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Women Leaving I.T.
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Mar 11, 2005 05:40 AM
from the baby-come-back dept.
from the baby-come-back dept.
Deinhard writes "NewsFactor is running a story on the exodus of women from the I.T. field. According to the article, women made up 41% of the I.T workforce in 1996. That number dropped to 35% by 2002 and that "the downward spiral is gaining momentum." While this is certainly a concern, what are the overall effects of such a mass departure?"
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Looking at the distribution ... (Score:5, Insightful)
CC.
Re:Looking at the distribution ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would dispute the figures they are spewing.
Unless of course they are including people who use computers to do their job rather than technical IT positions?
Nowadays, there is no point putting IT on your CV if computers are so ingrained into your career path that NOT knowing them would mean not being able to do the job in the first place (for instance a secretary not knowing how to email or use Office etc)
Anyway, we need more women posting on slashdot, but NO flowers or potpouri please, we have to keep some sense of decency.
Parent
Re:Looking at the distribution ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a CS undergrad at purdue. Our CS undergrad program, as of the start of last semester had 40 women in it. 24 of them are graduating. it's estimated that 6-10 at most are coming in, by figures I've heard. This is down from 10-15% of the department 4 years ago.
This is in a curriculum which has 800 or so undergrads, if I remember correctly.
I'm currently in a 300-level class (a major requirement, no less) that has 80 students, none of whom are female. Last semester I was in a database class that had 50 students, with a single woman in it. The semester before, I was in a class with 150 people, and a grand total of 4 women, and I know that after that class one of them changed majors out of computer science.
As of the end of this semester, 20-26 out of 800+. Those are very discouraging numbers, for women in CS. And the IT curricula in the school of technology aren't faring much better, I'm told.
Parent
Re:It's just too hard for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:It's just too hard for them (Score:5, Interesting)
Not everyone is as tenacious as your mother. Having work done for you and having people treat you like you're a "special person" is a pretty bad impression, and if a woman wasn't set on an IT career that could turn her off.
Hell, idiot geek students almost turned me to another major. When it looks like you will have to probably spend the rest of your life with people you can't stand, you start looking for alternatives.
Parent
Re:Ogling (Score:5, Funny)
Well, it's time for my morning prunes, so 23 skidoo! (23 skidoo is what we used to say.)
Parent
Re:It's just too hard for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, the answer to the question of precisely why there are so few women in computer science, physics, math completely eludes me. I'd really like to know why. I can't find any one good reason why not, and nobody else seems to be able to agree on a reason either.
Maybe it's a combination of everything. Overall, women and men do seem to have different distributions of personalities, aptitudes for certain skills, etc., just as any two distinct groups will. You can just as easily qualitatively compare the residents of two cities or Americans vs. Canadians, or anything else.
But it's always hard to point out some specific REASON that would explain the differences, be it genetic or upbringing or social expectations or hormonal or anything else. Maybe the fact that these distributions change over time serves as some sort of hint. Say, I haven't heard of many women physicists a hundred years ago, but today we at least have some.
From personal experience, though, I've observed that a sort of segmentation of the mind, whereby one can think about something while completely forgetting everything else (e.g., the ability to concentrate on a math problem after a nasty fight with your best friend) seems to be more common in men. I really might be wrong. But not being able escape your personal life while concentrating on hard abstract problems would make a technical profession rather frustrating, I think. Just a guess, maybe.
Parent
Re:It's just too hard for them (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:It's just too hard for them (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Looking at the distribution ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most women surviving on the internet realise fairly quickly that it's courting severe and long-term irritation to admit to their gender in a room full of geeks. Therefore the majority of women registered on slashdot are not going to be using names with giveaway terms like, I dunno, "babe" in them.
Parent
Re:Looking at the distribution ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, my gender very rarely has anything to do with my comments at Slashdot, so why would I even bring it up? Though, my name may give it away if anyone were to notice.
That said, I suspect there are a lot more women reading and replying than most Slashdotters give credit. What should we do? Use a sig that says "I'm a chick. Please regard opinion accordingly?"
