House of Eratosthenes

Only if you discuss male superiority. Find a way to make the girls look good, and you can jibber-jabber away about it to your heart’s content. So in that politically-charged climate, how do we investigate the continuing gender imbalance in Information Technology, and how to better direct all these resources that have been spent through the years, in vain, to even things out?

Ah…someone’s found a way. Even better, based on what I’ve seen, I agree.

Yes, we know. IT is much the poorer for having missed the gender-equality boat. But facts are facts.

According to a report in the Boston Globe: “One study of information-technology workers found that women’s own preferences are the single most important factor in that field’s dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other ‘hard’ sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.

“Another study found that women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don’t do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. Sure, they can become scientists, but they can also succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.”

What’s being discovered is the Yin and Yang theory. When men and women discover at an early age that they possess superior communication skills, it opens up pathways to them and they shy away from technological pursuits. Those who don’t have these skills, begin a life-long effort spent making things work, observing how parts interact with other parts, and building bigger, fancier things. This molds and shapes how thinking people think.

Yin and Yang then goes on to say…whatever people don’t do, whatever they do only under protest, when backed into a corner and deprived of all other options…their skills start to atrophy. Which, here, would indicate that even bright women might tend to possess inferior technical skills. Maybe that won’t happen, but it will logically follow that when people enjoy an abundance of options, the overwhelming tendency is going to be for them to choose the one with the most immediate reward.

And with all things technical, of course, you always have to wait. The server isn’t going to come up and start servicing client requests until you get it built, generate the OS, install it, configure it for your network, et cetera.

All of which is a round-about way of saying — since women are much brighter at, and more naturally inclined toward, the art and science of communication — they’re not likely to find optimal fulfillment in building things. To be a nerd right down to the core, you have to possess a lifelong history of finding greater fulfillment in saying “Hey Mom and Dad, look what I did” rather than “Hey Mom and Dad, look at me.” That’s the definition. And that isn’t likely to happen to a female; little girls are just too cute. And so even the ones who possess all the skills, aptitudes and passions of snapping Lego building blocks together, tend to gravitate more naturally toward other efforts that are more socially, and therefore immediately, rewarding. Because they can.

So since the problem is rooted in an abundance of options available to bright, flexible, capable and intelligent women — now what do we do? Deprive them of the options?

That would appear to be the only course of action available to us. Other than simply recognizing the gender imbalance in IT, and learning to live with it.

Women avoid IT.

O RLY?

I worked the racket from the 1960’s until 2003.

Most of that time surrounded by women. Lot of years with a woman who worked for a woman who worked for a woman for a boss.

Bee married to an ex-IT person for a lot of years.

Or by “IT” did you meant the recent hire only Xbox qualified PFYs?
- Larry Sheldon | 12/29/2008 @ 16:51
Yeah, I’m just going by what the article said: There’s been a vast, far-reaching, artificial and international effort at all kinds of levels, public-sector and private, to recruit more women to IT to even things out. And overall it’s been a persistent failure.

I know what you’re talking about, though. Particularly on the project management side — chock full of women.

When you get into “back room” things that are demanding of the hard skills, to the point where everyday human interaction is diminished, things change quite a lot, and I’m guessing your vantage point was such that you didn’t see this. This is true of my current job. Next staff meeting, there’s 20 or 30 fellas in there, not a single lady. Personally, I’d like to see a couple more women just to keep the fellas on their toes. But after spending my life in technical jobs, I have to agree with the article: It isn’t that the ladies lack the hard mathematical/technical skills for these positions. They just don’t like ’em.

Of course, if you’re right and your personal experience is a good cross-section of the universe (you don’t seem to be open to any challenge to this)…I guess there never was a statistical skew in the first place, therefore all these efforts to recruit more women, either never happened or were horribly misguided.
- mkfreeberg | 12/29/2008 @ 17:12
From the 1960’s The story includes Pacific Telephone through several name changes and includes programming (60-40 maybe, males to females) and Operations (mostly female). 1989 was the last year I was there and that year and for a several of the preceding years, the group leader, district manager and division manager were all women.

