Why women won't apply for IT jobs
Women won't apply for IT jobs unless they are certain they meet every single criterion for the gig, according to John Ridge, Executive Director of the Australian Computer Society Foundation Trust Fund (ACSF). Ridge and the ACSF run a national Work Integrated Learning scholarship scheme for IT workers in Australia and have, over …
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Re: I must of missed
"There is certainly something. The further East you go, (India, Eastern Europe,) the more sex ratios balance out. In India, programmers are around 50:50 ..."
Yes. And though I love all the Indians I know, (this last statement wasn't a troll,) we can see just how effective that policy is, by the absolute plethora of cutting edge software the Indian subcontinent has invented. I'm just looking at my Microsoft kit here, my wife's Apple kit, and so on, and thank god that if it were not for Asian female IT staff, we white anglo saxon men would have invented nothing.
Re: I must of missed
Sorry - didn't really make my point clear. It wasn't the women that were the problem - it was the policy.
So the government will decide we need more women in IT. Universities will be "incentivized" to get more women through it's programs. The only incentive universities have is entrance requirements and pass marks, so these will be adjusted to get 50% of women passing.
Similarly the govt can't do anything to make private companies hire women, but it can insist that govt IT jobs or govt IT contracts are 50% women.
The result of this is unlikely to be a rise in the status of women in IT !
Re: I must of missed
"I know few women working in IT and they are, as a rule, better than their male counterparts"
This is funny, I know loads of women in IT. Most of them do side jobs, and all the clever ones, both of them I've dated. They're outnumbered at least a hundred to one by the men of equal or better ability.
This is why I back them to the hilt, when men slag them off for being useless. They are mostly not as good as the men on average, but this is no reason to return to victorian britain, where all single women have to work in prostitution. I'd much rather the IT industry employed large numbers of reasonably useless women, than have them on the dole.
My policy is open. People who know me, know I think this, and act like this. Despite most of the men openly disagreeing with my view on useless people, I nevertheless find myself having to defend women's positions in jobs, by the people who describe themselves as pro-diversity. It is the pro-diversity crowd who are usually political and backstabbing knife merchants.
I'm unashamedly sexist. I think women aren't as good as men at virtually anything, but we should look after them because of it. So sue me.
Re: I must of missed
In Pakistan, being an engineer is well respected and on par with being a Doctor.
It's nothing like that in the US.
The US has a quite anti-intellectual culture and we have the elevation of athletes and things like "Revenge of the Nerds". It's little wonder that only dedicated geeks enter ANY sort of engineering or tech field. It doesn't help that most Engineering programs don't try to retain people but try to actively discourage them.
A 6th generation female engineer from the eastern bloc might be successfully put off by the entry level CIS course.
Re: I must of missed @PXG
@Chris W yes and yes and in my spare time I torment trolls, grammer and spelling nazi's, if it is any comfort there, thier, they're
Re: I must of missed
Dear AC, I had no idea you cared or indeed it was a job application. I will however not be using that brand of coffee again.
Re: I must of missed
@ISYS Duely noted and thank you for constructive feedback. Always have time for that unlike the usualy approach's most take to what they don't like. Kudos
Re: I must of missed
Yes, I agree. They make much better coffee than most men....
Re:PassiveSmoking
THANK YOU!
I was getting hung up on that trying to figure out what the post had to do with anything. Guess I really could use a pint.
Re: I must of missed
"It's spelt "males". Mails is that papery stuff that comes through the door (probably with the dole cheque in it, in your case)."
Your right about the misspelling upon my part, sorry I'm not perfect as to the assumtion as to what mails I do recieve, well fuck you you insulting cunt if I may be as bold to spell out upon this matter of dole cheques you speak of.
Re: I must of missed
The US has a quite anti-intellectual culture and we have the elevation of athletes and things like "Revenge of the Nerds". It's little wonder that only dedicated geeks enter ANY sort of engineering or tech field. It doesn't help that most Engineering programs don't try to retain people but try to actively discourage them.
The seemingly anti-intellectual culture in the U.S. is something that I actually think about quite often, especially since it didn't always seem to be that way. I almost wonder if the resentment held towards science and technology by many Americans today has to do with our society's failure to reach the lofty goals that we had set for ourselves back in the 1960's. For example, in 1967, Time magazine declared the entire generation of people that were "twenty-five and under" their "Person of the Year," and wrote the following about them:
“He is the man who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war.”