Parent
Re:Looking at the distribution ... (Score:5, Funny)
i am
() male
() female
() i dont know
() CowboyNeal ??
Parent
Re:Looking at the distribution ... (Score:5, Interesting)
More seriously there are a number of possible reasons for this. I would hazord a guess that a large number of women entered IT for the sake of the $ and now that the $ is harder to get they are moving to other fields.
Not that men didnt do this, but if you look at the major universities they have essentially been bribing women to go into technical fields (engineering, cs , etc.) so I would hazord a guess that those efforts recruited people more interested int he $ than the love of the field.
Of course I could be entirely of base.
Parent
Re:Looking at the distribution ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know a lot of women in IT, and there are certain qualities that they have. Men have different qualities.
To generalise, women are better in less geeky programming, where it is more business oriented. They don't tend to "play" in the way men do.
Most women I know have less languages/tools under their belt, but have done a lot more of them. They have some wisdom about languages - mostly a change of language doesn't deliver the stratospheric improvements touted by the manufacturers.
Here's why this matters: the world of programming used to be a lot more stable. You could learn COBOL and use it almost unchanged for a decade and keep getting better at it. The current thing of skills changing rapidly (i.e. another version of a tool that delivers nothing in terms of productivity to a business) doesn't help that.
I think a lot of women just get fed up with this geeky game.
It may also be that at one time, software development in companies was becoming more and more business orientated. Now, I see more and more hacker mentality than business oriented programming. And, I don't know if it's a culture particularly attractive to women.
Parent
As a woman in IT, I somewhat agree with the parent (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure that I'd say women are "better in less geeky programming, where it is more business oriented," but I would say that (in general) women I've known tend to prefer that end of the field. Maybe it's a desire to not have to spend their evenings learning new languages and technologies; maybe it's just less of an interest in pure technology and a predisposition toward seeing tech as just a tool for getting other things done; maybe it's something else entirely. But in my experience, the pattern does seem to exist. That generalization doesn't apply to me. I strongly prefer the "more geeky" hackerish stuff that requires keeping up with tech; it appeals to my curiosity about how things work. Nevertheless, the generalization has affected my career, because it's a perception many of my managers have had over the years. To be fair, my career does span two decades, and I started out in the southeast US, an area not well-known for progressive attitudes towards women in the work force. Lately, I've seen MUCH less of this, though perhaps it's because I'm now on the West Coast.
The experience I gained for myself in school included UNIX file systems kernel work, IBM mainframe data communications and systems-programming-level assembler, writing an ancient commercial computer game, etc. I spent my vacations paying my own way to Usenix UNIX research conferences and my spare student cash on a Compuserve connection and the PC Pursuit service (cheap long distance for calling BBSes) in the pre-Internet days. When I got out into the real world: "no, we don't think you're right for this systems position, how about this COBOL application development group?", (I was far better, and more experienced, at OS internals in C or assembly than I was at COBOL) "we need someone with your expertise in user interface design," (huh? I had none), etc. An astonishing percentage of the time, companies have steered me toward work in business applications even when I demonstrated more aptitutde and interest in other areas of computing. One choice quote: "Oh, honey, you don't want to spend your days lugging 50 pound servers around." Reality: I have found it frustrating to work in the same business apps development environment for very long. After a very short period of "learning the environment", my work consisted largely of tediously lining fields up on grids and populating database schema, NOT learning about technology or improving/challenging my dev skills (companies specifically didn't want new technologies used in their apps because then, horrors, my coworkers would have to LEARN them!). At one place of employment, a small VAR, I referred a (less technical) male friend to my employer. Before I knew it, he was the organization's official customer engineer (a job function that previously occupied half my day), getting to do customer system configurations, on-site support, etc. I was only trotted out as a problem solver when customers had trouble with their installations, complained and specifically requested my presence, having heard through the grapevine that there was a girl at the company who really knew her stuff even though the company insisted my friend was their best techie. Other women I know have had similar experiences.
It wasn't until I hung out my own shingle and had right of refusal over EVERY project, that I was able to lead my career away from that.
