Women Leaving I.T.

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?"

Looking at the distribution ...

... of participants here this has long since happened.

CC.

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

I don't think it was ever the case.
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.

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

here's some figures for you to dispute.

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.

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

've noticed a general flow of kids going for a technical education here though. They start off in a program like engineering or CS, fall back to school of tech., and lastly end up in either management (or some derivative of business) or as an education major.

I can't remember where I read this, so I can't cite my source, but most men who drop out of engineering (either to take something else or to drop out of school entirely) have averages in the D's or below. Most women who drop out have averages in the A's and B's.

Is it any wonder I didn't get laid in University!

People say that university was the best time of there life.
I wouldn't recommend computer science to my worst enemy.
Not only do you not meet any girls in any of your classes you carry around the stigma of comp sci.
On top of that I graduated at a time when there were no computer science jobs.
I was forced to take a job as a bartender.
Let me just say bartending was fun.

The stigma for girls is even worse in comp sci.
It's got to be hard not having any peers of the same gender.
They are surrounded by a buch of sex starved guys.

But look at the other side of the coin for example nursing.
Not a lot of guys there.
You never really hear studies about guys not going into nursing.
Even though there is a huge shortage of nurses.
The stigma of being a male nurse is a lot worse than comp sci.

If you look at country like Korea, The stigma of comp sci doesn't really exist.
I would imagine there is a high enrollment rate for women in comp sci there.
Technology is very much a part of their society.

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

Maybe this withdrawl is in part because thanks to TV, IT is no longer the sexy job it once was. These days everybody who's looking for a glamourous, wellpaying career becomes criminal investigators, or medical investigators, or whatever else is not on TV. The shows doll everybody up, make it look WAY more fun and exciting than it is, and then people try to get into that industry just following the crowd.

What a shame it is that this floods the market for the people who are really there because of their interest in the field.

Re:It's just too hard for them

I think it's a lot more likely that women are leaving IT because of attitudes like this.

Re:It's just too hard for them

I hope that you're not serious, anyone who would leave their chosen career field because someone else didn't think that they could cut it is a very weak person indeed. I really hope that you'd give women more credit than this.
After watching my mom go back to school and work her ass off for what she wanted I'm offended when I hear statements like this.

Re:It's just too hard for them

Well, I'm sorry you're offended, but if people constantly get brushed off there's often a limit to their patience.

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.

Re:Ogling

You kids with your ogling. Back in my day, it was gold fish swallowing and sitting atop a flagpole that was all the rage.

Well, it's time for my morning prunes, so 23 skidoo! (23 skidoo is what we used to say.)

Re:It's just too hard for them

Agreed.

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.

Re:It's just too hard for them

There's a sort of mild autism that makes people a whole lot better at math-related fields. From this little we understnd about autism, it could well have a sex bias. I'd certainly like to know the answer myself, but as the president of Harvard demonstrated, one can't even *ask* the question in Academia today.

Re:It's just too hard for them

Okay, so i'm the first 'barbie' to reply. I'm a 31 yr old female and i've worked in IT since 1998. As always, i'm in the minority as a chick, varying from 10% to 40% women of the workforce of the company (and the 40% was in a web/graphic design company). Don't forget that career choices are motivated by social stimulus and peer pressure which begin in the perambulator all the way thru educational career. It's still not hot for girls to go for science/technical careers. My dad always told me how good I was in languages. My tests showed that I had a natural affinity for mechanical insight. I ended up studying English lit. and autodidacted my way into IT. This illustrates how girls in general are hence less confident of their abilities. Recent studies actually promote the separate education of girls from boys in computer and science subjects at grade/primary school to counteract this not genetic, but social issue... Because of the growth in specialisms, and different programming languages, girls i reckon "perceive" IT to have become more difficult. And besides, how much fun is it to be the only girl out of a 100 geeks in CS? :)

Re:It's just too hard for them

And besides, how much fun is it to be the only girl out of a 100 geeks in CS? :)

Well, it's great if you want attention, I suppose. I'd rather be the one dude in a French class...

Re:It's just too hard for them

The odds are good, but the goods are odd.

