Discussion on:

Why the IT department needs more women

I couldn't care less about the gender of the person who controls my backups, hands out passwords, and sets up a new laptop for me every few years.

If, as stated, the IT workforce is largely male, then the management of those departments is necessarily going to largely male. You aren't going to do much to change the ratio unless more women enter IT from the bottom. Where are all of these extra IT managers supposed to come from? HR? That there aren't more women in IT and management isn't the fault or responsibility of the corporate IT departments. The problem has to do with why there aren't more women in IT and that goes back to societal norms and expectations. If the structure of society is to blame, then that is certainly not a problem that IT can or should be expected to fix. They need to find the right person for the job and, while there is probably discrimination, I think the problem is mostly because there just are enough female candidates out there in the first place.

For the most part, I agree with you. You can't expect people to hire women if there are none there to hire. I do agree it is a societal problem. But I also think it the responsibility of the industry to encourage women to consider IT as a career and that has to start with our children. Engineering programs like STEM, for example, encourage females to be interested in science, engineering and math.

because encouraging women to enter IT is at least part of what I was implying when I called it a societal problem. Men and women are still too stuck into the mindset that there are "male" occupations and "female" occupations. The only job I can think of for which one gender is a priori unqualified for is having a baby, although even this task generally requires some inter-gender teamwork. I used to date a woman who was a plumber. I know a woman who was a carpenter until her health failed. Men are nurses. There are many examples where each gender is invading the careers traditionally considered to be "only" for the other gender.

But is the reason that more women don't choose hard sciences and engineering a societal expectation or could it be that women often just don't find those careers as interesting as men? A nature-nurture problem? And the same question could be asked about men choosing "female" careers. I don't think we did anything to encourage them in this way, but I note that I never had to rescue my daughter from out of the high branches of a tree and my son never got very excited about a new pair of shoes. I don't have an answer to this but I think it is a question that needs to be answered. It may be that there isn't anything we can do about it if it turns out that women just don't like working in IT but I am afraid if anyone does find that to be the case, those "Guardians of PC" will pillory the poor sole who concludes that from his research.

Without being a sociology expert, white males tend to hire white males, etc. But yes, I agree there aren't enough women coming in to IT, and various organisations try to fix that.

is it possible that white females tend to hire white females? Or just men hire men and females hire females? Is this prejudice or just that tendency of people to be more comfortable around people like themselves. For example, I think this is one reason, among several, that ethnic groups tend to cluster into neighborhoods.

that men hire men because men get to know men at social events, and "men" are afraid of being accused of sexual harassment if they try to "get to know" women at social events ?
and women hire women for the same reason?

That seems to be the main argument - IT will be out of step with other departments and the "mood" of the rest of the company. Is that really the best way to run a department or company? What a crock.

As a woman, I was a little concerned with the word "mood" being used. I'd like to think the need to have more women in the C-suite has more to do with their talents and strengths than a prevailing "mood."

and that women in the C-suite should have everything to do with their talents and strengths. However, whenever one of these articles is published the inference seems to be that the PTB should be getting women to the top (or anywhere in IT) simply to create a balance of the sexes in the hierarchy which is 100% wrong. Equality should be exactly that for all people - colour, race, religion, sex and disabilities should not enter into consideration (I'm sure I missed a few -isms there so feel free to add). As a female tech, I want to know I have exactly the same opportunity as my male colleagues for training and advancement, want I don't want is to get preferential treatment simply because I'm the only woman in the department.

We have a problem here. We can only say that we need more women if we are prepared to admit that men and women are different - otherwise there is no point. But if we admit that men and women are different that opens up another whole new can of worms, not to mention the outcry of condemnation from the political correctness police.

Business needs the right person for the job. Period.

The person can be either male or female. As long as the job gets done, I am happy.

The problem with "need more women/whateverprotectedgroupyoulike" is that it becomes a quota game, where interest, aptitude, qualification takes a back seat. The end result is that invariably you'll have the wrong (quota) person in a key position and everything suffers. Wrong decisions are made or no decision is made. The higher the position, the more damage is done.

I've worked with excellent men and women. The key factor is that they were selected for their skill and not their gender. The fact is that men (in general) have a lively interest in technology, which means that IT will attract a large number of men. IT also attracts women who are interested in technology. It all works out....as long as the quota game is not played.