This is applicable to the slashdot crowd because I'd like to encourage folks to take an open mind toward the women you encounter in tech. Some of us have wired our homes with X-10 gear, read OS source code with breakfast and yes, even have a history of butting heads with school admins over learning activities they insisted
Parent
Women? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You're modded as +3 funny but... (Score:5, Insightful)
3 of the best programmers I know are women. That includes my boss, and 2 people that went through the CS curriculum with me.
Now
There's a gender difference in teaching though. Men tend to get called on more than women in classes, and also tend to get taken more seriously than women, all the way back into elementary schools, by both male and female teachers.
Caplan and Caplan's "Thinking Critically about Women and Gender" has a good chapter on educational differences.
Ultimately, the women in IT are just as good as the men, but they're a far smaller sample. There's a lot of piss-poor programmers and sysadmins and support people who are men, and a smaller number in the same positions who are women. If a man screws up, it's more likely to be blamed on his incredible incompetence, where if a woman screws up, you're more likely to draw the attribution that it's because she's a woman.
Parent
Flaw in argument (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:You're modded as +3 funny but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Although geeks are very important to IT, they often lack qualities that are very important to IT. In my IT department I can think of a very good example of a male geek who has enough certs to choke a horse and a female non-geek with just a low interest in persuing off-hours IT-for-fun kind of stuff. The woman is better.
The male is an egotistical blowhard who doesn't finish projects completely or on time. His projects are poorly documented. But, heck, he can answer almost any question off the top of his head about the interals of the servers and services he runs.
The female is demure and often has to say " I'll need to check on that." However, her projects work, come in on time, have excellent documentation and can be used much more easily by the whole company.
So, she's not as smart, IT-wise, as the guy. But who's the better IT worker?
TW
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Re:You're modded as +3 funny but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I was trying to explain male geekery to my wife the other day.
Her: "Women aren't encouraged to be nerds. If they are interested in geeky things, they are teased and degraded."
Me: "What do you think happens to male nerds?"
Parent
Re:Are there really... (Score:5, Insightful)
Women in science aren't in science to "hook a man". They're there to study science.
The women going to college hoping to get married along the way and be a dependent for life are the ones that go into gender-typical classes (ie: elementary education, liberal arts, to a lesser extent management or nursing).
Parent
Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
The closest I could find to an actual example in the article was this gem:
Where "enterprise software" is a link to a company selling something (ie it's an advert). What little credibility the author may have had vanished with that line. Ooooh! Enterprise software! That's some scary stuff you got right there.
I mean it's not like men ever get hit by a car and have to take a few months out (or lose their jobs!), is it? This article is a total fluff piece pandering to those who actually care about the imbalance, ie managers and not (by and large) the techs who just want to work with the best people possible.
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Re:Easy (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Effects (Score:5, Funny)
Less sex on the job?
Oh, wait, we're talking about IT right?
Nevermind.
Re:Effects (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this sums it up nicely : the field of IT is not what it ws 15 years ago. Today, 95% of the so called IT staff are project managers & planners. In other words : suits.
It's common knowledge that that kind of jobs is still a highly men-only world.
So it's not the number of women that declines, but the number of male boneheads that increases.
Parent
Momentum (Score:5, Funny)
Effects (Score:5, Funny)
We will have to get the teas and coffees ourselves.
What about (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it any wonder the people are leaving given that family friendly seems to be a concept completely lost on most companies.
Why is it a concern? (Score:4, Insightful)
The few women I know in the IT field seem to have gotten into it for the money or because they couldn't think of anything else to do, rather than because they like working with computers. Now the money's gone, so are they.
The same applies to many men of course, but it seems to me that geeky traits are exhibited more often by men than women, so women are going to be fewer than men in geeky endeavours.
I don't think that a 50:50 split in any particular field is necessarily fair, what matters is not the male:female ratio, but that somebody with the requisite talent is able to pursue a career in a field without being artificially held back on the basis of their sex.
