Now seriously: Why women tend to be less interested in a career in IT

Now seriously: Why women tend to be less interest in a career in IT

Less women work in IT than men. That’s just a fact. The percentage of women in IT is estimated to be around one fourth, which is still a pretty good number when you take into Deloitte’s claims, that only 13 % of computer science majors in 2013 were women. That is BTW a much lower number than in 1985 when it was 35 %.

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Woman coders?

From the data we can see that there is a discrepency between men and women in being interested in working in IT. And not only that, but it also seems that this difference seems to be getting bigger as time flows. We can see in many mainstream medias articles sounding the alarm, viewing this as a problem. Yes, of course it‘s good to ask whether this is normal and if we maybe need to look into why this is happening. But we can also find many articles from authors working in IT, who claim this is normal and that there is no barrier making their entry into IT harder.

Kathy Sherman says in her article that she has been evaluated based on her gender exactly twice during her career. First time, at the point when she was being evaluated for a manager position and her male colegue was chosen instead because her superiors thought that there is a lesser chance of him taking care of small children in the future. Secondly that happened when she was being evaluated to lead a purely male team in South Carolina and her superior thought that because of the local mentality there she might not be accepted as their leader.

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And while neither of those situations were ideal, the thoughts of her superiors aren‘t completely unwarranted.
Of course, they should‘ve asked her whether she would prefer her job over her children if it came to it, but asking about that sort of preference has its inherent problems as you should never prefer your job before your children, whether you're male or female.
And them thinking about how she will be accepted by a specific team? That just normal and it doesn‘t matter if it‘s done on the base of your gender, political view, the fact that you‘re vegan or just won‘t go hunting ducks with them on the weekend.

Why don‘t girls like working in IT as much?

For starters, we need to define a few things: By „working in IT“ I mean professional work in information technologies, not human resources, not sales, not being in marketing. I mean a job that requires that you understand either software or hardware. Somewhere on the border we have jobs like graphical design or UI/UX design.
Secondly: History clearly shows the role of woman for the development of IT and they 100 % brought revolutionary concepts. Woman surely had and have a important role for computer science, they just seem to be less represented in general. I don‘t think I need to list all the woman mathematicians or coders, so I‘ll just add this video by js.la

Third in line: I absolutely don‘t think that the lower interest of woman for IT is because of factors like intelligence. I know many women who are much much smarter than me, yet their relation towards IT is purely utilitarian. They will use them, but they don‘t really think about them. It‘s not because they couldn‘t understand them, but they just don‘t care. They view it similarly as I do look at chemistry. It‘s useful if I need to clean the drain, but otherwise, I don‘t care at all.

The IT wars

I have thought very hard and long about to what degree is IT hostile towards women. Yes, it is a very competitive environment where often many asocial, but very intelligent people are and their conflicts often resemble little personal wars. Putting a new coder on a project to change a single module can sometimes lead to him wanting to completely change the project to fit his wants. I like to call this the „ritual burning of the source“. And it‘s not really dont because his predecessors code was really that bad, but because he just has his own philosophy that he thinks is better and he doesn‘t want to adapt.

Conflicts between talented coders are really… fun… and no team-building will help here. The best developers just have their own point of view, are extremely intelligent and often very proud of their work and just view trying to explain it to less intelligent as a waste of time. The end result is that they look hostile to their surroundings.

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The interesting things is that this sort of problems mostly come only from males, women tend to be much better at adapting and finding compromises. Generally speaking, mixed gender teams tend to be less hostile and have a better social dynamic. If there ever was an argument for gender diversity, this may be the one. But teams in IT tend to be oriented purely on results. That only brings in more hostility, because people are competing with each other to have the results. That may be one of the factors discouraging women from IT.

Work in IT is often solitary, focused purely on things and often asocial. You can easily find many individualists and very talented people in IT, but they do have a big problem with interpersonal communication and teamwork. Every developer and coder that takes his time and teaches the „less gifted“ is a Gods gift. They do exist, but are extremely rare.

Working in IT isn‘t all about coding and working in server rooms. Many newer IT fields like UI/UX design – usability are almost dominated by women. Maybe not historically, but certainly by the numbers these days.

What discourages women

What if we were looking at this thing of women in IT in a bad angle all the time?
What if they enjoy the challenges but not the purely mechanical work?

Remember that Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program just as a purely intellectual exercise. There was no hardware at that point and only recently we‘ve seen that it would actually work.
Remeber that Grace Hopper pushed for a higher, more comprehensible programming language in a time when the „hardcore“ people enjoyed working directly with the machine code.

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Maybe IT needs different challenges, challenges that nobody but extremely talented women even views as a challenges. Something like robotics, social AI or something we haven‘t even thought about. Something less mechanical, more creative.

But there certainly is a chance my views are completely wrong. Maybe women like mechanical work in IT, but there is something discouraging them from joning.

I would love if them women reading this article, who work in IT would leave me their opinions. Why do you like working in IT. Or if you have a girlfriend, wife, sister, mother, anyone who works in IT, I would love to hear their opinion.