Re: "We need to promote women disproportionately, pay them equally or better..."
@Esme, I spent most of the 80s working in semiconductor research, there were lots of women scientist and engineers in the labs where I worked, perhaps not half but no shortage at all. Nor were there a shortage of them being promoted to being team leaders, managers and on upwards.
At the end of the 80s start of the 90s I worked for a large US IT company in technical support. There were no shortages of women engineers working there. Later I worked with the lab teams both in the UK and the US and again, no shortage of women.
In the last 20 years though I've seen the number of women working in support going down rather than up. In the SW development groups there seem to be more, perhaps still a little less than 20 years back, but not like in the support side.
I don't know why this is the case, why is it that women are now less inclined to enter the business than they once were.
All I know is that my wife who was a great Unix support engineer just ceased to be interested in the technology, then chose to leave to raise the family, something she said she had no wish to do when younger. I suspect that a number of her contemporaries made a similar choice. Ultimately it wasn't helped by fact that the flexible working that the company were happy to give just didn't fit with customers expectations which made life difficult.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
