Re: OT: Gender Bias In SW Development
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Feb 23, 2015
- 3661 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.
Same here, although I probably have less experience than you do.
I've been at the same company for over 13 years now (it's pretty technical heavy, though not entirely IT stuff).
Ditto.
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).
Ditto.
I've worked with plenty of women across various organizations.
Ditto.
The senior manager who hired me was a woman.
I joined my company after she had departed, but the hiring and head manager position used to be occupied by a woman.
There are several on my current team,
Only one here currently. There were several others in the past, but most left on good terms for personal reasons (e.g. one's husband was moving across the country). The one exception was a person who left rather abruptly due to the travelling requirement of the job, and ignored attempts by management to engage this individual on getting rehired (probably with a loosing of the travel requirement).
I.E. I'm not aware of anyone leaving for the reasons discussed in that article (being passed over for promotions, not getting enough work, constantly being required to 'prove oneself' ad nauseum, etc).
Others are superb at what they do.
The same is true of every woman I've ever worked with so far. Again, though, small sample size here.
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.
Agreed.
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.
Agreed.
It's hard to draw serious conclusions from a news story that only interviewed the people making complaints without hearing any other sides.
I think though that this was one of the points of the article - that there still are places that could be perceived as hostile to women.
I do not agree that this is the only reason why there are so few women in programming. I believe that there are other reasons beyond what the article discusses.
E.g. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/mar/31/girls-coding-female-peer-pressure
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.
I've seen that as well, but I think it can be clearly reasoned like this.
There are plently of tech workers, but they tend to be not top rated quality - these are the ones who just want to work hard enough to make some money. Once they reach a sufficient level, they cease to improve - and thus their skills are not as good as they could be.
Then there are those that this techcrunch.com article refers to as "A-listers".
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/27/write-code-get-paid/
Now I believe that the A-listers are the ones who are really needed, and that is where the shortage is.