You mean, just like 3 out of 4 men? (Score:5, Insightful)
The dot-con fraud attracted a _lot_ of frauds in this field. The dot-cons were throwing other people's money out the window with both hands, just to show that they can. People with less brains or economic sense than a garden snail, had found themselves in a bunch of money, and had no idea what to do with them... other than show the Joneses that they too can spend like the big boys. Fast cars, huge headquarters, corporate airplanes for a tiny startup, or expensive programmers, it was just conspicuous consumption. (I.e., same as having a massive gold watch, just to show the neighbours who's rich. Doesn't even have to be a good watch: it just has to look blatantly expensive.)
And they hired _anyone_. Literally _any_ drooling ex-burger-flipper was suddenly employable in IT or programming. People who were too stupid to operate a cash register, were ok as "web application developpers" or whatever.
Lots of them, preferrably. Having 20 programmers and 30 artists for a 3 page web site was _cool_. Made the PHB feel like he too can play with the big boys' corporations.
And unsurprisingly, a lot did fake a resume and move into IT or programming. A whole caste of fraudsters was created whose _only_ skill was marketting themselves. They too "deserved" the big bucks, a sports car and a plasma TV, and were not gonna let utter lack of skill and knowledge get in the way of their American Dream.
It had nothing to do with liking to use a computer, or having any skill or inclination. Most not only had none, they didn't even try to learn either. They just "deserved" the money, they didn't actually want to start working for them.
And I don't think that being male or female played that big a role there. If there weren't 50% females there, if anything, makes me suspect they're more honest. Because anything to do with skill or liking computers, it sure didn't have.
Parent
Re:You mean, just like 3 out of 4 men? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I stand by what I wrote there. From personal experience, 3 out of 4 men I've worked with, were utterly and totally incompetent.
Thing is, men really _aren't_ natural-born tech experts they try to sound like. (And I'm one, so I think I'm allowed to say that.) Maybe a bit more interested in tech stuff, but definitely _not_ naturally inclined to actually be competent at it.
We've just received an idiotic education where if you have a dick, you _must_ do the macho thing and fix your own car/computer/radio/whatever. Most men seem to have had the idiotic notion hammered into their head that if they don't open their car's hood (and ruin the car in the process), it's like admitting sexual impotence or worse. That you have to _prove_ you have a dick, by doing all sorts of stupid or dangerous stuff personally.
But as I've said, that doesn't actually make them competent. They just use massive selective confirmation to promote minor trivial achievements into meaning some technical expertise. "W00t, I changed the oil! I'm such a total expert in car mechanics! I know all about cars!" Not.
And when it _doesn't_ go well, it's selective confirmation to the rescue again. It's quickly shoved behind an excuse and discarded. In 2-3 days it's back to the old, "Hey, I'm still the greatest technology expert ever! I never made a mistake!" (Except those dozens of times which got conveniently "forgotten.")
E.g., dear old dad almost zapped himself to death about a dozen times, rather than just call an electrician. And lemme tell you, getting zapped by a 230V socked it bad enough. Getting zapped by the TV he opened to try to fix himself, now that muscle spasm smashed him into a wall, and left him there for a while. There's some really high voltage inside those. But that, of course, wouldn't stop him from thinking that he's God's gift to any tech device. 'Cause if he wasn't, he'd be like, you know, not man enough.
E.g., every Real Man knows that men are perfect drivers, unlike those women who can't even steer in a straight line. Too bad it's actually false. Insurance company statistics say that, per 100 km driven, a man is _twice_ as likely to cause an accident as a woman is. Unlike the popular myth, according to actual accident statistics, being a macho testosterone machine doesn't make one an expert driver... quite au contraire. It makes one more likely to drive in a reckless and dangerous manner.
E.g., the same pre-conception and selective confirmation goes for computers too. Any idiot who can write 5 lines in BASIC on their parent's computer, or launch someone else's compile script, thinks that his Y chromosome makes him God's gift to computers. W00t, typing those few lines was such a major achievement and surely making him the greatest expert to ever walk the Earth.
Sorry, nope. Being able to "emerge KDE" does _not_ make one a computer expert. And writing a "hello world" does _not_ make one a programmer.
