Girl Geek Dinner lady: The IT Crowd is putting schoolgirls off tech Sexism in The IT Crowd and other TV shows that chronicle of life in the tech industry is preventing women from considering a career in IT, said Sarah Lamb of women-in-tech-group Girl Geek Dinners. Jen from the IT Crowd The IT Crowd's Jen: Not an inspirational role model The portrayal of IT workers as sexist and women as …
If they think that the IT Crowd and stuff like Geek Barbie are real role models and accurate depictions of what to expect in the industry when they leave school, then we don't want them.
My line manager is a woman, one of my colleagues in a 8 strong team of technical specialists is a woman. They are both very technically capable people.
We should encourage more girls, but then we should encourage more of everyone, rather than this fake positive discrimination to make up numbers. Can we have less of this nonsense and more about Raspberry Pis teaching kids how to master computing
There are more men than women in IT. For whatever reason, that's what we currently have.
So TV shows are written than reflect that situation, simply because that's what exists in the real world (I rather doubt it is a misogynistic cabal plotting to keep women subjugated, us blokes are really not that organised).
I put it to you that is there were more women in a given industry than men, TV shows would be written and represent that imbalance. Would people still complain?
Do all TV shows/films have to represent some platonic ideal of society that we should aspire to? Or should they, by and large, represent what we have?
Obviously if a TV show shows (say) all women as hormonally imbalanced harpies who can't reverse park or change a fuse; then unequivocally that show is either sexist or so absurd and over the top that you are simply missing the joke (because I bet all the men are shown as knuckle dragging lager louts hell-bent on rutting and rugby!)
And one final question - why can't a woman have a man as a role-model (or vice versa)? Can role models only come from the same sex, race, culture, religion, skin-type....?
Nuffin wrong with that, its just that most people seem to go for role models they can more easily identify with.
Not a whole lot of choice in the computing world (though I'll pass on the usual 'Ada Lovelace' thing and raise you Grace Hopper). I'll leave you with the obligatory XKCD reference.
" two places I've worked where some women had been employed in the IT team to basically brighten the place up"
Well, my very first IT summer job after UNI was secured because I apparently reminded the matronly AS400 programmer/department manager of her husband when he was younger.
Didn't bother me none.
Yep, like AC (09:23), one of the places I worked at took two of the divisional administrators (that's secretaries, not sys-admins) and got them to start doing Sharepoint work including coding up widgets in C#. Let's just say that part hasn't gone too well. So sometimes these things can mirror reality. They were nice people. They were good admins and could no doubt have gone further on that side due to their organisational skills, but coders they were not.
I do believe that being female actually helped me get hired for a job once - but I wouldn't have been picked either had my technical skills not been at least as good as the male applicants (and they certainly were better than some of them!).
Does the IT crowd really mirror your experiences? Jen isn't hired for a technical job in the IT Crowd.
In fact I would say that the other women I have worked with in technical roles were on average better than the guys - probably because women won't end up in IT just by chance? I do find things are different in the channel (sorry about the buzzword) where you see people hired for sales having to pick up technical skills, with variable results.
I ended up in IT (the tech support side.. coding isn't for me) after doing maths and sciences at school - then languages at university - when I ended up spending more time learning to use computers, which I'd barely touched since age 12, than actually working on my degree..
When I finished school I wouldn't have considered doing science or IT - these didn't interest me very much in my teenage years as I was probably more interested in fitting in, and as a girl you're expected to study humanities, or if you're after money: business/economics or law. And my teachers did a better job at getting us ready for exams than they did at getting us really interested in the topics too. As long as that vision remains I don't expect things to change much. And picking on the IT Crowd is irrelevant - however I would agree that having strong role models on screen could be helpful, like 24's Chloe but with better social skills!,
More rubbish. It's always about filling quotas/being politically correct etc. There's always people saying there should be more women/ethnic minorities/whatever in companies. This is stupid. People should be employed for their skills and experience, not to meet quotas set by some stupid law or regulation.