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

A lot of posters have asked why there are so few women here, but I suspect that nobody really knows how many women do post on slashdot (least of all how many women actually read slashdot - good luck working that one out).

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.

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

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?"

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

new pool

i am :

() male

() female

() i dont know

() CowboyNeal ??

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

slashdot \neq IT
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.

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

That's not it at all.

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.

As a woman in IT, I somewhat agree with the parent

I'm a woman who's been in computing since the early 1980's. I (reluctantly) agree with the parent for the most part. Quick description of me: people I've worked with at a large software tool vendor have termed me "the geekiest womam I know" and admins and students considered me the school's "lead hacker" in college.

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

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

I assume that this is the real cause as well, actually.

For example, during the dot-com era, some of the bigger consulting companies were crash-training whole classes of non-technical people to do IT. Can a former art or literature major with 3 months of technical training develop quality software? Generally not, but we're talking about companies like Anderson or PwC that don't mind solving problems by throwing more bodies at them, since that equates to more they can bill.

When the tech market took a downturn, a lot of these people got forced out of the market. Some discovered they had a real talent or love for IT and stuck with it through the thin periods, but most went back to whatever it was they wanted to do in the first place.

I think this kind of crowd was proportionaly more women than men, and their departure is what the statistics are really showing. I've met some great women in the IT field who do it for much the same reasons as most of the men you'd meet in the field, and those women aren't going anywhere.

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

The facts from that article? What facts? They throw about assumptions that we're all interested in having babies and families, which isn't necessarily true. They're also assuming that men refuse to pick up on basic things like housework and child rearing. There's absolutely nothing to support that, especially considering all the 'negative population growth' alarmist nonsense being bandied aroud elsewhere.

Oh, I am aware. We have one manager here that does it to everyone, which fills me with a sort of 'part of something' joy. I would guess though, that no one has ever assumed you were the receptionist or the Office Manager? Or actually being asked point blank if there was a technical contact onsite after your name had been provided? OR, this is my favorite, have you ever been asked if your name is your 'stage name?' Or have you ever had a man shout at you over the phone, insisting that he HAD TO SPEAK TO A MAN to fix his system? These things happen to us all the time and I can assure you, it's not just me.

And of course it brought out this kind of a response. The article wanted to know why and I'm telling you why I've thought about leaving IT. As for the rest, who knows? I would assume that my gender probably is motivated by money, security and ambition just like men are. It's no secret that IT is kind of bottomed out.

I am enormously proud of being a woman in IT. I think it's pretty cool, especially in the face of all of this *waves around at the /.* comments nonsense. What I was saying though, is, it's generally not easy and not all make it. There comes to be a point where being asked to photocopy something for someone isn't funny anymore, it's just annoying.

Re:Looking at the distribution ...

They throw about assumptions that we're all interested in having babies and families, which isn't necessarily true.

It is true, as a statistical group.

If it's not, we have a problem as a species.

Other fields...?

You know, it's always a little disconcerting for me, as someone with an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, to hear the contant studies taking place with regard to women and IT, women and science, women and math...

This is because the ratio of men to women in the philosophy department where I did my B.A. looked about the same as it does in more, shall we say, marketable fields. But while there is a new story about women and their relationship with technology every seven seconds, no one seems too concerned about women and philosophy... or men and elementary education, for that matter.

It's pretty obvious that this is because neither philosophy students nor kindergarten teachers make as much as they arguably should.

But that means that we're not talking about this out of any real sense of equality. We may feel the knee-jerk impulse to argue about whether men and women are "really different" and whether this is biological or societal, but really we're seeing an inequality in a potentially lucrative field and so people feel the need to cry foul.

I'm fine with that, actually, but I think the dialogue would feel a lot more academic and reasonable if we stopped crying "women can do math too!" and started asking how certain facts relate to one another--how the low number of male elementary school teachers and low number of female philosophy students and low number of female IT workers all relate to one another.

(Personally, my guess is people have certain expectations of their roles, and that changing those societal expectations is not the sort of thing that takes place overnight... but I only minored in psychology, so take that as you will!)

Women?

There were women working in IT???? Where?

Re:Are there really...

social desirability theory says that, in general, women percieve themselves as less desirable if they're good at math, or involved in the sciences. If they're not 'normal' they're different.

