As one of those elusive women in tech... I don't know. I have mixed feelings on the whole issue and usually try to avoid it, mostly because I just don't see it as a big deal. I've never felt like an outcast or that I didn't belong in this field because of my gender, nor have I ever been made to feel like the center of attention because of it (thank goodness). It just is.
Of all the women I know personally, only one other works as a programmer. The others seem to have no interest, and not because of some social pressure or stereotype, or the long hours, or some perceived gender bias, but because the work itself just doesn't interest to them. So I don't see why it should be a big deal that they're not doing something they don't want to do.
I guess the question then becomes could/should the industry be made more appealing to women? Maybe. I have no idea how that could be accomplished, though.
Maybe it's not the industry that's the problem, but the lack of exposure to it. Mothers are big role models for little girls, and with less women in tech to begin with, there aren't as many of them to spark that interest in their daughters. Maybe more encouragement from female teachers and geek dads would do the trick.
I was a perpetual tinkerer as a kid, always building, creating, experimenting, and what have you. My father encouraged it. He kept me in a steady supply of lumber and nails, bought me chemistry sets, erector sets, a telescope, radio kits, helped me build my first computer and bought me programming books. By high school, I was a licensed HAM radio operator who was writing programs, designing circuits, wiring houses, and training search dogs.
I guess I never did fall into the stereotypical gender role I was supposed to, but it was never pushed upon me, either, nor was it discouraged. I simply followed my interests and was encouraged and allowed to do so. I try to do the same with my own daughter and, yeah, she's a bit of a geek in the making.
Anyway, this is getting kind of long and rambling. I'm not sure where the problem lies, but I'm still not convinced it's as big a problem as it's made out to be. It's kind of like asking why there aren't more 20yr olds in the folk music industry. Answer: because they don't want to.
A close friend of mine recently graduated from college. She was quickly offered a couple of programming jobs, but turned them down. After a while, she altogether stopped applying for any programming jobs. Finally, after one year of searching, she found a (non-programming) consulting job that she jumped onto. When I asked her why she avoided programming so much, she said that spending 8+ hours a day interacting with just a computer was close to her personal idea of hell. She likes to interact with people, meet new people etc.
Now granted this is just one data point. But, for me at least, it opens the door to a different hypothesis:
1. Women have a significantly different nature of the work / salary trade-off from men.
2. Reduced interaction with people is a put-off for women.
3. Thus, only half of society is really willing to do the geekiest tech-sector jobs, which puts a premium on the salaries for those jobs.
This sort of thing also tells me that people have an incorrect notion of what our work is really like. As a senior developer, I spend quite a bit of time interacting with people: discussing the problems our customers have; how we can make our product better; how I can make other coworker's jobs easier; how my systems will interact with other components; reviewing proposals, feature requests, and requirement documents and providing feedback to help refine them; reviewing other developers' code and mentoring junior members of the team.
I absolutely _don't_ spend 8 hours just interacting with a computer. I won't argue that there aren't any jobs in the field like that; and, in fact, entry-level positions do tend more towards "just implement this spec". But I think it's misleading to give people the idea that there is no human interaction involved in our jobs.
I wrote a (quite frankly dull and rambly) blog post about my upbringing to try to figure out why it made me an engineer, and it's pretty much the same. I was encouraged to tinker and nothing was ever discouraged. The only discouragement was lack of knowledge from careers and university advisors at school who didn't even tell me computer science was an option (for uni or a career).
I think that kind of upbringing helps, heck it's crucial. However, a lot of social signals can easily curtail it - peer pressure for not being girly and being called names etc (never happened to me, but I know others it did happen to).
Sad, but true. I know my daughter dealt with a bit of this a couple of years ago and we did a lot of bolstering of her self-confidence and talking through various scenarios during that period, until she eventually got to the point where she realized the issue was theirs, not hers. Fortunately, since then, she hasn't let it bother her and hasn't looked back and, really, once the kids involved saw that it didn't bother her, the shut up.
I was actually teased/bullied a lot as a kid, particularly around age 11-12, but it was more about my disability (I'm legally blind) than the stuff I was into. I kept a low profile at school and most of the kids doing the teasing didn't know me well enough to know my geek ways. I come from a long line of stubborn, though, so it didn't really have a lasting impact.
