Women in IT (Aug 3). Online freedom of speech (Aug 5th)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 09:21:45AM -0400, billt-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org wrote:
> I was working in the production main frame world for a spell, and all
> the woman are their. In fact in a group of over 50 people I was one of
> seven guys.

I suspect the mainframe world wants perfect code written to well defined
specs following set down code styles.  That probably suits the
personality of a lot of women better than a lot of other IT jobs.

In a lot of IT jobs, the person who is the loudest or has the most
dominant personality gets to make the decisions, which almost always
means it is a man that is making the decisisions.  It also intimidates a
lot of people, and probably women more than men on average.

My wife used to work for the transport automation division of alcatel
(they make systems that run trains/subways and the signaling and
switching for them, usually for fully automated setups), and the first
group she was in was 90% women.  Other groups were the complete
opposite.  It very much depended on the type of work that the group was
doing.  She certainly found that some groups had some very dominant men
working in them, and very quickly had no women in the group at all.
There are some women who would like such an environment, but I haven't
met very many.  I think many of those that do like it tend to aim for
management instead.

If a field is very competitive and requires being very outgoing and
dominating to get noticed and listened to, it will have a lot less women
in it than a field where working together rather than competing is
desired.  If you want more women in IT, you really have to change the
environment, which means you have to change the type of men that work in
that environment.  It isn't easy.  In places where the environment is
more cooperative, you often have a lot of women working in IT.

--
Len Sorensen
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