Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Feb 23, 2015
- 3428 views
Give this article , it would seem that there is a bit of a gender imbalance in the software development scene. Do you agree? Is that a good, bad, or otherwise thing?
The stuff in the article is certainly different than my experience. I've been at the same company for over 13 years now (it's pretty technical heavy, though not entirely IT stuff). The senior manager who hired me was a woman. I've worked with plenty of women across various organizations. There are several on my current team, one of whom desperately deserves to be fired, but for some reason works on. Others are superb at what they do.
But it's not a flashy internet company where you have "well known engineers," and there are many people of various ages and experience (lots of retired military and lots of kids right out of school).
I've heard the complaint about no well defined career paths from a lot of IT sorts of folks. That's definitely not a female specific complaint. It's hard to draw serious conclusions from a news story that only interviewed the people making complaints without hearing any other sides.
I've also seen studies that disagree about there even being a shortage of tech workers, so there could be a lot of question begging going on in the article.
That said, it doesn't surprise me at all that there are places that could be (or be perceived as) hostile to women. Hostile work environments are bad no matter who you are.
Matt