However when you start measuring success as gender/race percentages, an excellent candidate may be rejected because he/she is not in the preferred "special treatment" group while a mediocre candidate from a "special treatment" group is appointed to nmeet quota. Mediocrity breeds mediocrity and eventually you'll end up with the best mediocre candidate in management in stead of the best candidate . This simply does not make sense.

Tell it like it is

We need the best qualified person for all positions, IT included. Competence is not gender, age or an ethnic trait, it is an individual trait

We have to get away from the demographic model of filling positions and get on with making the US workforce the best it can be not the best statistical fit that reflects the population demographic.

I'm often the only female in the IT departments I work in and its been this way since I started in 1998. Working for small companies is my preference because they are more selective in choosing who they hire so no one questions why they brought in a female. When I take positions at large corporations, everyone immediately thinks I'm there to fill a quota and is always shocked that I'm competent. That bothers me. Even worse, I know I have been hired at least once to fill a quota. The money was right and there was opportunity for growth so I just shut up and took the job.

Five years ago, my management was trying to force me into management because I was female. I had to fight and almost quit to make them realize I had no intention of heading into management yet.

I know of a 50 year old white male that just got laid off because he was too white and too male. He has 30 years of industry experience. He was told there were too many supervisors on his team and his position was being eliminated completely. Before he had even packed his coffee cup, a 30 year old Asian female with 2 years of experience was PROMOTED to his position. So much for it being eliminated.

A thoughtful CIO...What rubbish. The best person should get the job. What if a woman doesn't apply? Affirmative action discriminates based on "minority" status, meaning race, or being a woman, sometimes sexual orientation. How does that get the best person? How is discrimination right?

If you really want more women in IT, then start in primary and secondary school. Get more girls interested in IT before they get to college so they want to pursue IT in college and as a career.

On the other hand, there is an imbalance in Education. Most teachers are women, especially in primary schools. Should a sensitive principal hire more men?

The bottom line is to hire the best person for the job. I will also add that compounding this is that the recession has been called a mancession, meaning men have been laid off in much larger numbers than women, so there are a lot more men looking for work in general.

"On the other hand, there is an imbalance in Education. Most teachers are women, especially in primary schools. Should a sensitive principal hire more men?"

They should, but somehow these worries about gender imbalance and the need to include more of the opposite gender in a field or workplace only appear when the ratio is more men than women.

I have never seen anyone making programs or quotas to insure that more men enter into preschool teaching or psychology.

particularly white men, are not considered a minority and therefore they don't matter.

On the other hand there is a definite bias against men in education here in the states. Male teachers are hesitant to go for primary school jobs because they are worried about suspicions of pedophilia and administrators and parents automatically suspect any man wanting to work with young children of pedophilia. kind of a Catch-22

My company was in a hiring mood for a couple of months for some technical positions. Out of 40 or so resumes sent in, not one was from a woman.

While it's true that the prime concern in any work setting should be getting the best person for the job, quotas are the wrong way to go, and IT tends to attract more men than women, especially in the more technical positions, I have worked with excellent people of both genders in IT. I notice that within IT, women tend to cluster in business analysis, testing and QA, and help desk positions, which are the positions that emphasize communication skills rather than deep technical knowledge of system internals.

People can come into the field at all levels, not just the bottom, and, as a discipline, we should welcome them because they often have business skills and knowledge that can broaden the focus of the IT team and help it be more relevant. The analyst from Accounting, the developer who created models in in Finance, or the coder from manufacturing all provide insights into system and technolgy needs that may not be obvious to to someone whose entire career was in IT.

We need to address the cultural factors prevent women from entering IT or push them out. Even when there is no sexist intent, many IT shops have a culture that says you keep working until the job is done, regardless of your other responsibilities. IT groups often reward individual contribution rather than team effort, which can discourage knowledge sharing and create key person dependencies. We reward the hero who gets the job done, but don't reward the person who identifies the risk and mitigates it to prevents the problem from occurring in the first place.

Finally, probably the biggest cultural roadblock is that we don't educate management on what it really takes to get a project done. We let projects become death marches and expect people to work long days, 6 or 7 days per week for extended periods because we take on projects with immovable deadlines, and the fixed staffing and budgets but we don't control the project scope or we allow upstream activities to take longer than planned while expecting those later in the process to absorb the impact.

Women are still the priimary care givers in our culture and they do the majority of household tasks, which is not a family-friendly environment and creates a bigger problem for women than men. Addressing these IT cultural factors could go a long way toward attracting and keeping women in IT and it will make life better for both men and women in our industry.

