January 6, 2010 at 12:20 pm
I *love* working in a chaotic ever-changing field. Lessens the boredom that otherwise would ensue. Challenges me to constantly learn new things.
Most of my coworkers are funny, smart, and just great to be around.
:hehe:
January 6, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Johan van Tonder (1/6/2010)
Manic Star sites support 79032's supposed "whining" post about his unfair treatment in the family courts, and responds with "Poor baby, is that what you want me to say? Well its not happening." I could have responded to your posts the same way, but I choose not to because I wish no one any unfair treatment based on gender, male or female. There are just as much bias against men these days than there are against women.....
I smelled a troll, which is why i said that, I probably could have communicated that a bit more clearly.
January 6, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Johan van Tonder (1/6/2010)By the way, DCPeterson, your argument about "self-selection" makes perfect sense 🙂
Unfortunately, there is cultural bias even in what is acceptable self-selection. While in a perfect world we could all be free to truly chose what we love to do, this is not the actual factual situation. As has been noted, bias against women in math and science has been found in educators from the elementary to the university level. This has a huge effect on the choices made by young women, often children, who haven't got the presence of mind to tell a teacher 'I can too' when the teacher tells them they're not suited for a particular field. The bullying and teasing that 'geeks', bookworms, and 'nerds' encounter at a young age (something I am also personally familiar with) also dissuades many from living up to their academic potential. On top of this disparity, and also pointed out in previous posts, there is still a belief that women of childbearing age are not reliable and that they will fold under pressure. This still does make a difference on hiring decisions. The only reason this even bears a resemblance to the truth is that these women are not supported by our society as needing to work. Single mothers especially still fight for the mere ability to keep working with no outside support by way of equal pay or affordable child care. The fact that some people believe there is even a choice whether or not to work for women (there isn't for most of us) is stunning to me and shows that these posters are living in another age, either too young to know better or throwbacks to a distant past. Being jealous of women because the justice system historically awarded custody more often to mothers (based on bogus sociological assumptions--this is changing, btw) and they 'get' to take maternity leaves is just insanity. Being recognized as a sentient human with a contribution to make is all I'm asking for. Not special privileges, not affirmative action, not preferential treatment. Just the opportunity to do my job, do it right and reap the rewards just as you do.
😎 Kate The Great :w00t:
If you don't have time to do it right the first time, where will you find time to do it again?
January 6, 2010 at 12:51 pm
katedgrt (1/6/2010)
... Being recognized as a sentient human with a contribution to make is all I'm asking for. Not special privileges, not affirmative action, not preferential treatment. Just the opportunity to do my job, do it right and reap the rewards just as you do.
As it should be for ALL.
January 6, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Just wow at some of the members here.
I am an ancient 29 years old male. I went to a relatively small HBCU.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historically_black_colleges_and_universities
When I talk to other people about their college experience it was pretty much the same as mine but on a larger scale.
I don't think that there is a problem with getting young people to go into IT and the Computer Science majors. It is people sticking it through once they find out how it really is. IT is attractive because young people hear about the perks and good salary. Computer science weeds out people real fast.
My college had 4-5 100 level computer science classes per semester packed in large classrooms. Half of the students drop and change majors within 2 months. By the time you get to 200 level its down to 2 classes. When you get to the 300 level+ classes they will be one every year in either fall or spring. The students had to collaborate to fill high level comp sci electives with the minimum of 5 students the university required. You can forget about summer's because you need to be at an internship and most freshmen have one going into the summer.
I graduated with 8 women and 4 other guys. All of the women finished at least Cum Laude two of them Summa. Two of the males finished with honors. All of the women had jobs waiting for them at good companies(Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, MS,Xerox). I can't say the same for the guys including my self. I know at the time there was a push to recruit African American women into IT. All the women were ambitious and were driven and determined to achieve their goals. All knew how to code and were better than most men I have encountered. Not all liked to code but most had leadership(director+) positions in their list of goals and being a code monkey was just a stop. This is why I don't think we see many female coders.
I am not saying discrimination is not there. I have seen it and heard it and it has come from other women as well as men. Most of the time its infantile males who don't want a woman to come in and keep the frat boys in check so they can go about farting and bringing up illicit conversations. You did not want to work with these idiots anyway.
I do believe we need more foot-in-the-door programs. I do not believe discrimination is the reason you don't see many female coders. The driven ambitious woman will achieve her goals and this thread has plenty of proof to support this for the women who want to code. How many men have gone to a Kim Tripp session?
As for the woman who worked at USPS and ended up on letter duty. I don't think the man was being biased. Me personally being raised as a gentleman, I am going to treat other women like I would want my mother treated and slinging boxes is not something I would have her do. I would have done the same thing and it is not out of bias but respect. This goes out the window if you actually talked to him about this and he ignored it.
