This article came to my attention on Digg. It’s rare to see an article in such a mainstream industry-mag as Computerworld deal with the problem of women in the IT workforce so well. For one thing, rarely are real solutions proposed, and although much of the article was nothing new, one thing caught my eye that I haven’t seen discussed before:
…is the risky behavior patterns that are rewarded. We found, particularly in the tech firms, that the way to get promoted is to do a diving catch: Some system is crashing in Bulgaria, so you get on the plane in the middle of the night and dash off and spend the weekend wrestling with routers and come back a hero, and there’s a ticker-tape parade, and you get two promotions — you can actually leap a whole grade if you rescue a big enough system.
But what does that have to do with gender? Women have a hard time taking on those assignments because you can dive and fail to catch. If a man fails, his buddies dust him off and say, “It’s not your fault; try again next time.” A women fails and is never seen again. A woman cannot survive a failure. So they become risk-averse in a culture where risk is rewarded. Women would rather build a system that didn’t crash in the first place, but men enjoy that diving catch and have a system of support that allows them to go out on a limb.
This is a real problem, and I’m glad that some systematic study has stumbled upon it. The risk-reward system is something I’ve noticed, but not thought about much. The reason that it’s particularly interesting as discussed in this article is that the author makes it clear that the study doesn’t believe that the risk-averse behavior is based in the “nature of the gender” (as speculation is often wont to do) or accepted gender-roles, but the perception that unequal importance is placed on failure by the workplace social environment. In this case, the blame is not laid squarely on the bosses; it’s democratized. That’s important. We all share responsibility in this, and it’s pretty clear that we can all make a difference individually.
As a last note, I have to take the first commenter on the article to task, because this is such a typical and often unintentional way of “changing the subject” that tries to make the argument that “I’m not an asshole and therefore I shouldn’t count” There are a lot of arguments that start this way, and they’re all equally invalid.
I’m not sure what the latin term should be for this fallacy. It’s related to ad hominem in that it tries to detract from the argument by accusing the debater of making an ad hominem attack where none is made and then defending against that attack.
Most people I know in the IT field don’t have mentors for career guidance. And the long hours affect both men and women and both sexes have to deal with it.
I know that some men are a-holes, but these same men are a-holes to other men as well.
This brings me to one question. I don’t have a specific problem with women in IT, but why is it necessary to have females in IT just for the sake of having females in IT?
It is not necessary to have women in IT just for the sake of having women in IT. That’s not the reason we decry the lack of women in IT. We’re losing a segment of our workforce to burnout at a rate that far exceeds that of other segments. It’s a statistic that doesn’t fit with any others, and doesn’t correlate with women coming into IT, women deciding to leave the workforce to start or continue a family, or any of the reasons that have traditionally been used to explain away the dropout rate and lack of interest falsely.
Systematic and unsystematic, but widespread discrimination and harassment contributes to the burnout rate, and the article talks about ways to mitigate that. Yes, some men are jerks, but saying that these same men are jerks to the men as well misses the point. In the case of men being jerks to men, there is a ready in-group of other men and social dynamic that tends to weed this kind of behaviour out. In the case of men being jerks to women, the structures aren’t well developed, and there are fewer women in the IT workplace to form that ready in-group.