At the University here, there was one group leader (functional title I invented) that was female, and two who were nominally male. The machine room supervisor was female. Programmers were about 50-50, including the other “systems programmer”.

At USE conferences there were lots and lots of women over the years, in all areas.

Woman seemed to be common in other IT shops I dealt with–Boys Town, BTNRH, St. Joseph’s–dunno what the numbers were, but I frequently dealt with women.
- Larry Sheldon | 12/29/2008 @ 17:30
Could very well be your cross-section is a better representative sampling of the universe. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve bent over backwards to deploy man-made solutions to phony problems.

But then again, with a resume as long and as technical as yours, you should be sufficiently acquainted with statistics to understand: If I’m working one job with dozens of men and not a single gal, it means something’s going on. If I take on a second job, and it’s the same story, and then a third one and it’s the same story…it becomes undeniable. And it’s not like they’re finding out I’m there before they make the decision not to apply. 😉

You can also step out of the technical fields altogether, and go look at certain other jobs wherein the representation of estrogen is — for all practical purposes — nil. You can have endless and entertaining discussions about why this is the case, but you run into D. Moynihan’s truism about facts & opinions & entitlements. Certain jobs are not gender-neutral, now matter how many people want them to be that way, or how much.
- mkfreeberg | 12/29/2008 @ 17:42
Common sense tells you that certain jobs are not gender neutral, unless you wish to unnaturally defy the universal truth of the differences between the sexes. While there are always exceptions to every rule, there are tons of exceptions to your hardened mindset in this particular instance, Morgan.

I generally appreciate your cold eyed take on the hypocrisy and hysterical blatherings exhibited by sixty five percent of my sex, but I think you screwed the pooch on this post.

While we may be more naturally inclined towards the personal art of communication, the field of professional and dilettante (blogger) communication (talking and writing), like IT, is dominated by men. I have no problem with this, but I’m a little stunned that you would choose this as a topic for beating the proverbial drums. So many others are ripe for the picking.

If women want to pony up at the table, any table, let them compete on their own individual merits, without bias – just like the men.
- Daphne | 12/30/2008 @ 00:05
Well I agree with that a hundred percent, Daphne, but the subject under discussion is that they aren’t doing it. Nobody’s keeping them out. And yet — in spite of the protestations from you and Larry, here, I’m not making anything up. It happened. Very few gals where I work currently. Last job there were quite a few in the company — in the office where I worked, though, there were zero. Job before that, there were a couple, out of…about fifteen of us. Job before that was about half-and-half, but the job before that, it was zero out of…uh…thirty or more.

I’m not saying the gals can’t do the hard, challenging technical stuff. I’m saying, to them, it’s boring. You clock in, solve puzzles, have a microwaved burrito at noon, solve more puzzles, work late, go home…your only human interaction is staff meetings, and your boss demanding you tell him when your software module is desgned, or coded, or debugged. Women will put up with it if they feel like it. But over the long term, they don’t feel like it.

That’s my theory. But the part about the gals being missing, that’s not theory, it’s fact. Offices chock full o’dudes. What, you two think I imagined the whole thing?
- mkfreeberg | 12/30/2008 @ 00:43
Well, first of all, you should be damn grateful you don’t work in a hive dominated by women, if Dante could’ve envisioned the future workplace, he would have added another circle of perpetual Hell to his famous list.

To most women, your work may be boring. I know it sounds tedious to me. I would much rather direct the nuts and bolts of running a company rather than deal with debugging and coding issues.

But…..

Women get to choose what they do with their careers and lives, who gives a rat’s if IT or engineering doesn’t float most of their boats? Most women, even the wonky science gals, want to establish a career, find a husband, make babies then get a flex schedule – so? The only thing thwarting any woman’s agenda nowadays is a man who won’t buy into the picture.

Look, there might be five academic bulldogs out there screaming about the lack of women in the hard sciences, but who gives a shit?

