Women Leaving I.T. 1027
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?"
Re:Easy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:overall effects? (Score:4, Informative)
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
This is such, such BS (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Eh? (Score:3, Informative)
For some real numbers, check out the following:
Re:Women? (Score:2, Informative)
Ahh... here it is [pbs.org].
It's hard to determine who exerts the social pressure on women and men. (Or, more accurately, young girls and boys.) When things are so entrenched in society and media and culture it's impossible to point to one area specifically. The recent controversy over the portrayal of women in hip hop music is one example that comes to mind.
Actually, I don't buy it (Score:3, Informative)
You see, as I've mentioned several times before, I happen to have some first hand experience with Eastern Europe during communism and the cold war. The funny thing about Soviet-style communism is that, at least in theory, they were really hammering on the gender equality idea. (Of course, theory and practice still often diverged nevertheless.)
And you know what? They had a _ton_ of good programmers that were women. Damn good programmers, in fact. Also a ton of physicsts, doctors, mathematicians, engineers, etc. And an almost 50-50 distribution in college students. Including, yes, in CS and electronics.
So the problem _is_ a social one, not some biologic/genetic pre-destination. (Unless you're willing to tell me that they had some rare genetic strain of women;) It's also a complex one. It can't be reduced strictly to "males are sexist", either.
For a start, there was no stigma in being good at maths or science. It was a pride. The whole social system artiffically put nerds at the top, and made sure they're much better paid than, say, plumbers are.
So there was a helluva lot of an economic incentive to actually become a doctor or an engineer, as opposed to just a pretty and popular airhead.
And the whole school system was a rather brutal exercise in selecting who can learn, from who can't. They didn't have some watered-down "science" class in school. They did physics, chemistry, and maths in high school at a level comparable to what you'd get in the USA only in a college of that profile. E.g., they actually learned quantum physics in high school.
The idea was not to have it all at a level where everyone can understand it. The idea was to filter those maybe 10% who can, from those who can't. Being among those who did, was seen as a thing of _pride_.
Also, their education really hammered on the idea of equality. E.g., in the USSR they had even books about female military heroes of WW2. The whole message was, "yes, you too can do everything that the guys can!"
So, on the whole, what we have here is a massive difference in social- and peer-pressure.
The girlfriend you base your generalization on, was told by society that _the_ way to go is to forget those childhood dreams of being a chemist or doctor, and just be a popular skinny airhead. That's the message we give to kids in the west.
On the other hand, the message they got back then and there, was the exact opposite. "Hang on to that dream. Fight your way uphil through the education system, and actually become that engineer or scientist or doctor. Being an intellectual is _good_."
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the Soviet-style society and enforcing an unnatural social structure, was viable. Their system did go bankrupt, after all.
But incidentally it also did show that, if given the proper motivation and peer-pressure, their women could and did make just as good programmers, engineers and scientists as the men.
Re:It's just too hard for them (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You're modded as +3 funny but... (Score:2, Informative)
I have to wonder what period the book you mention was getting its data from. We covered sex differences within education in a sociology class I took recently, and at least as far as the lower grades went, the conclusions usually seemed to swing in the opposite direction. That around the 90s the emphasis went to concentrating on female instead of male students both in class and extracraricular activities.
Re:Looking at the distribution ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm just as competitive as the next guy (Score:3, Informative)
But in the end these are all antidocial(sic) evidence and not real scientific evidence. A good cross country, cross gender study of these aspects of men and women in the work place needs to be done, but good luck trying that in our society without being called sexist or bigoted.
Re:It IS harder for them, in general (Score:2, Informative)
See, the big problem here is that two people can look at the same data and interpret it different ways, and they interpret it the way they want to see it, even if they are scientists. For example, a famous study conducted by Benbow and Stanley (1980) regarding the math skills of junior high students was widely reported to support a clear superiority of male students over females students. But when you look at the actual graph of the scores, you see two bell curves pretty damn close to each other, and if you remove the prodigies from the mix (which DO happen to be mostly male and rare), the scores for the sexes are virtually identical. That was back in 1980, when I'm SURE women were not encouraged in science and math.
Or how about Gustave Le Bon? He was a scientist who in 1879 wrote: "In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion."