P.S. Sorry for the long post.
January 6, 2010 at 1:09 pm
To the men who say women can't think as logically as men. LOL. Try to lie to a women and see who comes out on top.
January 6, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Fatal Exception Error (1/6/2010)
To the men who say women can't think as logically as men. LOL. Try to lie to a women and see who comes out on top.
Doesn't take logic to figure out when a man is telling a lie. Women are more social and learn to read people better. Plus, it doesn't help that most men just don't lie very well to begin with. I have personal experience with this watching a former boyfriend of my oldest daughter during the two months he stayed in our home.
January 6, 2010 at 1:33 pm
"Half the Sky" quotes a story about Bill Gates giving a talk in Saudi Arabia (I think). The room is 3/4 men and 1/4 women. The women are partitioned off to avoid contact. At the end of his talk, Bill is asked how they can position themselves to be one of the top ten countries in the world in technology. His response was that it will never happen when they exclude half the talent in the country. The women cheered boisterously. The men's response was not enthusiastic. That is why it matters. We shouldn't be excluding talented individuals because of age, gender, etc.
By the way, I'm a fifty plus woman who's been in IT since the late 70's with a few years off for child-rearing.
I don't think that there are any easy answers. Do NOT tolerate discrimination; strive to overcome stereotypes; and perhaps a willingness to hire people (men and women) who have proven abilities but whose technical knowledge may be a bit stale due to a time away from the industry.
January 6, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Fatal Exception Error (1/6/2010)
Just wow at some of the members here.As for the woman who worked at USPS and ended up on letter duty. I don't think the man was being biased. Me personally being raised as a gentleman, I am going to treat other women like I would want my mother treated and slinging boxes is not something I would have her do. I would have done the same thing and it is not out of bias but respect. This goes out the window if you actually talked to him about this and he ignored it.
Actually it was UPS, but same thing. "Being raised as a gentleman" means being raised to treat women differently, and it's something of a sore spot. Treat the women you love with love, treat your wife or girlfriend romantically, but please don't handle female coworkers with kid gloves. It's not a show of respect to suggest that an area of work is too difficult for a person because she's female.
At UPS, one of the hiring requirements was that you could pick up and handle up to 70 pounds. Once hired it was the rule for all workers that anything over 70 pounds required at least two lifters. As long as I my performance is acceptable, I shouldn't be shuffled off onto lighter duty because of ideas about gender.
This translates exactly into the difficulty with girls' education and women in IT. If you have the girls do easier homework, take less sciency courses, it pushes them away from careers that are rewarding, lucrative, and flexible. If I'm pushed to work customer service or document projects when what I want is the tech side, I lose out on fulfillment and money.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but I can't think of anything about the "gentleman" POV that's conducive to letting women be the best they can be.
(And by the way, my mom slung boxes at the post office for 20 years, and she's doing just fine. 🙂
January 6, 2010 at 1:50 pm
I'd like to respond to the original article. Whether or not it was worded in the most ideal way possible, the fact remains that young women are not flocking to programming careers.
Why do we care?
I think we care because
-- We want women to have opportunities to find (comparatively) lucrative careers.
-- We want them to have an opportunity to experience the satisfaction that comes from using their brains to solve creative/logical problems that apply to real-world situations.
-- We value their perspective (which often varies from the male perspective and can often improve a product).
Unfortunately, girls/women don't often get enough of a taste for what development is like to even make a decision about whether it is something they want to pursue as a career.
So we have to ask ourselves: what is different in the case of girls?
The following may be factors (certainly I have observed them in my own daughter and nieces):
-- societally women are not as aggressive as men. All genders are taught to be polite, but men are generally encouraged (through sports, perhaps, or just general interaction with other males) to be more aggressive when stating opinions, criticizing work, etc. They are less inclined to listen to another person's completed thought and more inclined to talk over them. I've been told in a large meeting by a male developer "you're just stupid" when I challenged his assertion that it was "impossible" to develop a certain feature in an application. Young women just learning to program may actually believe that, and switch directions. (I left the meeting and coded an example to prove to that developer that it could be done. He never apologized but our CTO took him aside and explained the concept of courtesy to him).
-- computer science curriculum does not focus on the implementation of code. My daughter is in her last year of college in a CS degree and has not had one bit of database exposure, and very little opportunities to write actual code. Even their brief education about computer components could be easily enough demonstrated by having, say, a real computer laid open in front of them, but no! It's all diagrams and theory. For a person who just wants to get to work this is discouraging.
-- young men who start coding early (before high school graduation) seem to have a network of like-minded fellows (whether same age or slightly older) to bounce ideas and problems off. Girls don't have the same support base built up, obviously.