I just think you picked an odd topic to make your usually excellent points on the increasing insanity of my sex.
- Daphne | 12/30/2008 @ 01:39
Well, now you’re agreeing. At least, that it’s a female tendency to find certain things boring, which was my point all along. I’m wondering if you and Larry read the article; the whole point is that yes there’s a skewing, but contrary to what we’ve been told some chauvinistic minds might think, it isn’t due to men being able to do things most women can’t do, if anything, it’s due to women being able to do things most men can’t do.

Honestly, I’m a little ashamed the two of you got as much fight out of me about my biography as you have. Since those computer science courses in tenth grade, and ever since, it’s never really been something I’ve been passionate about, never been anything I gave too much thought to. The time comes to sit down and build a complex computer application, or to take on someone else’s and figure out why it doesn’t work — the women are gone. Why ask why? It’s like the sun rising in the East, let it be.

But the other issue is the notion that all inequities must be indicative of discrimination. Robert S. McCain put up an excellent article just before Christmas about what he calls the egalitarian mind. These would be your five academic bulldogs screaming about the lack of women in the hard sciences. As to your query about who gives a shit, well, the hard reality is, we have programs because of these egalitarians. Regulations, initiatives, et al. Of course, they’re all destined to fail, which is my original point; male or female, if you have the resourcefulness, initiative, drive and wherewithal to command hard job offers from all different locales, and you choose to settle into something that does not make you happy because you had to be “enticed” to do so…you’ll be miserable in short order, in spite of the enticement, and lookin’ to leave.

But you’re both off-base in trying to cudgel and bludgeon me into imagining I saw gender parity over the last twenty years, when I saw no such thing. Not even close. Larry’s experience might have been different, I think, because “IT” has become such a softened and mushy term that it’s now approaching uselessness. You talk about some other fields this umbrella statement covers, and, hell, I agree with him. In fact, he’s understating it. The layers that manage projects, allocate resources, keep track of what deadlines are approaching and what ones have been blown…for some reason, in that area there are quite a few offices where there aren’t any men at all.

I understand some folks don’t want to look into this. It’s a huge mistake, in my view, to browbeat others to ignore it as well. Because when you succeed at that, you create a situation where the entire issue of gender disparity becomes owned, monopoly-style, by the egalitarian pinheads with their political agendas. Questions start to go unasked, and then in short order we all live under the iron fist of the very Kara Hultgreen protocols to which you were opposed.
- mkfreeberg | 12/30/2008 @ 09:19
It occurs to me that when I really think about what is written here, an interesting fact pops up.

In large, modern USAian organizations, hiring, firing, and promotions are not done by IT (or anyother department), but by Human Resources, which in my experience is almost always mostly women.

I recall a number of times at the University where the job description sent to HR were not recognzable when we found the ads in the newspaper.

And if there really is a problem here (in a field requiring, some people believe, specialized training) the problem is farther upstream, probably at the point in Junior Highschool, at the point where we pay Math teachers to scare the sh*t out of anybody smart enough to flee.
- Larry Sheldon | 12/30/2008 @ 11:17
“that it’s a female tendency to find certain things boring,”

I call BS.

Finding things boring is something everything with cognitive ability above that of beach sand does.

But the important issue finally arises in that comment. Unequal numbers is not proof of unfair treatment.

There are a lot of jobs that I am seriously, genuinely, and absolutely delighted that somebody else is willing to do. Forcing me to do one of them to make the numbers come out right would annoy me greatly.
- Larry Sheldon | 12/30/2008 @ 11:25
[…] they will attract attention by dint of sheer numbers, or the lack thereof: [S]ince women are much brighter at, and more naturally inclined toward, the […]
- dustbury.com » Blessed are the geekettes | 12/30/2008 @ 11:32
I’m late to the party, but… I worked with a HUGE number of female engineers and coders (no DBAs, tho) in my 16 years in the IT biz and had two women bosses during that time, each of whom rose through the (engineering) ranks. In my final job I had four UNIX sys admins/coders working as my Site Operations Center supervisors, and my top-ranked supervisor was female… the other three were men of roughly the same age and experience levels, but not even close in the competency department.