They simply are not interested in IT. Those "conversation" skills that this article gushes over are also the skills that marketing departments want. There is more money in marketing, more upward mobility, and you don't even have to get heavy into the tech. Just leave it up to the technical person that is part of the team.

Positive Discrimination is .. discrimination, period.

The fools who complain about the proportion of a particular sex in a field should read the book "The Red Queen" and learn that people, employees included, do what serves their best interests (including instinctive survival-of-the-species ones), and what they are good at, not Feminist self-deception and wishful thinking.

The sexes are not the same, each have their own strengths and weakness; this mix of abilities is not uniform across all members of each sex, and plenty of them can't be changed significantly by education or experience.

Yes, managers should be open to the women who want to and can do this kind of work, however this needs to be on a best person for the job basis, not discriminating quotas.

It's a serious problem.

simply to make up some artificial quota. Departments such as HR tend to be equally imbalanced, from experience HR departments tend to have more women than men and I don't see the businesses complaining about that. I also disagree that if they did hire more women they would improve communications and soft skills in the department - it's a personality thing with most "geeks" and the sort of woman who is attracted to IT as a career is likely to be no different at the soft skills than her male counterparts. I've worked in many IT departments, usually in support roles that involve interacting with other departments or customers and I'd say as a rule my male colleagues have been at least as good (in some cases way better) at the communication side of the job - but then I'm a tech not a sales rep.

We are talking here WHY?

I have experienced this imbalance first hand over my entire 17 years in the IT industry. Women tend to be invisible, and have to be twice as good as men just to get an "okay." Women are the ones who reach out to cross-functional groups, listen to what they are saying, and come back to the IT team and try to make real and lasting change. I rarely see men filling this role.

Yes there are fewer women in IT. I know because I am one of them. But it may not be gender discrimination. At least not at the end of the line. In my kid's high school, the IT related courses are filled with boys. Not just a few girls, NO girls. Science and Engineering is making inroads with programs like STEM to encourage more interest from girls. Perhaps we need to look at the education of our children and see if there might be underlying problems in garnerning interest from the female side of the population.
My second comment is that I find it offensive to say that because IT is changing, it may now be better suited to women. Pull women in for the "soft" skills?!?!?! Please. Stop stereotyping men and women and look at the real issues.

I am a woman and have been in the IT Industry for roughly seven years. In that time I've seen MAYBE five or six other women that I could call a colleague. The fact is, most of us have been pre-programmed to believe that fields like Engineering and Information and Tech are "boy" careers, and often are represented as being no better than a car mechanic. Instead of creating quotas, generate interest. Change the mind of the culture from the ground up.

So what. Why is there such a large need to try to cram women into career fields, a majority of them may not like?
IT as a career field did not really kick in until the late 80's. Before that it was engineering students that did computer related work - almost all male students. In the 90's colleges were pushing the IT courses by talking about all the large amounts of money that you can make. So a lot of people who otherwise would not have gone into the career field ( male and female ), took the courses - pretty much just for the money, not because they like the work.
Well those glory days are gone, the industry is chipping away at IT and it does not look like a money career field anymore - at least in the States. To be honest, with the instability and off-shoring that is going on in IT, I would not start a career in it in high school either.

Most people tend to hire people they feel comfortable with, i.e. that "team fit" dynamic. I.T. is predominately white men with a sprinkling of asian minorities thrown in. Hence the hiring dynamic encompasses the same, these are the type of people the incumbents feel they understand.
However, when creating a "world-class" team or having to compete on the global playing field, almost without fail the more diverse the team the better performing. Time and again this has been demonstrated. Common sense would indicate that the less "like speak, like think, like do" when in boundary/technology pushing environments, the better the results as long as everyone works together toward a common goal. Anything less than that just doesn't cut it in the longterm.
To hire people who "think differently" you have to recruit "differently" and you have to bring your "A" game managerially. That's a lot of work entailing successes and failures. Most hiring authorities will not take that risk even for the potential of outstanding results. The old phrase, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" comes to mind.

How about "You can lead a horse to water..."?
Said boardrooms (and businesses in general) should get their heads out of their politically correct behinds and realize that diversity should be an asset - NOT an aspiration. I know both male and female IT people who are much more knowledgable than I, and a few of each that are not.
jtdavies is exactly right - hire the best person for the job, and it shouldn't matter if that person is man, woman, or in-between.

