January 6, 2010 at 7:00 am
I don't doubt that there is discrimination going on. I also doubt it is just this industry with discrimination but are you sure its not by choice?
My graduating comp sci class consisted of 60% women 40% men. This is a bit lopsided since the school ratio of women to men was like 10/1. Out of the women I graduated with 1 had an interest in UI and interface design the rest had no interest in programming at all. It wasn't that they couldn't or were not good at it. They just didn't like it. I have encountered the same thing since graduating. Plenty of women who can program most just don't like it. That has been my observation.
P.S. Why is this on people's mind when there exists a plethora of men who like to program and suck at it. That is a bigger problem IMO.
January 6, 2010 at 7:02 am
Forgive me for asking, but is the title to your editorial taken from Steely Dan, "When Josie Comes Home?"
January 6, 2010 at 7:06 am
Wish there could be a similar illumination on the foundations of the other "ism" referenced in the article. Ageism is very real when it's thought that anyone over 40 or 50 is not capable of doing technical work. This is most evident in trying for an entry level spot after retraining for work on another technical platform/role.
I have seen job postings that specify being under 30 as a requirement since in the minds of the business owner(s), anyone over that can not possibly be able to think or perform in a manner they desire.
Though there are laws (in the US and I assume elsewhere) to prevent such things, it is almost impossible to prove any bias since the hiring entity can creatively point to some other reason for not selecting an applicant.
As in any other example there are many who will look at qualifications and fit to select the best candidate. Still it's a shame to unilaterally discount any segment of the population based on preconceived notions of supposed group characteristics and abilities.
January 6, 2010 at 7:09 am
david_wendelken (1/6/2010)
I'm very active in user groups. I've noticed the % of women at user groups is now way less than 20%. More like 5%. Again, I don't know why.
Agreed. I have only twice (in just over a year) been able to open a usergroup meeting "Welcome, ladies and gentlemen"
Must work on that this year....
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
January 6, 2010 at 7:12 am
Jen-574053 (1/6/2010)
Does anyone know the gender split of SQLServerCentral membership? In other words, how many male members and how many female?Just curious!
I don't think that demographic is captured, but I find that most of the ladies that participate here have a better grasp of what they are doing than some of the men. I don't think I've seen any women post a question with the phrase "help me or I may lose my job" either.
January 6, 2010 at 7:18 am
There can be valid reasons for a sexual disparity in work, but they all pretty much boil down to physical morphology. Because of the effects of testosterone on skeleto-muscular development and on long-muscle density, there are some jobs that men can do better than women from a purely physical standpoint. This is decidedly not true of software development.
To those who have cited the superstition that "men think more logically than women" or other cerebral process prejudices, all evidence currently points to the human mind being such an amazingly flexible tool that this concept is clearly cultural bias, not based on any actual physical/chemical brain difference.
And our society does have serious cultural biases in just about every area of endeavor. In IT, I've worked with one female developer, and one non-caucasian developer, in 10 years. There's no good reason for that, but cultural bias definitely has an effect on it.
I do think it's a situation, and I don't have a pat solution for it. All I can do is endeavor to avoid such biases myself. I think I do a good job at that, but one of the problems with biases is that they do become cognitively pervasive and it's very hard to observe our own biases objectively.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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January 6, 2010 at 7:20 am
I am another "lady programmer" who works for a state agency. There are lots of techie women here both in application development and database administration. I have never really felt a gender bias here so I guess I'm lucky.
