I've recently took part in a series of IT industry events organized in the US. My biggest surprise was to notice women are a minority to all these events. I don't know why exactly, but thinking about it, this is also true at work.
There are quite a few women at AXIGEN, but still, less then men. None in tech support, none in software development. Some work as testers, quite a few in marketing, sales and HR. And I have to wonder, why is that?
Thinking back to IT and computing universities, the numbers are the same. A lot less girls than boys. Is it because the field is not attractive for women? Is it because they don't like to have to prove themselves to the alpha males? Which is it, really?
I know from my own experiences that men in IT sometimes have troubling reactions. Some look down on you, as if you had no idea what you were talking about. Some are actually surprised when you know quite a few of the techie toys they play with. Some look in disbelief when you want to learn something more technical.
Of course, on the other side, there are those taking you as you are, regardless of any differences of any kind.
Which do you think are the reasons for us women to be such a minority in this field? Would more of us make a difference and if yes, in what way?
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7 comments:
Hi Alina,
I guess it depends on the society in general.. for example here in egypt number of girls in my faculty (computer science) was greater than the boys..so it's natural that their number is greater at work :) ...although most of them take the testing career instead of the developing..but still .
Hi Rain, I have one question for you. Of your colleagues, how many switched to a different career after university. How many were girls? And another one: in previous generations, was it the same proportion, more girls than boys?
I guess Egypt is the first one I find out about with such statistics. I wonder if there are other countries in a similar situations.
Ok, so whenever I say one questions, don't you guys take me seriously :)
As for the switching career thing... it's very rare cases actually , and i know ppl of the 2 genders did this ...so it's not a girl's thing to switch this career to another , in previous generation..that wasn't the case of course , cause this career is new in egypt , my faculty was founded 1996 , first graduates were 2000 ..only 8 generations graduated till now but i can tell u that generally girls prefer this IT to engineering ( the CS and engineering thing are main confusion to lot of students to choose from ).
There was an article about that a little while back in NYT, apparently women do well in IT and hard sciences at first but tend to drop out in their 30s and 40s supposedly because of sexism. I wouldn't be surprised if there were higher percentages women in engineering programs in MENA than North America.
Hi Nadia, thanks for sharing the info. It is indeed quite interesting. I did not imagine women would have such big issues with sexism in the US, I thought at least there managers are a little bit more careful.
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