-- to get really good at programming you have to do a lot of it. Girls don't seem to be as eager to give up other aspects of their life, like friends, social activities, etc.-- at least not at that age. And by the time they are willing to spend significant amounts of time on it it is too hard to get into the field, too hard to go back to school (if they need to), etc.
Someone mentioned that our girls need more mentoring, and I agree. This does not, however, mean that they only people qualified to mentor girls who are interested in technology are women in technology! Men can do this too-- fathers, uncles, brothers, friends. We are all only human and I realize that for men, working with (unrelated) females might be a little distracting, but if you really care about them you will focus on the reason you are helping them.
BTW, not that it matters, I'm a SQL Server database engineer and C# developer. I taught myself from the beginning, in 1993 because I was bored with my job as a legal secretary.
Yes, I'm female. But as a member of the greater Seattle community I am lucky to live in an area where women programmers exist in higher proportions in software-related fields and I have never had a problem finding or holding a job based on my hard work and experience.
January 6, 2010 at 2:05 pm
I had an opportunity to see Admiral Hopper give a presentation at my school MANY moons ago, sadly I was ill that day and the opportunity was lost.
My wife has the same problem with underrepresentation in her field: astronomy. She has a PhD in physics/astrophysics, the only one on her telescope that has a doctorate. Her telescope has roughly a 50/50 mix of gender, a slightly tricky count with part-time positions, the other telescope has women slightly underrepresented. There aren't any women on the support staff (mainly electrical/electronic engineers and machinists) but the head of the observatory is female. Though my wife is not a programmer per se, she's written telescope control software for other observatories.
She's a strong advocate for getting women in to the hard (physical) sciences and has given talks on that, and I hope that by her appearing on TV a couple of times, including MythBusters, that it might help. At least in astronomy the pay is fairly gender-blind, though publishing of papers still favors men or women publishing under their initials. And did you know that sometimes getting your doctorate is free if you're in the hard sciences? You're still paying for books and housing, but there's such a short supply of physicists and the like that once you get your bachelor's, things get much easier financially.
I would like to see more women in computers as the diversity of viewpoint that they bring is a good thing. But you do have the basic problem that if women don't want to get in to the field, then that's the way it is.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
January 6, 2010 at 2:22 pm
With a good chunk of technology jobs now being created in places where women have less status than a dog, the disparity is only going to become more pronounced, isn't it? Why would any sensible and competent woman WANT to be associated with that?
James Stover, McDBA
January 6, 2010 at 2:30 pm
nasoto (1/6/2010)
In my last position I made 55% of the male developers' salary (and so did the 1 other woman out of 16 men). Currently I'm at about 75% of the other developers' salary.
Now there is the real issue. I don't care how many women worok in a field, if they have the same experience, knowledge, have been at the comapny (or even just the field) and can demonstrate it then why would they not be paid equally. I am sure there are reasons for this, it is just a matter of pinpointing. But a few women I have met in the past compared themselves against others whom had been in the field twice as long so you cannot say starting out you should get a long termers pay.
Another thing I have seen is that many women (and a lot of men even do this) just settle. They don'y negotiate the pay and they don't tend to hop around to show they are willing to leave for better pay. The best pay raise I ever got was when I had another offer on the table. Many of the women I have met are very shy acting and just don't fight for their individual desires very well. And last year in a diversity dicussion this came up as apparently some educational instituions are considering adding couses specifically on contract negotiationing for future employees.
Then of course there is the fear approach many companies play on with the above. Especially now with the economy in a slump like it is. I have had many people tell me that they are ust happy to have a job. I look them in the face (and some have been management) and say, like hell I expect proper payor I will look for something else. Or I will go write my own ticket, lots of opportinty out there.
If you keep finding this to be the case then I suggest look elsewhere. And keep in mind there is nothing holding you from doing this, most companies will soon if not already drop their retirement accounts in favor of 401k so you have to look out for yourself. Businesses are no longer families like they try to use, they are about finding the right suckers to work for the glory of upper management to make large sums of money themselves.
January 6, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Fatal. thank you for entering the fray. I'm glad to hear one of the younger members of the group replying and letting us know what it is like in the academic world today.
January 6, 2010 at 2:36 pm
When I studied at University (albeit 9 years ago) I think there was around 400 people studying my course and it would have been about 5% female.
I cannot say I've really noticed any discrimination in any place I've worked at towards women...but I guess I could always be naive. My first team lead was female who I respected as a developer and a leader.
Ultimately if a company cannot hire the best person for the job, do you really want to work there. It could only really be a major issue for newcomers to the industry where one is willing to work in a less than perfect environment to get some industry experience.
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