I think one reason that the percentage of women in IT has declined is because IT has become riskier business what with outsourcing, economic downturn, and all. Women tend to look for security, and men tend to be more risk taking. Yes, a generalization and not always true, but I think the tendency is there. I seriously considered bailing from IT when all this outsourcing started happening, but here I still sit.:-D
January 6, 2010 at 7:29 am
OK I probably will offend someone here but with that said I have seen many a lady who worked as a programmer. However what is a programmer, in terms of where I work that title more or less means nothing as there are many types of inputs for programming. It is more of a laymans term to explain away what you do to those who don't know. So I question first and foremost how they came to there conclusion. Used to be data entry personnel were considered programmers as they programmed in the input. Now the shift is such that there are multiple jobs from system artchitech to application developer and even to project manager which were born out of the need to distinguish job specifications. And I have seen more ladiess on the project management side and data modeling side than men. So are these all lumped together or was this a generic poll for those who write the code itself. If so was it broken down into types of coding? Did they factor in career choices?
Consider this, in our society it is still considered the mans role to be the bread winner for the family. If a man stays home while his wife works he is frowned upon. But I know a few guys whom are stay at home dads. Can we have a poll of stay at home parents (with kids) to see how that compares. Many ladies I have met have made the decission to stay home once there child was born instead of returning to work. This of course should be IMO removed from the potential pool as it is a life decission. I also have found that once they have been at home for several years there skills are now out of pratice and they find it difficult to return to where they were right away. So I cannot stand polls that do not weigh in life choices and consequences. Just like race, regligion, sexual orentation, etc., I feel woman should be treated equally and fairly, but you cannot assume cut and dry that if must be an equal split. American society has gotten so hung up on the concept of fairness, I feel, that they have actually created a less fair society. Instead of on merit many times it is on numbers. This is totally wrong and will continue to degrade our societ, IMO, as it leads to resentments not born of prejudices but of just plain resentment for any other person using the system to get ahead without the need to show their actual capability.
And you will notice I do not distinguish programmer from lady programmer. IMO you either are a programmer or not and by adding the distinction I feel it detracts from ones capabilities. These polls point out trends on one point of fact (with large variances for error as we in the data reporting world know), but they are not definitive as they cannot account for every fact that leads to this particular trend. Is it fair to say there is a problem becuase only 20% of the workforce is female, if say 80% of women are stay at home moms by choice (and this is an example not a fact). If that happened to be the case then if there was 85 men and 85 women in the study, or was this a study in a particular geographical region (what if the next geographic region over was 90% women) or business. Did they account for every single person working as a programmer in the entire world. Samples have large room for error in many cases.
Dang it, my train fell of the track. Hopefully that all makes sense.
January 6, 2010 at 7:30 am
Honestly its time to stop, I understand we (women) have issues getting into the IT field in general but I think its time to move on and show that I am the developer for the job. I am very new to the IT world but decided about half way into my undergraduate that DBA is what I wanted to be! I am getting ready to start my graduate degree and can't wait for the challenge. To be perfetly honest I think the gender barrier is why I choose it, just to prove I am just as good!
January 6, 2010 at 7:44 am
Except for some locker room behavior at a few clients, I've not noticed any serious discrimination in my 20 years in the business.
The worst case was a guy who obviously just didn't like being told his ideas were moronic. I think he would have had problems with anyone smarter than he was, not just women.
I'm not a 'lady programmer', I'm a DBA who sometimes hacks her way around in .net, cobol, c++, regex or whatever is needed to get the job done.
*Lady programmer*, sounds like *lady driver*, the term is insulting and needs to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Gender has little to do with doing the job. Either you can, or you can't. Seems simple to me.
January 6, 2010 at 7:46 am
Women programmers, in my experience, have as a group been generally superior to men as a group. My IT experience ranges continuously since 1965 from punch card fed mainframes up thru the current time with client/server, programming mainly with COBOL, some Assembler, RPG, and now SQL Server development. Most of this experience has been in small team environments in staffs of 100 or so for organizations from banks, hospitalization, and currently local government, so got to observe many different people over that time. I have mostly worked for women team leaders who, with very few exceptions, were very capable technically and managerially. In any group of people, there are those that will perform better than the average given equal opportunities. My experience has been that the women paid more attention to the job and less on extracurricular activities in the workplace. There generally were more very capable women than men overall. Most of our real techies (the Assembler programmers) were women and they were real people with real lives - not geeks. In fact, I don't know if I have ever met a geek, let alone worked with one. They would not have thrived in our business IT environment, where most people function as Programmer/Analysts with all that entails. We did and do all aspects of a project. I have never worked anywhere that had specialists in any significant way other than networking.