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).

Re:You're modded as +3 funny but...

anecdotal, but ...

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 ... I wouldn't trust any of them to do the job I do (mixed environment system administration), because it's not what they know. But in their fields, they're significantly better equipped than most of the men they graduated with.

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.

Flaw in argument

You say that men spend more time in the basement with computers in their adolescence while women don't. First of all, I do not see an argument supporting this, maybe your own experience, which has not enough statistical weight anyway.Second, suppose it was true. Then, what do women do in their adolescence? You'll perhaps agree that they have a more social life (this argument does not have statistical validity either). Well, if so, then they are probably more aware of what a certain customer might need while developing software. Also they'll be more efficient in communicate with the customer to achieve better results in the software developed. This is as important for IT as the programming itself. Therefore, the fact that men spent more time in their basements playing with computers in their adolescence does not make them more suited for IT. They are just more specialized in certain tasks, while women are specialized in others. The mixture if the two specialities is crucial in the proper running and development of an IT company. BOTH are important.

Re:You're modded as +3 funny but...

However, people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement working on computers are better at computers than those who do not, and people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement are far more likely to be men.

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

Re:You're modded as +3 funny but...

Given any particular male in IT, and any particular female in IT, the male is much more likely to be proficient in what he is doing.

Yes, the male is much more likely to be proficient in what *he* is doing. But is he more proficient in what *she* is doing? Women tend to prefer information management rather than information technology or algorithmics. My experience tells me that women are often better getting the "big picture" in IM than men who just like cut the crap and go write some code.

Then again my sample of fellow geeks is too small for my observations to carry any real weight.

Re:You're modded as +3 funny but...

Now, I'm sure a buncha people are going to get up-in-arms screaming 'Men are not better than women!'. To which I wholeheartedly agree. However, people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement working on computers are better at computers than those who do not, and people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement are far more likely to be men.

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?"

Re:overall effects?

How am I supposed to deal with a woman that doesn't think compiling a just released kernel is exciting and the best forplay one can have?

Apply patches first.

Re:overall effects?

"Gazeta Wyborcza", it's the Poland's biggest newspaper. Not a tabloid, too.
It was a two-page big article, a couple of months or so ago.

I'm afraid I don't have the paper anymore.

I also didn't intend the grandparent post to be a troll, even though it includes a rather extreme view. A typical woman is not interesting in anything other than clothes and the last soap opera, while the typical man cares about nothing but beer and viewing a mindless football/baseball/etc game on the TV.

I'm not interested in your typical person. People I want to talk to share a mindset -- a mindset that's typical to hackers (in the non-tabloid/MS FUD sense of the word), some scientists (most often in physics) and some related groups. People of this mindset often get labelled "geeks" -- and they are around 0.1% (a completely wild estimation) of the male population and 0.00001% of females. This very /. article is related to this proportion.

Easy

Easy, stigma of the geek. Kill the stigma of IT and the geek and IT will attract more Women. Meanwhile IT will scare away just as many Women as any other geek...

Re:Easy

That wasn't what TFA identified as the problem. They had some whacked out theories about stress and repeated claims about how women are just different from men and that's why it's harder for them to succeed.

The closest I could find to an actual example in the article was this gem:

For example, women tend to take maternity leaves when their children are born. Even if that leave is only a couple of months long, much could have changed by the time the woman returns to her desk. Imagine the increased stress for her if an enterprise software update occurs in her absence, for instance.

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.

Re:Easy

Or you could stop calling people geeks for being into computers. You people might have tried to turn it into a compliment because you were bullied with the term all through school, but for real people, the term is an insult.

Eh?

Why is this necessarily a concern? I'm not against the presence of women in I.T., but I don't see that it's a problem if the proportion of female I.T. workers declines. This is just sexist scaremongering, along the lines of the GNAA [www.gnaa.us].

Re:Eh?

I don't think it is a concern if women are leaving IT because they can get better jobs elsewhere or because there are less IT jobs or something.

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.

Effects

While this is certainly a concern, what are the overall effects of such a mass departure?

Less sex on the job?

Oh, wait, we're talking about IT right?

Nevermind.