Actual competence starts around the point where your team did a project worth at _least_ 100,000 lines, and which didn't fail miserably. (Of course, that means divided into modules, programs, whatever.) And where your contribution was actually a substantial enough slice of that. (Not like some Wally instances here that just inherited someone else's module and refused to do any changes for _3_ _years_ straight, for fear of breaking code that's well beyond their skill or knowledge.)
Parent
No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
This Proves It (Score:5, Funny)
Thank goodness. (Score:4, Funny)
Poor choice of dates, and show me the numbers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Start with the two years the mention: 1996 and 2002. 1996 was the start of the dot-com boom. And 2002, a slump after dot-bombs are clearing away.
Where's the numbers in the middle? Did it drop in 1997-1999, in the boom? Did it stay the same until 1999, then drop? Has it been a continuous rate change? Where's the support that it really is a "downward spiral"?
Second, lacking from TFA are actual numbers and places.
Is this the IT market globally, including countries like India, China, Russia, and others? Or is this the IT market in the US? Or perhaps just the San Jose area? Or just Arkansas where the school that ran the survey is at? How many women? Has there been an increase in the number, just less of an increase relative to men? Or has the total number stayed about the same, or dropped? What are the women doing? Are they including women employed as secretaries and managerial operations within the IT business? How about men similarly working in IT companies, but not doing IT? What about the people not in the IT business but doing the work for small companies?
Given the (lack of) data we are shown, their conclusions are not really warranted.
frob
Why is this a concern in and of itself? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I REALLY The First Person To Say This? (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA talks about women's participation in IT as a percentage of the IT workforce, but that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not women are fleeing IT. Try this as an experiment:
Time 0: 100 IT positions. 40 are women.
Time X: 1000 IT positions, 350 are women.
We've gone from 40% women to 35% women. Have women fled the field? HELL NO.
We need absolute numbers to figure out whether or not there are less women in IT than there used to be, but TFA doesn't seem to have them (or I missed them -- I did R it, of course).
Titanic (Score:4, Funny)
Blame the outsourcing iceberg. Something about "no longterm prospects".
There are loads of girls in IT here in Korea (Score:5, Interesting)
When I came to Korea I was amazed at the ratio, it's approaching 40-50% in my new company. And not just artists but programmers, sysadmins etc.
It's not unusual to see a girl on the subway studying a cisco, C++ or Linux book. There's definitely no sense of uncoolness being in IT - it's not even seen as geeky, just a good career.
So in Korea, only old women are leaving IT
as a female software architect... (Score:5, Interesting)
First, I've still never met another female software architect. People like to work with people who are like them. It gives them more to talk about than just "the code". It's hard to make friends at work when you're surrounded by mostly men. Everyone thinks you're "more than friends".
Second, IT managers tend to have less "soft skills" than their business-side counterparts. Face it, we live in a world where women do the lion's share of child-raising. If my manager isn't sensitive about the time I *need* to be away from work cos school is closing early, then I'm going to be less happy on the job.
Third, IT managers tend to be male (as are most IT workers). Managers like to promote people who are like them. It's been hard for me in some organizations to envision a good career path.
Lastly, it sucks sometimes to be in meetings and be the only woman there. Yes, that can be a point of pride, but it's not always a comfortable feeling.
As a female undergrad computer science student... (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, I'd like to say a little bit about myself and what I've observed around me. I'm a second year student at Dalhousie University (that's in Halifax, if anyone cares), and I've only been an official computer science student for this past term. Before that, I was a biology major, so I'm really behind in my cs courses and have to take both first and second year classes concurrently. I've noticed that while my first year Java course has quite a number of girls in it, most of them are from other faculties and, quite frankly, wouldn't cut it in any IT-related field. These are the kinds of girls who got it into their miniscule brains sometime in highschool that boys only like stupid girly girls, so they seem to make a sincere effort to not learn anything about computers. In my second year classes, the girls are more like me -- perfectly ordinary geeks who just happen to like computers and want to learn more. Of course, there are far fewer girls in those second year classes because the aforementioned bimbo types have already been weeded out by the insurmountable challenge of writing a Hello World program in Java.