Let's see how much of that we have accomplished since then:
Land on the Moon: Yes! However we haven't had a manned spaceflight to the moon since 1972. Bummer.
Cure Cancer: We have much better treatments for cancer than we did in the 1960's, with many of them extremely successful, but by saying "cure" in the article I think that Time was looking for something much better than that, such as a fool-proof prevention of all cancers. Unfortunately, we have not found anything close to that yet.
Cure the common cold: No
Lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities: No
Enrich the underdeveloped world: We could have done a whole lot more than we did
Write finis to poverty and war: Not even close
I mean think about it-- in the 1960's everyone was talking about how wonderful the "Space Age" was going to be, with mile-high cities made of gleaming steel and glass, jetpacks that you could fly yourself to work with, supersonic airliners that could fly us across the Atlantic in less than 3-hours, pills that would allow you to not have to sleep, doubling your productivity, a supply of nuclear power that would be so inexpensive that electricity would become a basic human right, robot servants, giant laboratories were scientists could permanently live on the bottom of the ocean, or in orbit, or on the moon... I mean people really believed that we could achieve that sort of stuff back then, and that science would eventually make almost anything possible.
It was that hope that inspired young people to join the scientific and technical fields during those days. Back then everyone wanted to be an Astronaut, a rocket scientist, a biologist working on cracking interspecies communication with dolphins, or a researcher looking for the next disease-eradicating miracle pill. Everyone wanted to be the next "Johnny Quest," and use super-science to save the world. But when it turned out that achieving those lofty goals wouldn't be so easy, and that to reach them it would take more hard work, funding, and time than anyone had ever imagined. I think that somewhere along the lines as a culture everyone started to become disillusioned. People began to stop viewing science as our great savior and the scientists as the great heroes who were going to bring those technological miracles into being. Pretty soon people stopped doing things for the good of mankind and started doing things only based on how much money they could make doing it. Businessmen and politicians starting looking for short-term research projects that could lead directly to a quick financial return, often neglecting the fact that sometimes scientific research done for research's sake can eventually lead indirectly towards greater more important discoveries. Think for example how NASA's support for the then fledgling semiconductor industry in the 1960's helped indirectly lead to the "Information Age" of the 1990's. Could solid-state computers have evolved to where they are now without the Apollo program's help? Sure, but it would have taken a lot longer if the research and funding required only became available through market forces.
Nowadays there is no need to want to be an Astronaut anymore because there is no manned space program. The pharmaceutical industry, whether fairly or not, is now viewed by most people as valuing their financial bottom line more highly than trying to rid humanity of plagues and disease. Our great supersonic airliners ceased their operations in 1983 (the Tu-144) and 2003 (the Concorde), respectively. Our great advances in Information Technology are now being used against us by corporations to profile every detail of our lives and deliver targeted advertising to us. And worse of all, we actually live in a world where we have to tell our children how we used to be able to send people to the moon and how we used to have airliners that traveled faster than sound. And those few young people out there who still want to get a degree in a scientific or technical field often find that the great research and achievements that their universities are responsible for are overshadowed by how good their varsity football and basketball teams are. Even when these students graduate their futures aren't certain-- with the short-term "how will this boost our next fiscal quarter results" kind of thinking that corporations and shareholders have today, many companies have moved much of their R&D to labs overseas where PhD's can be hired for cheaper, leaving the brilliant young technical minds here to get a job where they are treated like cattle in a cubicle farm at best, or left only being able to get a job at Wal*Mart or McDonalds (or no job at all) at worst. And all the while our politicians wonder why our students' math and science scores are slipping and people care more about becoming "famous for being famous" than actually achieving something that has any social worth.
To sum up my thoughts, I think that this is in many ways a top-down problem. I believe that more of our youth (including young women) would get excited about science and technology if there was something huge going on to get excited about. The U.S. Space program inspired a massive increased interest across all of the sciences during the 1960's-- there must be something along those lines, or perhaps several things, that either government or private enterprise could use to inspire the youth of today in much the same way. I think that if young people are given a compelling reason to "shoot for the stars" in math and science that they will put in the extra effort to do so on their own, and those drooping math and science scores would fix themselves.
Re: I must of missed
"Your right about the misspelling upon my part, sorry I'm not perfect as to the assumtion as to what mails I do recieve, well fuck you you insulting cunt if I may be as bold to spell out upon this matter of dole cheques you speak of."