Re:Effects

we're talking about IT, right ?

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.

Effects.

what are the overall effects of such a mass departure?
Er... tangible masterbation material is thinning out?

Too lazy to provide links...

How often is it though that you see an actual vagina-and-boobs bearing person in the IT field? Their scarcity may be scaring them off (No pun intended). It's simply a male-dominating field, considering some studies have shown that males have better grasps on logic and reason than woman, who tend to think more emotionally. That's obviously not the case with ALL women (See: Hilary Clinton) though, and I shouldn't be taken stereotypically.

Re:Testing?

My favourite "IT and gender" anecdote occurred shortly after we opened our cybercafe. My French colleague had just graduated in IT, and had a very... well, French... view of what women were for. One morning a platinum blonde dressed entirely in black walks through the door and asks what sort of computers we have. Colleague starts his "well the computers are those little boxes over there" speech, she says "no, what C compilers do you have available, and can I use telnet from here?" Sound of jaw hitting tiled floor... It turned out that she was studying IT in Paris. She pops in about once a year, and last time I saw her she was working for a bank in London. She says she has a lot of female colleagues there, but that there are very few women in French IT.

Hmm... kinda makes me wonder

You know, I sorta wonder about the generalization that everyone who left, was in it just for the money, and everyone who stayed is passionate about it.

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.

Momentum

"the downward spiral is gaining momentum."

Angular or linear?

Effects

"While this is certainly a concern, what are the overall effects of such a mass departure?"

We will have to get the teas and coffees ourselves.

What about

The general exodus from IT given the fact that most jobs in this sector pay next to nothing and seem to be as satifying as a red hot poker crammed up the *ss.

Is it any wonder the people are leaving given that family friendly seems to be a concept completely lost on most companies.

To Be Expected?

Isn't this just another baby boomer generation leaving the office to have kids?

Why is it a concern?

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?

E.g., according to real studies, 3 out of 4 "programmers" just can't program. E.g., about 2 out of 3 don't even know the basics of the language they're paid to program in. Yes, males included. Doesn't really have anything to do with gender.

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.

Re:You mean, just like 3 out of 4 men?

Heh. So then it's just an exercise in sexism, eh?

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.)

No surprise

Judging by many of the replys so far probably the bigest thing driving women out of IT is the attitude of male IT workers who seem to think that we're still living in the 50's, for an industry thats meant to be the cutting edge of the future, many peoples attitudes seem to be about as old fashioned as they come.

Re:No surprise

there's no question that the interest simply isn't there.

The question is ... WHY is the interest not there?

Now, a "sexist pig" (or Harvard president) would suggest that this is strictly an innate difference. Someone a little more educated in the field of psychology (specifically gender studies) would be more prone to say that this is a socialized difference.

Women aren't electing to be programmers (or any of the numerous other IT positions out there), just like they aren't swarming to engineering and physics and chemistry. Nobody's saying they should be forced into jobs they don't want. But there's an indication of a problem when women as a whole are being indoctrinated with the idea that they CAN'T pursue these jobs, when they are capable of doing them.

More to the point, this isn't a gender difference that's always around. Women don't abandon their interests in science and technology until they're in their teens, as a rule. Ask 20 fourth grader girls, they all want to be scientists and doctors and executives and astronauts. Ask 20 9th grade girls, 18 of them will want to be thinner and more attractive, and have substantially no long-term goals beyond their appearances.

The problem is "why is the interest disappearing when these girls start puberty?".

Women aren't interested.

Lets face it, women generally aren't interested in computers. (being very general here)

There is nothing wrong with this. Why is it a crisis?

I suspect the "downward spiral" is due to a lot of women who went into IT (perhaps due to all the efforts made to attract them) only to discover they really weren't interested.

The effects won't be very significant. (it may have an impact on the consumer level as less software is written with women in mind though)

Live and let live. They're not interested, so what?

This Proves It

Women _are_ smarter than men.

Thank goodness.

I worked for a female I.T. manager once. She fired someone every 28 days.

Define "I.T."

If they include call centres as "I.T." jobs then offshoring may have had an impact.