While it most certainly IS true men outnumber women in IT in sheer raw numbers, there are way more than a few highly competent, exceptional women in the field. I’ve known many…
- Buck | 12/30/2008 @ 14:32
Yeah, and for the record, I’m not saying they don’t know their stuff. The ones that do survive seem to be more competent than the gentlemen, partly because they’re put in the position of burning the candle at both ends — known the nuts-and-bolts, as well as that troublesome task of interacting with people — and partly because of Thing I Know #170:

Women seem to be most capable of out-thinking men, when they are outnumbered.

That one’s proven true every time a new episode of The View comes out.

I stand by the bit about the female tendency to become bored when there’s a lack of human interaction, though, as unpopular as I know it is. It’s been true in each and every single example I’ve ever seen, of that rare lady gear-head. The real passion was not so much in fixing things, even when they had the talent for it — it was in being recognized for having done so, which is quite a different thing.

And to those who prevail upon me to forget what I have seen with my own eyes, I respectfully submit there’s no argument to be had about anything. I saw it. Time comes to figure out why this gizmo is doing X when it’s supposed to be doing Y, and the recognition that’ll come for having fixed it will be slight, infrequent, or non-existent altogether…the ladies lose interest quickly. The article linked is correct, they’d rather be doing something else.

Why no female DBAs, Buck? I really expected when you came on to share your experiences on this topic, there would’ve been some in that crew.
- mkfreeberg | 12/30/2008 @ 14:49
“Time comes to figure out why this gizmo is doing X when it’s supposed to be doing Y, and the recognition that’ll come for having fixed it will be slight, infrequent, or non-existent altogether…the ladies lose interest quickly. The article linked is correct, they’d rather be doing something else.”

That’s interesting. I thought about it and realized I get more pleasure from looking at work I’ve done well and knowing I did it than from others acknowledgment. It’s not that recognition isn’t nice but a little goes a lonnng way for me. I think I have much less desire for human interaction than most women.
P.S. You think IT is gender-imbalanced? I am a female plumber and 99.9% of the time am the only woman on the construction site.
- moped | 12/30/2008 @ 19:21
I have a sneaking hunch that we may have a my-mind-is-made-up-I-don-t-need-facts situation here, so I’ll be brief.

Unequal does not imply unfair.

At Pacific Telephone we only had one DBA in our departmnt, and he was certifiablly male.

At the University, we had maybe a dozen (the difference being mostly due to the passage of time and changing technologies)–most were female. I say “mos”t because I can’t remember for sure and there might have been one or more males.
- Larry Sheldon | 12/30/2008 @ 20:57
Why no female DBAs, Buck? I really expected when you came on to share your experiences on this topic, there would’ve been some in that crew.

There were only six DBAs in the whole company (well, at HQ anyway), four of whom worked for me. The reason I didn’t address it is simple: the sample size was too small. I just mentioned the DBA thing in passing, as it were. My last job was the first and ONLY time I worked directly with DBAs… as well. I don’t speak to things I don’t have experience with, generally. There ARE exceptions, of course. Example: I feel perfectly at ease talking about presidential politics, but I’ve never known or even been near a candidate. Or a president either, for that matter.
- Buck | 12/30/2008 @ 22:02
Well…

I’ve never worked IT, but I did spend a fair amount of time at two different Universities with the word “Technological” in their name.

The male-to-female ratio was 2-to-1.

However, the women who were there tended to be smart, confident, and at the higher end of the academic bell-curve.

At the place I currently work, the HR staff is 75% female, while the Computer/Electrical/Software Engineering crew is 85% male.
- karrde | 12/30/2008 @ 22:14
It’s interesting all these stories are essentially the same. The opinions drawn from the facts vary, but the facts remain more-or-less consistent. Men outnumber women, but the women who are there, are on average more capable than the men that outnumber them.

If the report is correct, that women are poorly represented in technical positions because the ones with the desired skills have other places they can go — I wonder how this female population is represented, in terms of being smart, and choosing to go ahead and slog along in IT. Are those the “smarter than average, but not smart enough to stay away” types? Or is it the extraordinarily bright ones that pack their bags and get into something more artsy?

