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