Is anyone treated sympathically in the show? I love it, and I work in IT and I recognise some aspect of myself and those I work with in the show, but its just a comedy. The two male leads are maladjusted lovable hapless dateless unsexed nerd losers; if anything, the female lead is the most normal of the three.
What about the lack of men in teaching, medical and so on? Nobody gives a toss do they? But when it's a women that is underrepresented then it's those bad men that push the poor girls out.
Men prefer doing some things and women other things. Get over it and stop playing the victim all the time.
"The portrayal of IT workers as sexist" - particularly overseas contractors who are still from countries where women are almost literally chained to the sink and the words "freedom" and "religion" only exist in the same sentance with a negative between them. I'm one of the fortunate people who works with a decent crowd, but stories still reach my ears with a degree of regularity.
In February we took 40 of those GCSE students to Silicon Valley. ...He added that his school used to teach scratch programming until specialist school funding was scrapped and it was no longer able to do so
So funding for school trips from London to Silicon Valley is there but not for programming. Not wanting to go overboard without all the facts but that sounds like a problem of priorities. Anyway, why go all the way to Silicon Valley to find out about computers? Surely, Silicon Roundabout is closer? Or how about pointing out that computing skills don't just get you jobs in the computer industry?
The reference was somewhat tongue in cheek. There are more than enough IT clusters close enough to visit - ARM, and co. in Cambridge. I just like the Day Today style implication of how school funding is now so poor that the winter ski holiday has had to be relocated from Lake Tahoe to St Moritz.
..than fiddling with the arcane error messages of the Lazarus IDE. It is more fun than tracking down that piece of code which accidently overwrites your data structure.
Meeting people and talking to them - that's an interesting thing for girls. But it does nothing to improve their cold, hard programming skills. If they wanted to do that, they should have gone to Oxford or Cambridge and visit a CS introductory lesson. After that, they would spent 1000 hours in front of Pascal, like I did. There is little instant gratification in becoming a proper programmer and you need lots of determination to master that complicated machine.
'Nobody laments the dearth of male midwifes...'
Rubbish. We had an excellent male midwife attending at the birth of my youngest daughter (now 18) and she's ended up being a real tech wiz. Not only can she multi-task like a lunatic, she also PREFERS using that godawful ribbon interface in Office 2007! AND she loved the IT Crowd, so there.
I'm not sure what that proves but dammit, it had to be said.
'Nobody laments the dearth of male midwifes...'
Not midwifes but my son had an 2 or 3 ear operations when he was 6-8 years old and on his first operation he came out from the operation full of how there'd been a male nurse in the theatre (or "boy nurse" was I think his description) and he kept on hoping that one of the "boy nurses" would come onto the ward!
What about the sort of sexism and banter that happens on forums like this one? It can be pretty bad, any mention of a woman, particularly a senior woman in IT and it's "Stupid bitch", "mad cow" this, "whore" that. Just the general level of discussion can be very dismissive of Women and aggressive towards them. Ask yourself how many times you see an article on The Reg about storage or bandwidth and how soon there is a comment like "imagine how much porn you could get".
We guys in IT also have a very bad time admitting that there is a problem. I daresay that a lot of people will be reading this post and think that it's bollocks or that somehow the people who have these comments and attitudes targetted at them should just deal with it, because it's part of being in IT. Well, I've got news, like topless calendars in the office in the 70s, it's not and nor should it be. Now, I expect your thinking that I'm anti-porn, again I'm not, I just think that there is a time and place.
And don't get me started on attitudes towards sexuallity...
I don't think I've ever read anything on el Reg like the comments you say come up whenever a woman is discussed . And while bandwidth/storage articles may inevitably attract one or two porn jokes, I'm not sure how that is sexist? Did you think porn is only ever made for heterosexual men? Don't be embarrassed if you did, I thought the same thing 'til I was about 12.