Other factors

While the article's conclusion seems insightful enough, it doesn't take account of aspects like the general outsourcing of data entry (formerly the only kind of IT work women could get), or the sheer lack of advancement opportunities, particularly in telecommunications. Even with good prospects, women are disadvantaged.

Given the current wonky state of the larger IT companies, are they missing a useful female perspective?

Poor choice of dates, and show me the numbers.

That article is very poor journalism, even by the low standards of today.

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?

I really don't see why people get overworked when statistics like this come out. Is there anything really wrong with the concept that there might be inherent differences between men and women that would account for something like this? Or will I be modded down like Lawrence Summers effectively was?

IT is becoming a commodity

I think what it means is that Information Technology is, from the point of view of a company that isn't writing code, making hardware, or providing connectivity, a dead horse. The corporate world doesn't need in-house geeks soaking up the payroll and hoarding the sacred knowledge of esoteric, arcane legacy systems that don't work.

That equates to corporate IT being a pre-capped stove pipe within any given non-tech company - something women who are looking for good paying positions with the possibility of advancement aren't finding attractive. It may be that they aren't drawn naturally to the "me geek, me play with cool toys" life, but that life has limited applicability outside of the tech sector. Why would anyone intentionally choose to enter a career track that leads to becoming the digital equivalent to a cafeteria server or a janitor?

Until someone comes along and changes the landscape of Information within business (and society) to something that more closely approximates electricity - Information Utility - there won't be any truely good reason to get into anything but the super creative core disciplines of IT in a shrinking number of tech firms that are charting the course for the future of business computing.

Because women constitute both a more observed and a smaller population, trends will appear sooner in their group within the IT world as a whole. I think they are leaving because it's smart to be leaving this particular ship if you aren't in a position to steer a new course.

IT as a long-term career

The article asks readers to imagine what would happen if a woman took a two month maternity leave during which an enterprise software update happened. That would be stressful, and suddenly her skills would be obsolete.

If IT remains a field where the only relevant knowledge is what you've done in the last two months or two years, then it makes no sense for someone to spend a career on it. Kids are coming out of school (in schools around the world now) with the latest programming languages. If a short absence from IT means you are less valuable than a recent graduate, then it makes sense to leave the field after an absence. Women are more often forced by circumstances like having children to make more mid-career decisions like this than men.

In other professions, there are skills you use and tools you become proficient at over the course of many years. It seems that these either don't exist in IT, or (as I believe) they do exist, but are rarely developed or valued. If returning to IT is as difficult as starting over in a new profession, we shouldn't be surprised that people choose to do so.

Are they counting call centers too?

Two different call centers in my area closed down and both of those who lost jobs were women. My understanding was that were more women than men at both. So I am curious what is counted as IT in this report...

As for maternity leave. We have 3 out now and one more going by July here. Two are out on 12 week maternity leaves. This is where I disagree with the article. We, like other companies, simply don't move that fast. Yes a lot can go by in 12 weeks but most of it is meaningless. There might be one major change, maybe two if some managers actually got out of their own way. Two of them have come back once already from an earlier pregnancy and nothing really changed here other than they have a few more missed days throughout the year.

Leaving in droves? Maybe they got smart :)

Comparing percentages

You can't compare percentages like that and come to the conclusion that women are leaving the IT market without mentioning the actual numbers...

Am I REALLY The First Person To Say This?

I tried not to be redundant and all, but ...

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

When the ship is sinking, the women and children leave first don't they? :)

Blame the outsourcing iceberg. Something about "no longterm prospects".

Headline somewhat misleading

The article doesn't actually say there are fewer women in IT -- only that the percentage of IT workers who are women has declined. In other words, since the IT field has no doubt grown, the number of women may have increased -- just not as fast as the number of male IT workers.

Rather than crying that the sky is falling and theorizing as to why a trend that may not exist happen, maybe the article should question the way it uses statistics more closely. (You see similar things in Apple marketshare stories -- Apple is down to 2% of the market, but they sell a steady or increasing number of machines. Why? Because the market is growing. It helps to have perspective on these things.)

There are loads of girls in IT here in Korea

When I worked for a game development company in the US it was extremely rare to meet a female developer, occasionally an artist or level designer. My company had a single female - the office manager.

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 :-)

I think I know why.