My question then becomes, how do we get more intelligent girls in computer science? Not just girls in general, but ones who actually have some kind of talent for it and aren't going to make the rest of us look bad with their antics. I don't think there's an easy answer to this, but I suspect that the current initiatives are doing more harm than good.
For example, when I see a job ad that says "We encourage minorities like blacks, Native Americans and women to apply!" I'm sitting there thinking to myself, "Uh... OVER 50% OF THE FREAKIN' POPULATION HERE! How the HELL are a minority?" But for some reason, we're treated as if we're some kind of endangered species. Doesn't it occur to anyone that we might not like that treatment? Doesn't it occur to anyone that we just want to be treated like ordinary human beings, no matter what's between our legs? I mean, I'm not going to refuse if somebody throws money at me for having a vagina and using a computer, but it's really not a good way to encourage other girls to join the field. It's hard to see myself as successful when I so often have to wonder if everything I've "achieved" is only because I'm female (and thus have to be specially encouraged and rewarded to keep me from running away.)
Oh, and another thing: I never see any similar initiatives to get more men into... say... nursing, or even regular biology. They're definitely in the minority, but either people are afraid of being called sexist for favouring the sex that's supposedly in power (even though it hasn't been for decades), or they've figured out that the best way to get men into something like nursing is NOT to say "Oh, don't worry! It's not just for women! You won't be less of a man if you're a nurse! Not feminine at all! Trust me!" because they know that any man will look at something like that and think to himself "So wait, nursing makes me gay?" thanks to the wonders of reverse psychology. I just wonder how long it will take for the faculty of computer science to figure that out as well...
(Yes, I know I'm bitter.)
An area where women are very common in IT (Score:5, Insightful)
I have worked for the various government agencies and departments for 8 years now, and the number of women working in IT is definitely above average for the IT field. I attribute this to the fact that they are not being driven out of the field here. As a government employee, we have steady and predictable hours with little overtime. Vacation time is quite generous, and family related leave is available. These working conditions are not only attractive to women, but also to the men that I have worked with as well. I knew one guy who took a 20% pay cut (transferring to government from the private sector) so that he could have dinner with his family on a regular basis. I know another who is taking parental leave shortly so he can raise his daughter while his wife goes back to work early (in the private sector, she also works in IT).
I think the problem here is that the expected working conditions in the (North American private sector) IT field are atrocious. Long hours, unpaid overtime, arcane technology that is constantly changing is what's wrong with the IT industry. Women leaving the field in droves are just a symptom of a deeper running illness.
Young Women Have More Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
She has NO desire to go into IT. Nor do her friends.
Why?
These girls have seen all the "girls can do math/science" stuff their whole lives. They KNOW they can. They will take that else where.
When IT becomes people friendly, the women will come back. Many men are leaving for the same reasons.
how many in IT are 25 to 35 now? (Score:5, Interesting)
About 45% are home atleast a year -- "55 percent [nwsource.com] of women who gave birth between July 1999 and July 2000 returned to the labor force within a year of having their babies". "Of the 41.8 million kids under 15 who lived with two parents last year, more than 25 percent had mothers who stayed home, according to a Census Bureau report."
Some might think this is a bad thing. But "You're not how much money you have in the bank."
Re:overall effects? (Score:5, Funny)
Apply patches first.
Parent
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is a concern is if they're leaving because they're being driven out by sexist attitudes or working conditions (not deliberately sexist perhaps, but more likely designed by single men, for single men and with a "you have to change your life, because we're not changing our conditions" attitude). If this is the case then a) that shows a deep ingrained prejedice that belongs in the 50's rather then a 21st century cutting edge industry, and b) we're losing lots of very talented people who can bring whole new ideas and ways of looking at problems into the industry because they were born with a particular set of physical characteristics rather then for any worthwhile reason.
Diversity is good, not just in the operating system and software market but also in the people that produce that software.