I find that a pithy put down works so much better when it itself is not littered with 4th grade spelling and grammar errors.
You should try it some time.
Interesting
I'm a male and I won't apply if I don't meet all the listed criteria. I don't understand why have a list of requirements if you then accept applicants that only meet half of them. Failing to get any applicants that do meet them, you're left with people who think half is good enough.
Alien because I must be one.
Re: Interesting
I think it's mainly because the people writing the requirements are non-technical people who have no idea what they're asking for. They put every conceivable qualification that they can think of down expecting god himself to apply (as he's the only one who could possibly meet the requirements) but after months of silence or unsuitable people they just settle for someone who can just do the job.
Re: Interesting
Indeed. Ads for general practitioners don't usually require car maintenance skills, but people looking for IT people seem prepared to put together any kind of grab bag, and the agencies encourage it because then they can talk up the wage rates. The requirements, too, often have no concept of level. They don't distinguish between a highly skilled data analyst who can knock up a basic dashboard, and a web designer who can just about connect to a back end database: in both cases they will ask for the same skills. I think the truth is that men tend to know this and account for it, while women don't have the same background knowledge and take things literally.
Re: Interesting
The adverts are very commonly put together by recruiters.
Many of them use them to filter down CVs based on technologies and what not mentioned, rather than trying to understand the content of it properly. It just leads to lying in CVs, or just listing things to get past the recruiter keyword filters, which is annoying.
On my own CV I've actually gone as far as to put a table at the start just full of technologies, languages and buzzwords for the recruiter to read. They don't tend to read the rest of the CV (I've checked).
Since I put that in I've invariably been given an interview, as its the choice of the recruiter in most places these days.
It annoys me that we all have to play this weird, sick game though.
Re: Interesting
As a bloke the laundry list of expected skills puts me off applying for plenty of jobs. Having attended plenty of interviews where my skills [i]were[/i] a perfect match yet the technical bod in the interview has a completely different skill set in mind resulting in me wondering just what they hell I have applied for, makes me increasingly reluctant to waste my time attending interviews when I really don't need to (I have a job but like to keep an eye on other opportunities).
Re: Interesting
I've done both - applied to some jobs where I've met all the criteria, and applied to some where I didn't. In cases where I got the job, I ended utterly bored out whenever I seemed "the perfect fit", but if there was an element of the unknown in it, I enjoyed and stayed in the job for many years.
Can only speak for myself there, but I guess the boost from someone else saying "we believe you can do it" is better for my motivation and willingness-to-strive-for-it than the intrinsic "I believe I can do it" thing. Whether this externally/internally-induced motivation thing is gender-biased I don't know, though.
It's always seemed like an advantage for my wife........
I find companies may use some kind of affirmative selection criteria (or it may just be sour grapes)
My wife and I have worked in PC support, general electronics and telecommunications and now she is working in Medical equipment and there have been times we went for the same job and she got it over me (There's those sour grapes I was speaking of!)
Seriously, she has applied for (and got) some jobs where I looked at the requirements and thought "I won't even get a reply to my application"
I personally think it's like any area of life, if a person is not particularly interested in a field of work then they are highly unlikely to enter that field.
"IT" is seen as the last domain of the geeky outcast (wrongly of course, I mean just check out some of the well written, grammatically correct, reasoned debates that regularly take place in these forums to see that most IT professionals are well rounded, wholesome, well educated people)
Anon, because the wife might see this :-)
Re: It's always seemed like an advantage for my wife........
Hell, both your wife and you work in IT!
That must make for some scintillating conversation when you get home in the evenings?
Re: It's always seemed like an advantage for my wife........
What really annoys me is when someone thinks I got a job because of some sort of affirmative action program rather than on my abilities.
My husband and I both work in IT. Occasionally I have applied for jobs where my husband hasn't even bothered to apply because the list of requirements put him off. On other occasions, we actually have applied for the same job and I got it over him. Basically, I am better qualified, but I know that he secretly thinks I got the jobs because I am a woman and have some sort of advantage, rather than having to work twice as hard to for the same respect in the IT field.
Anon, because my husband occasionally reads El Reg. ;)
Re: It's always seemed like an advantage for my wife........
I was interviewing for an IT post.
A husband and wife who both work in IT both applied for a job.