Just take a quick glance through the comments here and it becomes kind of obvious.

Re:Women aren't interested in IT?

Actually, most of the women I've personally worked with in IT fell into a very limited set of categories, personality-wise:

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.

Dential Hygienists

When people start worrying that there aren't enough men going in the dental hygienist field (I've never in all my life seen one), I'll start worrying about the lack of women in IT.

And this is a concern because.....

As much as I love women (after all, I'm a man) why is it a concern that women might prefer work that's a little less tedious and a little more rewarding. Maybe we should worry a little bit more about improving the quality of IT jobs and software engineering jobs in particular rather than sexist or racist issues of why we don't have equal numbers of every sexual and ethnic group in IT jobs. Is it a concern that most garbage collectors are men????

Bytes in the blood.

I've met far fewer women doing IT here in the UK than men. I'd bet good money (if I had it) that the % of women in UK IT is much lower than in the US.

Why? IMHO those [women] that I've met in IT are very competent and good at their jobs. But I've not met any yet live IT . Doing the job 9 to 5 is all well and good, but I've yet to meet a woman who does this kind of thing in her spare time. The sort of thing we all do, home projects, fun hacks and the like. I think there are women out there like that but not as common as the men like that.

Well...

The article cites special absences, such as maternity leaves, preventing women from keeping their skills up-to-date as the cause of women dropping out of IT. There are a number of flaws with this:

• Women are underrepresented even on the college level, where not many of them are of the age where raising a child becomes a problem. Out of 80 Comp. Sci students in two sections of my freshman computer science class, 1 was female, and she dropped out after the first semester.
• I understand that raising a child takes a lot of time, but surely there must be an hour or so a day to do some research and keep up-to-date on IT skills.
• I doubt that "staying current" is as important as the article makes it out to be, anyway. Even knowing some new hot topics, I find myself using older technologies 90% of the time at work.

I think that the real cause of the female IT exodus is twofold: The first is that the money is no longer there. Fortunately, this means that IT candidates now are likely more dedicated. On the other hand, that means homogeneity... you only get those that are dedicated in the field, and that seems to consist almost entirely of males. Additionally, there is a social stigma associated with these sorts of fields... or, for that matter, demonstrating rational intelligence at all. Women are expected to be nurturers because that is what society expects of them, not because of any significant innate difference. Likewise, men are supposed to be the rational protectors and financial supporters. For a woman to defy what her peers may think of her in order to pursue the field that she really wants to is rare. Then again, how many male nurses do you know?

as a female software architect...

i can come up with several reasons why my career is taking me ever more into the business side of the aisle, away from the geek cubes::

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.

Because they were re-treds?

In 1998, I knew a woman with 22 years experience as a nurse, who wanted to get into IT. Unimaginable now. In 2001, I knew a woman programmer, who got laid off and went back to accounting.

During the boom, virtually anybody could work in IT. After the boom, you had to know your stuff. My guess is, that after the boom the re-treds, both male and female, went back to their old professions. Leaving the field as it was before the boom - predominately male. In fact, often the same males who were there before the boom.

Top 3 Reasons

3. They married the billionaire CEO and quit working
2. They went back to grad school to shut that Harvard guy up
1. They got tired of being asked to dress up as "7 of 9" every Halloween.

As a female undergrad computer science student...

... there are a few things that I'd like to add to this discussion. Some may have been said before, but I'm afraid that due to an imminent Java tutorial, I don't have the time to read through everything.

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

Government.

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.

Good

...they made me nervous anyway. They kept wanting to talk and stuff.

Young Women Have More Choices

I was discussing this very issue with my daughter just the other day. She is investigating colleges. She happens to be a math and science wiz!

She has NO desire to go into IT. Nor do her friends.

Why?

• They don't want to work 60+ hours every week.
  
• They don't want to be stuck in a cube.
  
• They like working WITH other people.
  
• They like doing things after hours that don't relate to their job.
  
• They want to have a social life, family, friends.
  
• They want respect.
  

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?

how many in IT are 25 to 35 now? Because that's the age when many people have kids now. My wife was in IT till our son was born. She's staying home with him. Although not as many moms stay home while the kids are in school, a lot more stay home with them for the first year or so.