Parent
Re:Testing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Hmm... kinda makes me wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally know people who left a field or a job precisely _because_ they were passionate about it... and it had turned into something they disliked. E.g., we have at least 3 people here alone, who used to program assembly since the days of mainframes and long before dot-coms, and then left for other completely unrelated jobs (2 of them became marketters and 1 trained to be a usability expert) when basically the job was no longer what they liked to do.
Loving computers and programming is sometimes _the_ best way to _hate_ an IT or programming job, respectively.
People liked coding a smart algorithm or maybe a cute game at home, they had their peer recognition for being good with computer in university, and... then moved into a real world that doesn't even vaguely resemble that. In the real world they:
- got bogged in hundreds of hours of verbal-masturbation meetings,
- were forced to do overtime for someone _else's_ mistake (e.g., the boss being too weak to tell the customer that completely changing the program needs more time and budget),
- were asked to implement blatantly wrong specs, or use the blatantly wrong tools, just because a PHB (own or client's) said so and wasn't gonna take feedback from a lowly peon. (The nice salesman says it's the perfect "solution" for anything, so now go make it work. If it doesn't work, it's your fault, not the nice salesman's.)
- had to wrestle with systems that wouldn't have been the wrong tools as such, but were wrongly configured and piss-poorly adminned by some other corporate department that's above the law,
- had to deal with co-workers that were annoying in a miriad of ways (ranging from the 400 pound stinking geek, to office backstabbers, to people who are utterly incompetent and lazy but awesome at selling snake oil to the boss, to whatever else),
- were forced to do stuff that really had nothing to do with the job they had signed for, such as being the poor-man's marketer instead of a programmer,
- were asked to do blatantly unethical stuff, like to actively lie to a customer,
Etc.
And some of us just learned to shrug and deal with it. Some left the job. And I think it's a bit unfair to just lump them into the same category as those who were in it just for the dot-com's money.
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Re:Women aren't interested in IT? (Score:5, Insightful)
The managers, hence fuckwits (just like men.) Very few managers are not fuckwits. Unfortunately, with one possible exception, on which the jury's still out, the female managers I dealt with were as bad as the usual male manager. By virtue of having contact with more male managers than with female ones, the chances of meeting a non-fuckwit female manager was greatly reduced.
The uninterested--as another poster described, these were the sort of trend-drones seen during the dot-com boom. Once again, fuckwits. Fewer women percentually means fewer non-fuckwits, absolutely. In my case, the non-fuckwit female trend-drone share was nil.
The intimidated--because of the (real or perceived) disadvantages faced by women in IT, these were the mousy, quiet types who never had anything to say. Happens with men too, but as men usually tend to be at least a bit more assertive, it's less common. Not unpleasant to work with, mainly since you never encounter them (they're hiding.) "Oh no I could never do this, I might break it."
The intimidating--taking the previous class a step further, these are the ones who treat every personal encounter as a confrontation. Not man-haters, just insecure people afraid of being fucked by god-knows-what, or unsure of their ability to deal with people trying to fuck them (in a professional manner, mind--no, not that kind of professional manner.) See managers.
The officious--an offshoot of the last category. One of my dearly held stereotypes is that women care more about rules than men do (as in Dilbert's Wally vs. Alice.) These are the types who will throw rules and roadblocks in your face out of principle, because you COULD BE TRYING TO PULL A FAST ONE OH MY GOD. See managers.
The cool ones--don't care, are professional and competent, have the self-confidence to ignore harassment or hit back with wit and style, and understand that there's a job to be done and hey, can't we all just get along. Very rare, but oh so incredibly appreciated. They get things done, are more responsible than the guys, come up with cool, creative solutions, and basically combine all the good sides of a "typical" female personality with a few characteristics making it easy for guys to work with them.
Once again, I realize that most of these stereotypes apply to men as well. I love working with women, if they fall into the latter class. It's just been my experience that a far higher percentage of men tend to be competently agreeable to work with than women.
The main points that I make to women (as with anyone) when talking about IT careers are: (a) don't be intimidated, and (b) don't do this job if you don't love it, and can deal with technical and human shit a lot of the time. Rule #1? Relax, it's a job, get it done and that's it.
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