On the DBA thing: I’ve only met three DBAs, and all of them were e-mail administrators (which one might argue doesn’t really count). Certain departments show a gender-dominance, which remains consistent among companies that have no contact with each other. We spend a lot of money on this diversity stuff, but nobody looks into why some departments are consistently male and others are consistently female. To me, this just further helps to clarify that when you seek the truth about something you have to go all-in on it, or else not bother.
- mkfreeberg | 12/30/2008 @ 22:42
I read the article Morgan and reread your post thrice. I may have been drunk blogging last night, but I stand by my assertion that you jumped the shark on this one. Maybe it was the tone of your post that initially struck a wrong note (a mistake you rarely make) but then you proceeded to follow up in the comments with a few ripe old canards that I’m amazed came out of your mouth.

I’m simpatico with your general frame of mind regarding the knuckle-headed pc mindset that dominates the boy versus girl discussions on everything from birth to caskets, but I’m a little insulted that you would consider my mild disagreement of your general points on this particular topic and your subsequent rebuttals as a shameful waste of time.

I actually like your thoughts and appreciate the erudite point of view you give here daily. I respect the unwavering consistency of intelligence reflected in your writings. I read you daily and rarely comment, probably a mistake when I choose to disagree – I’m bringing a small knife to a gunfight.

It seems that you’ve had a generally bad experience of women in your life, but I would ask that that you stop broad brushing all of us with your harsh personal opinions – I don’t fit into that nasty box and neither do the other smart women who spend their time with you, Morgan.
- Daphne | 12/30/2008 @ 22:56
Well I don’t know who this fellow is you’ve been reading thrice, it would seem to be someone with something derogatory to say about female competence. That isn’t me. I’m simply agreeing with the article — competent women are liable, even likely, to nail down a fulfilling career outside IT because they’re female. I’ve discussed this with my girlfriend repeatedly since you folks all objected to this post in the last few hours, and she’s in emphatic agreement about it. She’s quite capable of this kind of job. But she wouldn’t want to touch it with a forty foot pole. If she did, how many guys could I replace with her? More than a couple. But it isn’t her cup o’tea.

Men and women simply do not react the same way to the opinions of outsiders. If you spend an abundance of energy fixing something, and what you get for it is a “what’ve you done for us lately” — that really wears on a woman. Thinking back on the few women I’ve met in high-technology jobs, what would they have done if they woke up one morning, and people stopped noticing what those women were accomplishing? They’d have been gone. They were in it for the attention. I remember one case in particular, my group got a new boss who was a complete dick. “What’ve you done lately?” written all over him. He wore on everybody. But the lady-project-manager of the group…aw, man. I thought there was gonna be a homicide, I really did.

I’m gonna have to retract the first couple sentences of this post. A lot of folks aren’t ready to discuss how men and women are different. I crossed that line, and here’s three of you who are ready to swear on a stack of bibles, that I said women are somehow incompetent. Well, I didn’t. I found a report that said, women are outnumbered not because the men have more options than they do, but because they have more options than the men. I agreed. How you guys got from there, to where you’ve taken it…I just don’t know.
- mkfreeberg | 12/30/2008 @ 23:47
I said I wasn’t going to do it, but after the last comment I’ll have to study the whole thing one more time.

But not tonight. Not with my ankle hurting bad. And a scary trip to hospital w9th wife. And finding out that my hearing is failing fast–maybe caused by choices I made long ago, and last month.

Maybe tomorrow.
- Larry Sheldon | 12/30/2008 @ 23:55
Perhaps Women are smart enough not to go into the industry
- pdwalker | 12/31/2008 @ 10:57
Yeah, I’ll bet that hits closer to the truth still.

Ten years ago I fixed a problem an office was having out in Connecticut, and they sent a beer across the country in gratitude. Thank you for fixing it! Thank you for making it work! And twice as long ago, that was something I was hearing constantly.

Now…it’s just something yer s’poseda do. Like the tollbooth guy is s’poseda take yer three-fitty. It’s no wonder the salaries shrivel to match with our prevailing sentiments. It’s what you should expect.
- mkfreeberg | 12/31/2008 @ 13:20

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Women Avoid ITMonday, December 29th, 2008

Women Avoid IT
Monday, December 29th, 2008