Good fix, transfer perople from HR to IT and IT to HR, balance fixed.

I'll check back i a week to see how it worked out!

Provided you know what you are doing and have experience. Who cares?

The point is, I.T. is not a profession that interests a whole lot of women. The discrimination is NOT by the company, or the I.T. institution; it's women themselves, in general, being discriminatory against I.T. in their career choices.

If board members didn't have the attention span of a 5 year old, they'd know this already.

I am associated with a company that has recently had a high degree of management turnover. This hit the IT department hard in the past year. The IT department leadership was composed of three males and three females - quite well balanced in my mind.

The top role IT role was male and had been with the company for his entire career. This individual, fully deserving of a VP postion, became frustrated when this didn't occur, left the company to become a CIO, and was replaced by a female VP of IT - far less qualified (not just an opinion). The new leader subsequently fired the top two males left in IT leadership, leaving the entire IT leadership team to be females. All three males were highly qualified in their specific areas of influence, with good performance histories. No different than their female counterparts.

The Senior VP of HR is female - as the vast majority of HR is - the opposite problem as seen in IT - and three of the past four executives hired have been female. I have nothing against females as leaders, or females in general - some of the best leaders, managers and peers I have had in my career have been female. Their sex had nothing to do with how they were viewed through my eyes. They were qualified individuals and we were fortunate having many talented females in IT leadership. As females they definitely brought a different perspectives to many aspects of the job. Not generallizing, just fact.

Rising females in IT and business at all levels is a good thing for America and business in general. However, quota based hiring is not a good thing, and this case certainly could indicate a strong bias toward quotas based hiring practices. Women are no longer a minority in the business world. Candidates should be judged on their merits not their sex, at all levels.

How convenient that he highlights the "conversational" skills of women and relates that to "Account Management" work. It seems a bit insular to highlight a single area where "woman help" is needed in IT. Doesn't it take a certain finesse and great skill set to successfully handle IT Project Management? What about technical skill application? Please.

I think the approach should be bottom up instead of top down. if we take a look at the ratio of female workers to the total population of IT workers, the current ratio of female students studying computer science in all universities is around 1 in 6. That is a very low ratio. So if today we have 1 female CIO out of 6 CIOs, that is the right level. If we want to increase the number of female CIO, we should start with students entering Computer Science majors and leadership positions will take care of themselves.

Ayman Sokkarie

The IT industry sucks, if your not being outsourced, your being overworked and underpaid. Your pension sucks, you don't get a union, and you constantly have to keep training.

The women are the smart ones to avoid this industry.

IT needs more homosexuals...

If you have 10 candidates for a position, lets assume that 5 of the 10 are really worth considering. Furthermore, if 2 (more likely 1) of them are women, then the odds of finding a woman who is also worth considering are not all that great.

These number also show themselves in CS degree programs. I teach a course, on the side, and out of a class of 14, I had one woman last spring. In this case, she was one of the top performers in the class... But that is not always the case.

In another workplace a managerial person was hired to fill a "quota" and the simple truth is the person did nothing productive, just walked around, and asked the engineers, "what are you working on", and then would say to the engineer, "well, hurry up", or, "That won't work". -and then turn and walk away. Other times some really negative statements would be made.

That was many years ago but I doubt things have gotten better when quotas are involved. Still, they could have dug up someone a little better.

And as for all you engineers wasting your time:
Hurry it up!
you have other work to do.
you don't need to worry about that.
you can't do that.
Are you going to make a carreer of that (item/test, etc)?
That won't work.
you don't know how to do that.
you can't patent that.
you didn't do that.
Who really did that?

--just some quotes. ^^

I always hope my manager is well qualified.

If my personal experience is an indication of the norm then it just makes sense that there are far fewer women in IT or IT Management.

I went to school for Computer Science and there were almost no women in the program. After college I took additional networking certification courses and there were almost no women in those courses. I started a job in an IT department and there was 1 woman. I moved to another company's IT department and there were women but they were only in Application Support (none were technical). In my current role I've browsed job applications for openings we had and either no women or very few applied.

In order to achieve a gender balance you'd have to say, "Well we received 25 resumes from men who could be qualified, and 1 from a woman. Looks like it's her lucky day because our department is embarrassingly one-sided. We just have too many men."

I'd have no problem hiring a women for the most senior level technical position in the department as long as she is the best candidate. No one is going to get a free pass though, cause I need to make sure the job is done well.