Tuesday, 31 July 2007

In need of people

Intergen now has its own blog (with a post from me, which is a little scary!). I'm thinking it will be an interesting one to watch - should have posts from a variety of people on a variety of topics but generally covering the organisation/industry wide type issues that I find interesting.

That's my plug for the day :)

We've had some interesting discussions around work lately around the male:female ratio in IT and whether it needs changing; following on from my previous blog posts, the post from me on the company blog and our recently acquired membership to Women in Technology (WIT). One conversation (which went on for an hour!) with a couple of other women was particularly interesting. I was asked: "So why do we need women? Do we actually have anything in particular to offer other than numbers?" and it was also pointed out that "The IT industry just needs people". True. And, I think, exactly what I've been trying to say.

I'm aware that there's a fine line between helping things shift equality-wise when they need to, and making too large a fuss that only creates new problems and I want to make very sure I'm clearly on the right side of the line. So, in the interests of clarity and not being lynched, here's a quick summary of where I stand:

The IT industry needs people to work in it but, for some reason, half the population are far less likely to than the other half. There's no particularly good reason why this difference should exist to this degree so, as far I'm concerned, it shouldn't. But, it does, and there are some bright young women out there who would probably really enjoy an IT career but don't think of it as an option. That's not cool. I'm not a crazy women's-rights activist, but I am passionate about young people getting all the opportunities they can to excel. If I can do something to ensure that girls are leaving school with a good grasp of the choices they have of where to head next then I'm all for it!

We need to promote IT as a career to people. Not women. Not men. Just anyone and everyone who has the aptitude and might enjoy it. However, whatever we're doing at the moment seems to only be reaching the men... and that's what I think needs to change.

(Incidentally, the other thing I think may need to change at the moment is for me to stop being the 'womens advocate person' and go back to just being a developer...)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jo,
I've read both this post and your Intergen blog post and I agree with your findings thusfar.

Unfortunately while many people will blindly believe that we live in gender-equal times, it's still not the case, and I don't mean just in terms of pay. If you'll allow me to generalise for a second, I think that women are still raised to be either passive (although brainwashed to believe they're not eg "I'm empowered! *giggle*") or man-hating spinsters. Just observe advertising that's clearly targetted to women and you'll see what I mean.

It's unfortunate, I think, that instead of getting the equality they deserve, women are being roughly split into those polar extremes. And I don't like nor want to sound like some kind of anti-establishment conspiracist, so I don't say this lightly :) Fortunately though, between these polar extremes are a large bunch of intelligent free thinkers, and that's who you should be targetting initially, because sadly no-one can singlehandedly change our society, that's going to be a slow evolutionary process.

When I was doing my IT studies, about 40% of the class were female - so the question is: why has my anecdotal figure dropped to your anecdotal figure of under 20%? A lot of the girls I talked to, under obvious other motives, almost routinely complained that IT was a men's industry, or that IT was too hard, or that IT wasn't cool. On all fronts, what a load of nonsense!

* Apart from men-of-the-night I cannot think off-hand of any men-only industries. Women can do anything men can, sometimes better sometimes worse. What matters is that they get stuck in and have a go.
* IT is a very broad industry - if one corner of it is too hard for you, there's plenty of other areas you can try. Just because you might flunk at development doesn't mean you can't excel at network administration, for example.
* The perception that IT isn't cool is a bad stereotype. This needs to be cracked to show a closer depiction of reality. Showcase work environments like Google as some kind of IT mecca. While many companies aren't to that extreme, a lot of them still foster a very similar relaxed and creative work environment. The point is - you're working in an industry full of intelligent and funny people, and most IT companies out there actually look after their staff.

I personally think that what needs to happen is that IT companies should engage with Tertiary Institutions, offer internships to graduates but more importantly - open the doors and let first and second year IT students come in and see for themselves what kind of environment to expect. If they see that IT is not much like the stereotyping that's applied to it, and that it can be a very fun and well paying career, then maybe more young women will apply themselves instead of dropping out, and then things can start snowballing.

At the very least, they need reminding that the first programmer was a woman, maybe for a bit of inspiration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Byron

What a comment! It's a bit to chew on :)

Anonymous said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergen *cough cough*