Women in IT
July 22nd, 2008My colleague at FSU’s College of Information, Dr. Mia Lustria, sent me this article last week:
http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb011607-story03.html
concerning a Gartner survey presented last October that documents the declining numbers of women entering – or staying in – the IT profession. Because I am so personally concerned with increasing the numbers of women in IT, I read the article with great interest.
“The raw research numbers presented by Gartner are fairly dramatic. The number of women in IT, as measured as a percentage of the total IT personnel pool, declined from 42 percent in 1996 to 32.4 percent in 2004–with no noticeable progress in the number of women in professional or management ranks.”
It is hardly surprising that women are encountering the glass ceiling in IT – a traditionally male-dominated arena in which a women must work twice as hard for half as much respect. It has been my personal experience that women are generally regarded by men as having less natural scientific and technical ability – this colors how I am perceived by my male colleagues and results in my having to prove my technical chops over and over again in order to earn their respect. I found it interesting that this article notes that some of the findings are “politically incorrect” and hard to say out loud in an era when we are supposed to have achieved gender equality. Gartner suggests that there is a need to break through some of the standard approaches to attracting women to IT and accommodating the needs of women:
“… companies need to do some “radical thinking” to address the problem. This radical thinking makes the topic controversial because it requires that employers look at the male and female populations as being different and as having different strengths. That is difficult because in gender politics, you are supposed to treat everyone as equal.”
Changing the culture of a traditionally male-dominated industry is a daunting task and companies will need to do some radical RE-thinking of what IT is and who it serves before you begin to see changes in the overall culture of the profession. Back in the day when my dad first entered the computing profession, computing was all about math and electrical engineering. The only people who owned computers were nerdy Radio Shack weirdos who wired them together in their basements and made them do fun things like sum a row of numbers. (… that geeky weirdo in the image is my dad with a computer that probably had 8 bits of memory. If that. I am sure he got all worked up when the light came on that indicated it was doing something. Who knows what, probably adding 2 + 2 for ten minutes. I am sure he will tell the story on his blog….) That was a pretty big deal in 1962 (the year I was born) when even the fastest machines counted memory in K, not M or G. Throughout the sixties and into the seventies, computing remained mostly about science and math and Grace Hopper not withstanding, a woman in the IT profession was unusual. Women were not encouraged in any way to enter the profession and women who did so often found themselves alone in the IT department, surrounded by a ‘guys-only’ culture that was – and still is – difficult to break through. It was easy enough for the men to close ranks on the women and to exclude them from many of the traditional guys-only bonding activities like golf or hunting that often cement work friendships and make them more productive.
In the early days of computing, no one cared about what users wanted or needed because there really were no ‘users’. Computing was a mainframe activity and you had to go to a ‘computer room’ and sit at a dumb terminal in order to interact with the machine. How well I remember trips to the Honeywell computing facility with my dad on Saturday mornings – he would get some ‘time’ on the mainframe and off we would go with his boxes of punchcards to perform some task for his consulting business. He rarely sat at the screen to interact with the machine – he would feed his box of cards to the punch card reader at one end of the room and we would wait (and wait. and wait…) for the paper to start coming out of the printer at the other end of the room. On our birthdays, dad would make banners for us out of the green-and-white striped computing paper that said “Happy Birthday” using an early version of ASCII-art – it would take hours for him to set up the cards and print the results – a task we can do in under two minutes today. Back then, it was a big deal, though we were too young to appreciate the amount of effort that this seemingly small task required in terms of computing resources.
The idea of personal computers was laughable in those early years – computers were expensive, cumbersome and definitely NOT user-friendly. The Altair 8080 – considered by many to be the first “personal computer” – had no keyboard, no video display and only 256 bytes of memory. Data input had to done by flipping toggle switches and the only output was flashing lights.