Almost laughable, right? But it still goes on today... Science magazine reported in 1983 that "Math Genius May Have Hormonal Basis," a story based on the work of Geschwind and Behan, who claimed to have witnessed differences in the development of male and female brains. Well, yes, they did. In RAT brains, where after undergoing a testosterone wash, male rats' brains were 3% thicker on the right than the left. From this, Geschwind and Behan, ignoring an earlier study of human fetal brain development from 10 to 44 weeks gestation that found no sex differences, decided that this was because the male rat needed better spatial skills to watch for other rats while having sex. They then essentially ported this theory and applied it to humans. Great science, chums. What's even more insulting is that Science never published any of the articles, corrections, or letters to the editor that neuroscientist Ruth Bleier sent to them contradicting and poking holes in the shoddy science.
And this is what most people have grown up reading, so it's what they believe, and it's what they pass along. And frankly, if you don't know you're supposed to be bad at math, you're a lot less likely to be bad at math.
Anyways... My point is that before you claim anything is "scientifically proven," keep in mind that we're always discovering and reinterpreting scientific findings, and that any variation between the sexes in ability is much less than the variation within a sex. I know a lot of women in IT who are very good at their jobs. I know a number of women with advanced degrees in math and science. It's certainly not a result of sex that anyone has to be bad at anything.
And frankly, as a woman who has generally scored in the top percentile in math and logic tests, I have a hard time believing I must be deficient because of my chromosomes.
Re:As a female undergrad computer science student. (Score:2, Informative)
>University (that's in Halifax, if anyone
>cares),
Good to see someone in the same province as me posting. This place doesn't seem to be very "knowledge economy" right now unless you count call centers - I've about given up on sysadminning and am looking for a receptionist job (seems to be all I'm qualified for). Good luck with the CompSci.
>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.
"Java - that's about coffee, right?" I'd be tempted to blame some of it on morons with more money (correction, parents with more money) than brains who follow a boyfriend/girlfriend to college and then just take whatever 'looks good'. I knew a guy who did that. He wanted to play in a band for a living and wound up in a marine biology track. Why? He liked to fish in his spare time, so he figured he'd get to know what bait was best for the fish he liked.
>My question then becomes, how do we get
>more intelligent girls in computer science?
How do we get more intelligent girls? Not to say that boys are more intelligent, but school (and life) seems to select against geek girls. Geek guys don't do so well, and are often bullied, but some of us were fortunate enough to get a fairly large and imposing type build (Thank you puberty!) that scares most bullies away. Girls don't have even that refuge from the more emotional bullying of their peers. They also don't necessarily have refuge with the geek guys, who sadly can get into "EEEE! COOTIES!" mode. Isolation, depression, or forcing onself to conform. Not pretty options for a geek girl to face. (Of course, being a geek guy, I could be completely wrong. I didn't much pay attention to social dynamics of females. Or males, even, I just knew enough that when I got tall and broad, guys didn't tease me or pick fights as much.)
The media isn't kind either: There's even a minor geek guy hero archetype (the guy who stays at base typing on a PC or giving info via radio to the Manly Men who go on the dangerous mission), but geek girls? Unpossible! Sandra Bullock vehicles notwithstanding, all you see is that villainess who can do kung fu and fly planes and use computers, but that person's almost always the "villainess who can do everything", not a specific geek type. And always a villain. (Grrr! Og says smart woman evil! Evil woman witch! Burn witch! Arrrrg!)
>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?"
Less in the workforce. Also, you've been legislated a minority; therefore, you are a minority. Besides, it's cheaper for the Big Boss to say "We hire minorities, like women!" and junk all male-named resumes for the occasional job than it is for him to pay their women employees identical wages to men. Sexism is alive and well in the workforce. Isn't the difference between female and male wages (on the same job) increasing again? People got so focused on "chairman" vs. "chairperson" and other "political correctness" that they forgot that a lot of women were still only making 80 cents to a man's dollar.
>Doesn't it occur to anyone that we might
>not like that treatment?
Not really. You're supposed to be the downtrodden masses who only get anywhere because the White Male Empire is nice enough to throw you a line every now and then. Merit? Skill? Oh, womenfolk don't have that!
It's part of the reason I don't like affirmative action. It's supposed to be a defense against sexism/racism - force Bad White Men to hire fairly - but can be twisted into sexism/racism easily. The implication is that non-whites/non-males need lower standards. As you've said, any female or non