Men have always had it easy in most occupations while women have had to struggle to get what men got without thinking. If most men had to put up with what women do, you would really hear some crying. I would probably be right there with them. It has to be rough having to put up with some of the actions mentioned in some of the comments on this forum.
January 6, 2010 at 7:58 am
I'm a development manager, and last year I lost two senior programmers who happened to be women. In each case, it was the perceived need for the woman to give up her career to attend the demands of family (read: husband) and child-rearing. An astoundingly 1950's notion, to me.
When I started in IT back in early 1980's my mentors in VM/CMS were mostly women; the only obvious gender gap then was that more of the "operators" were men, because their job involved heavy lifting (ah, mainframes, and especially mainframe printers.)
Someplace along the line, though, and I saw this in the 1990s and after 2001, the layoff hammer seemed to come down heavier on the female part of the team. Funny that.
There is still plenty of subtle sexism (and according to my female co-workers, some not-so-subtle) in the corporate world. It's everyone's duty to fight it.
Question for managers: do you make an effort to evaluate a resume before reading the name and making a conclusion about gender?
January 6, 2010 at 8:01 am
Gender wars again? (over 400 posts along these lines in a photography forum, another geeky field).
For the record, I'm a 53-year-old DBA, working in the field since the 1970s. My majority of my group (DBAs) is female. The application developers are mostly male (16 of 20); R&D is totally male. It ticks me off that they threw the DBAs out of R&D so they could get their group all male again. Maybe that's just my interpretation?
In other jobs IT was split evenly. The field was healthcare, not as well-paying as another industry in the area, Defense, which has mostly male programming staffs working under contract from the US government. If I wanted better pay, I'd apply there, but who wants to work in an industry that I think of as 'boys with their toys' - all that military stuff? Healthcare as an industry suits me better, lower paying as it is. (I don't work in healthcare currently - I found a middle-ground).
My generation of programmers was created in the 1970s, when they took anyone with aptitude and trained them in the field. Gender was irrelevant, undergraduate degree (necessary) was not important, just a willingness to learn. The work suited me, leading to a graduate degree in the subject. At various times I've been routed into the 'softer' side of IT, once into management, and another time into systems analysis. I would then switch jobs to get back into the techie side of things, where I remain today.
The world is different today. The majority of college students are female today (some say 60%) so that's a huge pool of talent that we need to tap into - not for any particularly 'female' attributes, just from numbers alone. However, they seem to be self-selecting OUT of IT. Why?
Actually, we're seeing a fewer home-grown programmers nowadays. With fewer men in college we have a smaller pool to draw from. My nephew is the kid I know of in his grade (12th) going into the field. More and more I see our applicant pool coming from India and Taiwan (evenly split, gender-wise, I will note).
So the real question is - why aren't kids (either gender) picking IT in college?
Once we know that, we can look at the question of women in IT.
January 6, 2010 at 8:05 am
Manic Star (1/6/2010)
Except for some locker room behavior at a few clients, I've not noticed any serious discrimination in my 20 years in the business.
Same here. Worst I've had is people assuming I'm the HR rep (in an interview) or a project manager (in a meeting) or people assuming that I'm the token chair-warmer employed to satisfy the equality act. That usually doesn't take long to resolve.
There was the amusing 'mistake' at a free training event several years ago. All they had was my initials and surname. When I registered, my badge read "Mr G Shaw".... Talk about assumptions. After I pointed out that the badge was actually for me, not a (non-existent) husband, the gentleman at registration fixed it with a permanent marker.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
January 6, 2010 at 8:08 am
Just as a point of speculation, we might ask why there are so many more young boys than young girls getting lost in the world of video games...
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