We call companies and some kind of people "whores" here. But if you comprehend what we write, this refers to "people doing nasty things for money". So a "computer science whore" is a person who will collect funding to perfom some "Artificial Intelligence" scam. But these persons are mostly men !
If you like tainted-rose, brainwashing news, go somewhere else. Fox News will tell you why the next war is urgently need, brought to you by Lockheed-Martin in cooperation with Exxon Mobile.
I certainly don't think the reg comments is anywhere as bad as you make out.
What is toe curling is my wife's recants of conversations they have in her all female office (she doesn't work in IT). Colleagues calling one another "bitches" and "whores" behind one another's backs are the least offensive things they say about one another! I've never experienced that anywhere near level of vitriol or name calling here in the mostly male but still mixed IT offices I've worked in.
I agree about what women are like with no blokes around. I unfortunately received a very explicit education on this matter when I hid upstairs when I was about 10, my Mum was hosting a naughty knicker party in the living room and thought I was out - they all did.
I still don't trust women. (Just one - my wife coz she's different)
In most of the companies I have worked at has been tits or balls.
I honestly have not seen any more "sexism" than the normal interplay between the sexes.
I think the source for this article is the normal "look for a story" crap you find in the daily mail.
Final point, who cares how many people go for IT style education at GCSE/A level? Its not like the stuff they learn will ever help them get one of the two good jobs available to full time employees.
We don't have Grammar schools in our area, state system is not academically selective. We do have single sex selective private schools.
My sons mixed comprehensive obviously lies much further down the league tables but reality is very different if you do the sums. The selective boys private school sets an entrance standard higher than the top 10% academic performance so the A*s all round is predictable. The top 10% at the comprehensive actually gain comparable GCSE/A Level results. The lower 50% who leave school for college or work or drop out at 16 highly skew the GCSE averages.
Having done the arithmetic it was very easy to say no thanks to any thought of spending 12000 a year for the private school. Although the big plus of the comprehensive is the opportunity to socialise with a wide range of boys and girls from different backgrounds.
There are some very poor comprehensives but most are ok and much of the twaddle talked about standards and selection is simply another symptom of poor mathematical and scientific understanding among the chattering classes,
The few women (programmers) I knew ended up being bullied out of their jobs after entering motherhood. Why? Their childless career orientated boss (also female for the record) understood neither the complexities of child management, software development management and ultimately people management.
Why is it so wrong to have an industry, any industry that has a bunch of blokes working in it?
Is it felt that we cannot manage without having a lady to organise us or work along side us and metaphorically hold our hands? (real hand holding could be construed as sexual harassment).
Sometimes it can be enjoyable to just work in the company of other men and even be allowed to make un PC jokes and laugh at farts.
If Anybody wants to join our industry we should welcome them and encourage them but please don't make it a quota/sexist issue. A lot of industries have been male dominated for years, IT is perhaps the last one left (apart from sewer cleaning and I don't see the lady queueing up to point girls in that direction). Sometimes just leave things be and let things work.
Two things I should add.
1. I met a girl many years ago on a course in Hardware maintenance, she was a brilliant engineer, great worker, great personality, could drink the best of us under the table, but hated every little thing about IT.
2. My granddaughter is a science wizz, bright as a button, sharp as a pin, interested in the sciences, had computers from an early age, but the only computing thing she is interested in is farce book.
or maybe I am stereotyping.
Because the situation would appear to be self-reinforcing, and is to the detriment of the industry as a whole because there are so many intelligent women who choose other industries because of the negative impression they have of the tech sector.
The problem is cultural, not genetic (unlike all those jobs requiring hard physical labour for which guys just have a natural genetic advantage) and so should be possible to change.
She's my elder daughter's role model. She often struggles to control the Fist of Death, however, being surrounded by Wallies on her course (the French Baccalaureat 'S' with Engineering Science) - and yes, she does sometimes have to do their work as well (when working on "team" projects).
"You knocked him senseless!"
"Ah, he was senseless before I hit him."
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