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."

Misogyny

Gee. I wonder if it's because of jerks like my boss. After interviewing a woman yesterday, he came back into the engineering area and announced in a loud voice -- "Well, she was good -- I really liked those bolt-on titties." He proceeded to discuss the woman's looks for everyone to hear.

I never once heard him address her ability (or inability) to do the job. Now I don't consider myself a feminist, but I was left speechless by his complete lack of professional (and social) competence.

Not helping employability

My wife graduated with her BSEE last may and she's still looking for a job. She was one of 2 females in her class and 98% of the others were from out of country and many of them went home.

Living in DFW you'd think it would be easier for her to get a job but despite her skillset and companies "wanting" to hire college graduates it still has not happened.

IT is a dieing field.

Simple, women are smarter than men, and they already see that IT is a dead end field, like making buggies after the Model T came out.

Although there will still be IT jobs (unlike the buggy makers) from here on out IT will be drudge work, and not a desireable field to be in anymore. It is just that women noticed this first.

==>Lazn

I am a female programmer like my mother before me

My mum's a java/C++ programmer who works on unix for the department of energy - highly respected in her field.

I'm a C++/multimedia programmer who works mostly on windows.

I have no children, but hope someday to continue the line of women geek programmers.

When I graduated from college - I majored in CS - we had 6 women out of 300 graduates. Then during the IT boom, the numbers seemed to go up - women, as well as men - were attracted by the "promise" of easy money.

Then the dot com bubble burst, and there isn't "easy money" anymore, so the numbers have gone down - back to about where they were before the dot com boom.

I believe that society does not tend to create as many geek women as they do geek men. I'm an exception rather than a trend. I learned to pull the power plug out of vt100 terminals to get my mother to pay attention to me. I helped my dad build our first computer - an 086 - from scratch when I was 8. I played adventure with my mother at 9, and together we charted the maze of twisty passages. I installed Linux at age 14. Had my own web server running in my bedroom by the time I went to college.

But most women aren't given the resources and encouragement I was. I was given free reign of the home computers. I was told at one point that anything I could do to the computers COULD be fixed. So when I corrupted windows at age 10 through experimentation, I was not punished, which allowed me to continue to view computers as learning experiences rather than "Scary machines".

My father had no sons. He loved to teach me "boy things" like tools and cars and computers, because there was no one else to teach it to. Had I a brother, I probably would not have been allowed to convert the spare computer into a linux box. Had my mother not been a mathematician and a programmer, I probably would not have been taught QBASIC when I was 9 - and then given a set of BASIC books and left to my own devices.

Most girls are taught to concentrate on other things. Clothes. TV. Boys. Art. Makeup. I am horrid at wearing makeup. My fashion is incredibly boring. I was never a "popular" girl. Most of the time I got treated as one of the geek guys, because I could program as well as any of them.

Which brings me back to my original point. There are only so many girls raised with the encouragement and inclination to become geeks. There are many more boys who are given the tools and resources and society pressure to become geeks. Therefore, boy geeks will continue to outnumber girl geeks.

The increase in girls in CS in the past few years was mearly an echo of the promise of "Easy money" of the dot comm boom, and now that it is gone, only those who do it because they love to do it remain.

Sincerely, A Girl Geek.

Consider a job in the earth sciences

We have had women entering the field in droves. There is a strong interest in work that is performed out of doors by young, college-aged women. This mirrors an overall trend seen by outdoor sports retailers who have seen and increase in sales to women.

More of them are getting out of their parent's basements and are coming out into the cold light of day.

Re:Not politically correct but reality is...

Not sure why, but in my experience, women were better project managers and QA while men were better coders.

You're not sure why? But that's obvious - women have great people skills, men are better at building things, constructing objects. The later is true also for virtual objects - all great programmers or architects that I know in fact see how the code works. They unconsciously kind of visualize it in their mind as a functioning mechanism.

Project management in turn is a people skills exercise. You have to be very good at dealing with people, understand them, communicate effectively and so on. Women are much better at (unconsciously) manipulating people (especially men, above all geeks) into doing something they want. A man would sooner retort to using authority and orders - woman would first try to make you want to do it. Guess when the job is done better.