Comments
As one of those elusive women in tech... I don't know. I have mixed feelings on the whole issue and usually try to avoid it, mostly because I just don't see it as a big deal. I've never felt like an outcast or that I didn't belong in this field because of my gender, nor have I ever been made to feel like the center of attention because of it (thank goodness). It just is.
Of all the women I know personally, only one other works as a programmer. The others seem to have no interest, and not because of some social pressure or stereotype, or the long hours, or some perceived gender bias, but because the work itself just doesn't interest to them. So I don't see why it should be a big deal that they're not doing something they don't want to do.
I guess the question then becomes could/should the industry be made more appealing to women? Maybe. I have no idea how that could be accomplished, though.
Maybe it's not the industry that's the problem, but the lack of exposure to it. Mothers are big role models for little girls, and with less women in tech to begin with, there aren't as many of them to spark that interest in their daughters. Maybe more encouragement from female teachers and geek dads would do the trick.
I was a perpetual tinkerer as a kid, always building, creating, experimenting, and what have you. My father encouraged it. He kept me in a steady supply of lumber and nails, bought me chemistry sets, erector sets, a telescope, radio kits, helped me build my first computer and bought me programming books. By high school, I was a licensed HAM radio operator who was writing programs, designing circuits, wiring houses, and training search dogs.
I guess I never did fall into the stereotypical gender role I was supposed to, but it was never pushed upon me, either, nor was it discouraged. I simply followed my interests and was encouraged and allowed to do so. I try to do the same with my own daughter and, yeah, she's a bit of a geek in the making.
Anyway, this is getting kind of long and rambling. I'm not sure where the problem lies, but I'm still not convinced it's as big a problem as it's made out to be. It's kind of like asking why there aren't more 20yr olds in the folk music industry. Answer: because they don't want to.
A close friend of mine recently graduated from college. She was quickly offered a couple of programming jobs, but turned them down. After a while, she altogether stopped applying for any programming jobs. Finally, after one year of searching, she found a (non-programming) consulting job that she jumped onto. When I asked her why she avoided programming so much, she said that spending 8+ hours a day interacting with just a computer was close to her personal idea of hell. She likes to interact with people, meet new people etc.
Now granted this is just one data point. But, for me at least, it opens the door to a different hypothesis:
1. Women have a significantly different nature of the work / salary trade-off from men. 2. Reduced interaction with people is a put-off for women. 3. Thus, only half of society is really willing to do the geekiest tech-sector jobs, which puts a premium on the salaries for those jobs.
This sort of thing also tells me that people have an incorrect notion of what our work is really like. As a senior developer, I spend quite a bit of time interacting with people: discussing the problems our customers have; how we can make our product better; how I can make other coworker's jobs easier; how my systems will interact with other components; reviewing proposals, feature requests, and requirement documents and providing feedback to help refine them; reviewing other developers' code and mentoring junior members of the team.
I absolutely _don't_ spend 8 hours just interacting with a computer. I won't argue that there aren't any jobs in the field like that; and, in fact, entry-level positions do tend more towards "just implement this spec". But I think it's misleading to give people the idea that there is no human interaction involved in our jobs.
Yes, but when you first take the job you'll spend at least a couple of years dealing mainly with just the computer.
I wrote a (quite frankly dull and rambly) blog post about my upbringing to try to figure out why it made me an engineer, and it's pretty much the same. I was encouraged to tinker and nothing was ever discouraged. The only discouragement was lack of knowledge from careers and university advisors at school who didn't even tell me computer science was an option (for uni or a career).
I think that kind of upbringing helps, heck it's crucial. However, a lot of social signals can easily curtail it - peer pressure for not being girly and being called names etc (never happened to me, but I know others it did happen to).
Sad, but true. I know my daughter dealt with a bit of this a couple of years ago and we did a lot of bolstering of her self-confidence and talking through various scenarios during that period, until she eventually got to the point where she realized the issue was theirs, not hers. Fortunately, since then, she hasn't let it bother her and hasn't looked back and, really, once the kids involved saw that it didn't bother her, the shut up.
I was actually teased/bullied a lot as a kid, particularly around age 11-12, but it was more about my disability (I'm legally blind) than the stuff I was into. I kept a low profile at school and most of the kids doing the teasing didn't know me well enough to know my geek ways. I come from a long line of stubborn, though, so it didn't really have a lasting impact.