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” –
Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
Steve Jobs is generally regarded as the father of the GUI interface, though there is some dispute about the true origins of the GUI. Personal computing started to come on strong in the eighties and really took off with the introduction of Windows 3.1 in 1992. As computing moved out of the purview of nerdy geeks and into homes and offices around the world, a funny thing happened – users and user interfaces started to matter – A LOT!. As the Internet has become widely accepted and used by ordinary people in the last 10 years, the nature of computing is changing dramatically in response. Computing is increasingly a people-activity – it is about relationships and staying in touch. The ordinary user is completely unconcerned with bits and bytes in the same way most people feel no need to understand how the picture gets in the TV. When I ask my students to raise their hands if they think they are in a technology business, most of them do. Most of them are also male. And OH! are they ever surprised when I let them in on a really big secret – this is a people business and it requires good people skills – especially empathy – to do the job well.
This brings us back to the politically-incorrect observations about gender differences:
“He points to things like the increasingly social nature of the Internet, of information management (e.g., the percentage of female librarians to male librarians), and of the importance to companies of building and managing relationships with vendors in the supply chain and at outsourcers, not to mention managing the interactions between IT and the business side, which is becoming more and more pivotal to the success of IT. “Again,” Raskino emphasizes, “all of these things point to the need for more ‘female characteristics.’”
I work hard to reach out to young women to let them know that once you get past all the boys-club nonsense, this is a great profession for women because it uses skills that come naturally to us. Key is the ability to empathize with the user and to work collaboratively with them to improve the user interfaces. Most guy programmers I have worked with build a system and really don’t care about how the user experiences it. They are more concerned with function and don’t consider the form worthy of the extra effort. I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with programmers around the concept of “pretty counts” – form IS as important as function because what good is a system that is so unfriendly, no one wants to use it?
The misperception of IT as a geeky-math thing still remains and for women considering computing as a career, I want you to know that you can be just OK at math and still be very successful in this industry. Before becoming an IT professional, I cleaned houses. After graduating from the University of Florida in 2001 with a degree in Decision and Information Science, I began applying and interviewing for IT jobs. I would walk into a room full of young guys who would look at the old, grey-haired woman and say to themselves “yeah, right” – especially after they looked at my resume and saw my 10-years experience as a self-employed housekeeper. In the interview that landed my first job, I told my interviewer that the same traits that made me a good housekeeper would also make me a good IT project manager – and I was right!
The ability to walk into a messy, disorganized house and make sense out of it – to figure out the one right way to clean it and to clean it that way every time, the attention to detail and the understanding of what small touches really mattered most to my clients – all of these skills translated perfectly to my new role as an IT Project Manager. Every home is a system. Cleaning is just organizing the system so it is attractive and user-friendly. I had years of dealing with finicky clients who wanted me to use only certain products or clean something in a very particular fashion. This prepared me to be very understanding of user requests for the interface to behave in certain ways that always seemed ridiculous to the programmer but were very important to the user for whatever reason. I would generally take a lot of blowback from the programmer who just could not see the point of the extra effort involved in accommodating their requests for modifications not directly related to logical functionality and viewed the client as a pest and a nuisance. I always stood my ground and insisted (and still insist!) that the user – not the machine – is now the point of computing.
And I suppose, that is where we find ourselves now. As computing becomes more about the user and less about the machine, the industry will need and demand more of the feminine principle and it is imperative that academic and corporate culture change in response. The article makes some suggestions for attracting and keeping more women in IT, such as creating more work-from-home opportunities and “designing work teams that emphasize group dynamics over leadership centralization.” I suggest lowering the stress level of being on-call 24/7 must also be addressed – for a mother in the workplace, the expectation of being on-call around the clock is stressful and untenable – and is the primary reason I am considering selling my own IT business and retiring to the academic life.
Until the soft skills that women bring to the table are as valued as the ability to do matrix math, you will not see an improvement in salaries for positions that mostly require ‘soft skills’ such as interface design, training and tech support. Low salaries for these positions are another factor influencing the career choices of many young women and combined with the stress of the “always-on” expectation, a high burnout rate is the result. There is no point to working hard to attract women into the industry only to have them crash-and-burn in a few years and exit to a less stressful work existence. The problem of the declining number of women in IT is a many-headed hydra that must be tackled on all fronts. I am hopeful that this Gartner study will start a conversation in the industry that will lead to the sorts of changes that will reverse this trend and make IT a less stressful profession for ALL of us – men included.