The husband came across as a geeky outcast but the wife was particularly interested in working in Medical equipment so got the job.
Anon, because they both occasionally read El Reg. ;)
Re: It's always seemed like an advantage for my wife........
I attend a lot of swinging parties and there was this couple once who both worked in IT...
Re: It's always seemed like an advantage for my wife........
Best chain I've read in weeks! Thanks, 'Mr' and 'Mrs'...
The answer is in the article
So in Oz, few women work in IT and the director of the ACSF reckons it's because they don't perfectly match the wish-list in the job ad.
However, the article then goes on to contradict this opinion by citing the "pitifully low enrolment rates" into australian IT courses and then the "horrifying drop-out rates for women in IT courses".
So it seems that while the hardy few who do apply and get through the course may be reluctant to apply for less than perfect jobs, the biggest failing is in getting sufficient numbers of women IT graduates, in the first place.
Maybe the guy should stop blaming the few women who "talk themselves out of applying for jobs” and instead fix whatever is broken in the education system that's an almost complete failure at attracting women into the relevant university courses and retaining their enthusiasm through those courses.
Weird
My office is very guy-heavy, and the only woman who got a technical job in the last few years - who was also the only one to apply - wasn't actually much cop at it (she once asked me the difference between megabytes and gigabytes, if any). If she thought she hit every criterion for the job then she was massively fooling herself.
This is in the UK, where we've just taken on four graduates. I interviewed almost all of the applicants, and they were all male. I hate the fact that the office is almost all guys, but what can we do if women barely ever apply (the lady described in the first paragraph had a weak CV, but got an interview on the strength of being female and the guys wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt)?
Re: Weird
Megabytes and Gigabytes? Hell, our Head of IT ops doesn't really know that one!!
He is a he BTW :)
Re: Weird
> My office is very guy-heavy
Well my office has quite a few heavy guys. As a physically fit male, it makes me feel very uncomfortable to not have moobs to match my colleagues.
well
I'm gonna get chastised for this I'm sure.
Firstly on the job advert front. I've always taken the opinion that nobody can fulfil all those criteria, they just want a portion of them. I mean honestly, who in their right mind advertises for a junior software engineer, graduate, who had 5 years work experience and expert knowledge of C++, C, C# and XML.
Of that subset I had 2 years C#, 3 years C++... That was it, I applied and I got the job (i'm still not sure how) and voila I work in IT.
The lack of women I'll agree on, but honestly, when I came out of school there weren't any girls interested in IT. Lots of girls I knew of spoke to went into social studies, psychiatry, media, fashion, hairdressing.. (most went fashion hairdressing). We had one girl in our class and she failed I believe (first lesson, she didn't even know how to create a new folder on the desktop)
So I'm honestly not surprised that there aren't as many women in IT positions. But the few women who do join the proffesion I'd say are far superior to the men working, not because of some inate talent women have, but because they probably studied much harder and actually put the effort in to prove they can do it.
I will say however I HATE with a passion affirmative action or whatever its called, honestly if I had to hire employees, I'd ask them to send in CVs with names and any gender related bits blotted out, then I'd work through the list chucking out any who don't meet the requirements, and I'd found out their gender during the live interview. Can't be accused of discrimination that way.
Re: well
I don't know if it's the place you live or just the girls you know / spoke to, but I know lots of girls who have gone into business, law, international politics, medicine, natural sciences and engineering. But none have gone into IT.
Really, it goes way down to the young age where you buy a barbie for your daughter and legos for your son.
Re: well
Really, it goes way down to the young age where you buy a barbie for your daughter and legos for your son.
Watch this, The Gender Equality Paradox in Norway http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2xrnyH2wQ
That being said my daughter got lego from her mom :). Researches claim such preferences are built-in in humans.
Re: well
The local hairdresser drives a nearly new BMW M3. I (with my degrees, certs, NVQs, 6 years of experience etc etc) ride a push bike to work.
Who is the fool???
Re: well
We'd need to see income and loan statements to judge that, wouldn't we? The hairdresser could be a bad week ahead of the repo man.
Or actually, maybe we don't need to. I am the fool. After about the 10th posting on women in IT at El Reg and a few more at Hacker News, I could write the specimen entries for all points of view, and throw in the typos for the ones that need them. Yet here I am.
