Women are fleeing from the digital sector, reckons UK.gov report Fewer women are working in the digital sector than a decade ago, according to a report by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills quango. Currently just one quarter of employees are women in digital businesses such as software development, visual effects and computer games - down from one-third in 2002 - according to the …
You beat me to it - this was my first reaction to the article and I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought it. It's a field where the balance is likely to always be off the magical 50-50 that our glorious overlords require but the environment has been improving quite a lot over the years and for a while looked like it might have been 'settling' to an almost stable figure.
Dear original AC,
You say " fear-mongering idiot self-declared "feminists" who yell constantly about the "boys club" and call everything a misogynist patriarchal conspiracy". Has this happened to you? Do you know of women who call themselves feminists? (BTW, why the quotation marks around the word in your text?) Have you sat in an IT department feeling hostile to all women because some woman accused you all of being in a conspiracy? Have you ever been troubled by real doubt and insecurity caused by accusations?
Kinda thinking not.
There are feminists and then there are "feminists". The former are like my mother, who ran a large department in a major city council for a decade, or my wife, who would rather go homeless than accept a handout based on her gender. They work for their equality. They fight for their place.
The later are whining little children who want everything on a plate and screech about the patriarchy whenever they don't get their way.
There seems to be some very bitter forum feminists in EU and UK, that will hijack any thread regardless what its about and pick anything for a hook to roll out their special purpose heavy artillery.
I said, look, I have no beef with you, but make your own thread, I'm trying to talk about the ill effects of TV soap operas on small children here.
There's no automatism with human beings that makes a woman or a man more or less dominant, except for societies brainwashing of children. Some (of either gender) are strong regardless of that and other's are not. You can't force every woman into one thing or the other. Ok, so there's some people that try, but it never worked in the first place, though the church was pretty effective with their nasty methods of just burning people at the stake.
So I can understand if some women get bitter about it, but there's no universal solution or fix, it can only be individual. Ideologies are always at odds with reality.
And we all know what's happening to that charter of liberty right now, hard won by our ancestors, its getting shredded in the war of the ultra rich against everyone else.
Most IT jobs are pretty shit. IT is thankless, the pay is bad, the stress is intense, the demands to work 24/7 are incessant...the list goes on.
Every now and again some wag feels they need to post about how great their specific job is, but they are the exception that proves the rule. The fact that having a job that only demands you work the number of hours specified in your local labour legislation is something nerds use to measure the size of their penis is itself proof that IT jobs, in general, are ass.
Every time someone whines about how there are no women in IT, I want to slap them with a salmon and yell "that's because they're smarter than us, you blithering idiot!"
If you want women in IT, make IT jobs less shit.
"But if you do not have them at some point while you're still young, you are missing on a very important part of life."
No, I'm not. I have two cats, a bearded dragon, several hundred fish, a long tailed grass lizard and a Mediterranean house gecko. I am full up on other organisms that believe they are the emperor of the universe and that I am their subject, thanks.
I understand that it's a universal thing amongst parents that they need to delude themselves into believing that child rearing is somehow "special" and 'rewarding" and other such things. I don't buy it for a second.
I get all the "special" and "rewarding" I need when I have a kitty jump up on the couch beside me, flop over and purr like a goddamned lawnmower for an hour while I rub his belly. Or when the beardie climbs up bed and park herself directly on my chest and promptly passes out.
As hard as it is for breeders to understand, there is no part of me that desires children. There is no part of my life that is void without them, there is no space in my desires or happiness that they need to fill.
The next generation should be grateful that I am not passing on my genes. They are not good genes. Humanity gets a little bit less awful, and I live a contented life. I think this "not spawning" thing has it's merits.
Mr Pott, I salute you. I, too, tire of parents sure that I am missing out on one of life's greatest privileges, or that I have an emotional or genetic need that, while it remains unfulfilled, is destined to make my life feel like a hollow mockery. I personally think they either lack imagination (that a satisfying life can be lived in other ways) or resent us for not bending our necks to the yoke of parenthood.
"Children are yours. You don't get anything out of shitty IT jobs other than a smaller than it should paycheck."
Uh...no. Children are human beings that are born with a full suite of inalienable rights. They are not property. They belong to themselves and noone else.
Your paycheque should be paying your mortgage, car and other material goods. You get to keep those. Those material goods are yours.
You spend a lot of time fixing up the s**t left behind by other people, dealing with people who feel they're more important than anyone else, dealing with feelings of entitlement, dealing with people who are willfully ignorant and unable to learn.
It's like being a carer in a teenager's foster home sometimes.
A woman who's already a mother might not want a job that's like being at home.
"Most IT jobs are pretty shit. IT is thankless, the pay is bad, the stress is intense, the demands to work 24/7 are incessant...the list goes on."
While I can believe you have and probably had these experiences in IT it does make me grateful for the jobs I have done. I love the work I do and I honestly enjoy IT. In fact the only soul destroying job of absolute hell was working retail during university and that was mostly due to the staff.
Oh Trevor!
I surely can't be the only person in IT who loves his or her job. 35 years now, man and old man and I wouldn't swap any of it, even with the loony business people and the 'super users' who just want me to 'add another zero. How hard can THAT be?'
From wheelie chair volley ball and networked X Wing vs Tie Fighter all the way down to occasionally getting some actual work done I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
Or maybe I just need to get out more. Or less. One or the other.