Re: well
or more likely a lot of income is undeclared as it is cash in hand so you could be earning the same just with less stopages
Re: well
"Researches claim such preferences are built-in in humans."
Speaking up as an IT person who keeps an eye on psychological research due to a big interest in human/computer interaction...
Researchers used to claim that, but on closer inspection they (and other aspects of brain development) turn out to be more highly influenced by culture than anyone previously thought. And unfortunately, it's not just what toys the parents get; it comes from every direction. It's a huge topic but you can start by reading up on the basics of situational psychology.
Re: well @Rocket_Rabbit
I think you'll find the _owner_ of the local hairdressing boutique drives that flash car. Their oh-so-stylish minions are likely paid significantly less.
(I speak as a bald man who trims his own hair on a No 0 setting, who was shocked and stunned when I found out how much Mrs Borked paid for a trim... )
Re: well
So the hairdresser is shagging a man with a good job. That has always been a popular career path for women...
Re: well
Oh how I wish I could honestly downvote you Richto.
Re: well
@stanimir: The "The Gender Equality Paradox in Norway" documentary film that you linked to was very interesting and enlightening. Thank you for posting the link.
Interesting...
...to see that (on my system at least) the original article has a great big advert within the main text for a women's clothing website ; lots of pretty dresses on display. Ahhh, how sweet!
Misogynism got anything to do with this hiring crisis, perhaps? ;-)
As for the job spec not really matching the real world requirements - maybe if we finally allowed the Hiring Managers to do their own jobs and dumped Human Remains departments out of the equation?
For me, Personnel (I refuse to call them HR, the jumped-up tw4ts) should only get involved once the experts concerned have made the decision to hire someone. Too often they seem to think the company works for them, rather than vice versa. Put 'em back in their place.
Time for action
Plainly schools, universities need to change their approach to attract more women to take IT courses. The IT work environment needs changing to make it more attractive to women.
Eventually, there will be more women in IT than there are men. At that point we can begin to question what it is about men that makes them unsuited to IT, and how we can change men to make them better suited.
Re: Time for action
They're already trying to get women into IT, haven't you seen all the pink laptops / netbooks coming out? What more could a girl want?
“Industry wants women,”
It does indeed, this means that women have superb opportunities in the industry.
All women have to do is want them (which often they just don't, hence low enrolment
and high drop out rates at uni), so quit the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It's as dumb as going on about the shortage of male nail technicians.
As an aside to this, I notice there's a tendency for the feminists to expect instant change to things.
Even if the shortage of women getting qualified was "fixed" overnight, they still have to complete 4
years of uni and a work experience year to be a serious candidate for anything, then there's at least
3 or 4 years before they'd be aiming at the upper salary range to balance pay differentials.
So it takes a decade to turn this ship assuming we want to turn it anyway.
If you look at the same claims about upper management (typically filled with blokes in their 50's) they
started work 30 years ago, it will take 30 years for women to be equivalently qualified even if all the
chauvinistic morons were removed overnight.
job applications need as much experiance as the role itself
Basically any job advert is a company trying to get as much as possible for as little as possible.
The contractors out there understand that, and laugh.
The influx of ex-full timers have not yet learnt this, they will. Then they too will laugh in the face of such gems as "6 years Windows 2008 experiance required".
Once people understand the game being played they start to understand that these adverts are rubbish.
The company requires someone to look after some servers, they do NOT need someone cabable of building those servers from the raw materials and writing the OS to put on them while laying the cable over the pond and putting the routers in while blindfolded and under hostile fire, they are also NOT going to get anyone who fills all the "tick boxes" for 200 quid a day.
If someone does fill all the criteria and is willing to work for that after spending years getting the knowledge, then that person is probably an ex-con or on the register and so has to work for pea-nuts.
Oh the irony...
...given that women are heavily involved in writing these adverts...
Paris, because that's the closest I can find to an icon for misogyny.
Re: "Paris, because that's the closest I can find to an icon for misogyny."
Umm, fairly sure that the use of Paris is actually ironic rather than misogynist. If you need an icon in the current age see attached - which is basically your average lunch time office drinker nowadays - with views and opinions which turn even me pale. (I kinda of miss the 70's though - so like a long lunch).
Verity Stob
Perhaps Reg Mangers (sic) could suggest that she writes an article on this topic?
Has anyone ever stopped to consider that maybe not as many women are interested in IT jobs as men?
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