"I surely can't be the only person in IT who loves his or her job. "
Oddly enough, if you'd actually read my comment you would have noticed that I had already predicted that response and discussed it. From my previous comment:
"Every now and again some wag feels they need to post about how great their specific job is, but they are the exception that proves the rule. The fact that having a job that only demands you work the number of hours specified in your local labour legislation is something nerds use to measure the size of their penis is itself proof that IT jobs, in general, are ass."
Stop being predictable!
That's been my thought. Perhaps women are smarter than us men in realizing what a dead-end the IT field has become. Certainly no future in it unless you're working in some dirt-floor shack in some 3rd world country. In that case you're probably running the world's data centers (presuming you can keep the dirt and cow-poop out of the servers).
Just go and visit an IT company somewhere East of the Berlin/Prague line.
The difference is that they are paid up to 5x (relative to the country average salaries) and respectively 2x+ (expressed in effective buying power) more than in the UK.
On top of that in the upper tier for MVPs you can see benefit packages with up to 2 years (yes two years) paid maternity leave. Try getting two years paid maternity leave from a UK employer. Go on, try that. I am going to buy the popcorn.
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Could it be that this isn't actually a problem?
I mean, if there are lines out the door of recruiting offices around the world where capable women are being rejected in favour of less capable men, then yes - that's clearly a serious problem - but we have been hiring quite a bit over the last couple of years and so far out of about 100 people who've applied, only 5 have been women.
I know it's not a popular viewpoint and everything, but perhaps women - on average - just don't find our industry appealing? I wouldn't be very surprised. I mean even I don't find our industry appealing, and if I'd had a better idea what I was getting into earlier on, I probably would have quit whilst there was still time and retrained as something else.
I mean, let me paint you a picture here, and lets see if it resonates with any of you:
I spend most of my time in isolation in a dark, noisy, overly hot office, on my own, staring into the abyss of a cheap TFT which gives me headaches if I forget to take my half hourly breaks. I rarely see the other staff I work with, although it feels more like "for" because when I do see them it's only ever because something is broken - in which case I'm already working on it and I want them to go away - or because they have somehow managed to raise ignorance about IT to a fine art, and brandish it about like a shield preventing them from having to take any responsibility for "losing" important emails or documents about once a week.
Neither way are they making my working life better by turning up in my office and talking to me. I don't _like_ interacting with my co-workers. But then I don't like interacting with people much in general. Being an irritable anti-social bastard isn't a uniquely male trait I know, but you gotta admit you meet more of them than women who feel the same.
Oh, and then there's this:
http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Seriously, is there anyone here who _doesn't_ feel that's what it's like? With the camel. Anyone? We're not crazy. We're being _driven_ crazy.
If women are actively avoiding IT, perhaps the problem isn't the way IT treats women. Perhaps it's the way it treats _everyone_ and most women are just either smart enough not to put themselves through this, or not prepared to put up with it in exchange for a life where you don't have to wear a suit or talk to people much.
...that the high male participation in IT is somehow a structural problem deserving of government attention and much hand wringing by liberals and feminists alike, but the high and rising female participation in medicine, nursing, veterinary work, law, public relations, marketing is no problem at all.
The logical solution Guardian readers would probably approve of is 50:50 legal quotas, but that needs to be backed up by allocation of roles, because it doesn't follow that all those women choosing law or medicine.
So, not wishing to generalise the feminist agenda at all: Hairy, unwashed, sexist, white males of IT, better sign yourself up to a basic social skills course, because in future you might find that you've got to give up the comfortable binary world of IT and become a doctor, teacher or a vet.
Ledswinger, there is a lot of handwringing when boys do less well than girls in school, and governments look into how to right that wrong. Although I have never understood why it was a bad thing. Heaven knows, the boys don't seem to suffer when they get to the job market.
I think chaps in IT, who have up till now works for a boys' club, are able to indulge themselves in a way that chaps in, say, Finance or Legal or Marketing cannot. I suspect that change will happen, eventually, because simple good manners should not be beyond anyone, especially the bright minds (and I am not being snarky) within IT.
The only possible solution is that all women are forced to work in IT. No woman should be permitted to choose any other career and it is irrelevant whether or not they actually like IT or have any desire to learn the skills or be interested in the concepts. Mandatory. All women. Until this disgusting situation is dealt with.
Also darts. Women are horrendously under-represented in professional top tier darts and therefore all women will now be forced, by law, to play darts at least five times a week or face a custodial sentence in a special darts training centre.
Jeff Atwood talked about about this a while back: http://blog.codinghorror.com/software-developers-and-aspergers-syndrome/ ( with interesting follow-up pertinent to the original story here: http://blog.codinghorror.com/what-can-men-do/ )
The ratio of autism diagnosis is 4:1 in favour of males, but the incidence of female autism spectrum problems is higher than most people realise because women tend to manifest symptoms a little differently - possibly as a result of cultural conditioning - and they can often go without being diagnosed.
He said: "Initiatives like TechFuture Girls that encourage young women to consider a career in this dynamic sector will play an important role in addressing this issue.”
Why? Is there any virtue to having a 50-50 gender split in the IT, or any other, sector?
I don't see any urgency to get men into fields which are dominated by women, and I'm ok with that too, because I don't see what's wrong with accepting that some fields appeal more to some population groups than others.
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