Women in Information Technology: You Will Join Us Or…Something
To the barricades! InfoWorld is calling for action to recruit and retain more women in information technology jobs. The piece is not as bad as it might have been, but it contains some assumptions that are as odd as they are unexamined. To begin with, data:
It may not be surprising that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women filled only 26.7 percent of computer and mathematical positions in 2006. What’s troubling is that this percentage has been declining for some time. And the descent has been nearly universal across all IT job categories. For example, women accounted for 16.6 percent of all network and computer systems administrator positions in 2006, down from 23.4 percent in 2000. At the management level, the imbalance persists. Among computer and IS managers, for example, 27.2 percent were women in 2006. By contrast, women held 66 percent of all social and community service management jobs last year.
An optimist might at least observe that women seem to be better-represented in management ranks than among network and system administrators. However, the data are very spotty, and there are many peer categories to sysadmins that might dilute the outlook. Still, what is “troubling” about the numbers? Whence the assumption that the sexes ought to be equally represented in a given occupation? Can anyone adduce evidence of real oppression keeping women out of IT? I don’t deny that glass ceilings used to exist in full force and are surely present residually in the world today, but the burden is on the author to show that they are to blame in this case, or explain why anyone should care what little girls want to do when they grow up. The article’s strengths notwithstanding, these burdens are not borne.
An obvious explanation for any gender imbalance in any profession is that younger women make career sacrifices in order to raise children. Pinnacle Entertainment CIO Carol Pride comments:
In order to get to the top of the food chain, you have to own something big and ugly — an ERP implementation, for example, or a slot machine implementation at a casino….Often, the first big-and-ugly project coincides with the time one is trying to raise young children. Women often realize, rationally, that children are more important than companies, but if you don’t do the big and ugly, then it ends up hindering you later.
I’d hate to think I’m giving Carol an uncharitable reading, but I hear her saying that women need to be ready to sacrifice their children in favor of their careers. To dispel some of the gender-political confusion that might cloud our judgment, let’s reverse the roles and see how well the statement plays. Now, nobody knocks dads for being away from the children for 40 or 50 hours a week; it’s not just culturally normative, but necessary to keep food on the table. But suppose we were talking about men who have young families and still want to pursue very competitive careers in which 70 or 80 hours a week are needed to get anywhere. Suppose some executive was mentoring these young men, and he told them that sure, their kids might miss them and their wives might wilt under the stress of running the family substantially alone, and they might know what they’re doing is somehow wrong, but if they wuss out now, it will “hinder them later.”
I mean, with hypothetical mentors like this, who needs no-fault divorce laws?
Clearly I am locked into patriarchal, male-as-breadwinner thinking. This article, written for respectable company, can’t be expected to deal with troglodytes like me, can it? Apparently not:
According to a recent joint study by Catalyst, the Families and Work Institute, and the Center for Work and Family at Boston College, 74 percent of women executives have a spouse/partner who is employed full-time. By contrast, 75 percent of male executives have a spouse/partner who stays home full-time — strong evidence that, despite progress in attitudes toward domestic workloads, women still predominantly bear the brunt of striking a balance between career and home.
The paternalism of that paragraph is jarring. The point is well-taken that most women executives are the “second income” in the household, and most male executives are the only income. But to turn this into “strong evidence” that women are bearing the “brunt” of anything requires us to assume that all women want and ought to pursue a career path that leads to executive management. Could the data not as easily tell us that women from wealthy households frequently make the decision to be homemakers? It’s not like these wealthy families couldn’t break loose a few bucks for a maid and an au pair. If these numbers suggest anything, it is that the women most able to decide how to structure their lives, decide in large numbers to stay home and raise families. They need not be scolded for making what is in the final analysis a much freer choice than most are able to make.
And as for a bad attitude toward housework, my wife would need to comment here to acquit me finally of that charge. However, I am confident that in the end I will be found innocent.
Eventually the article drops complaints about strict gender inequities and instead attempts to give an account of why it matters. Here we find a mixed bag of silliness and sobriety:
“Because most companies are based on a male model and have been for many decades, the men don’t get the kinds of business contribution women can give,” [Women in Technology International Carolyn] Leighton says. “They often [institute diversity metrics] just to meet requirement codes.”
But, Leighton adds, the current nature of IT actually calls for what are considered stereotypical female characteristics. No longer an island within the company, IT is integral to other departments and requires employees who communicate well. “Now IT goes across all departments globally,” she says. “And women by nature are collaborative consensus builders.”
It’s too bad Leighton didn’t elaborate on what a “male model” might be. I mean, I saw a picture of my company’s president from when he was in high school, and he honestly looked a lot like Fabio—no, for real, he did—but I’m pretty sure that’s not what she meant.
Given that, imagine my honest relief that strict gender equivalence is not being assumed here. One might construct a species of feminism around the proposition that the classes “male” and “female” are functionally identical as they relate to the institutions of commerce and family, but the author avoids that path. If we’re talking about corporations based on a “male model” which might be improved by the presence of naturally collaborative and consensus-building women, then we are obviously all comfortable with the fact that men and women differ in important ways which might actually matter in the real world. Continuing along these lines is IBM V.P. of SOA and WebSphere strategy Sandy Carter, who says that “Women are good at accepting change and creating change, which is important in the marketplace,” and “The skills that [women] have — being able to juggle things, multitasking — reflect the [business] environment we’re in now.”
And these are valid points. It seems fairly uncontroversial that collaboration, consensus-building, and “multitasking” are typically more natural for women than men. (Take me, for example. The “consensus” I like best is when everybody agrees that my way is the right one.) But let us not overstate our case: saying that women are more natural consensus-builders is a little bit like saying men are more natural sysadmins because they have the upper-body strength needed to lift the occasional server into the rack. No one will deny that men do, in fact, have this physical advantage, but it’s not like women are all so weak that asking them to heft a 1U box 40″ off the ground is going to make them wilt like delicate garden flowers in the sun. The difference is real and important, but somehow each sex learns to develop some aptitudes that come naturally for the other—even outside of a diverse environment like a 50/50 workplace or a family.
Ultimately we can agree that no man or woman should be hindered from making free vocational choices within the scope of the knowledge professions. Far from this modest goal, though, the InfoWorld piece agitates for strictly proportional representation of women in IT. Even if all the resulting collaboration and consensus and multitasking would make IT departments hum, it seems unlikely that it’s actually good for women to set this goal, or even to care much how many of them choose technology professions at all. Let it be enough to present free choices to women and allow them to structure their lives as they see fit.
It will come as no surprise to my readers that I have a place in my heart for the career choice of homemaker and homeschooler, and I am not shy about extolling the benefits of that path. Nor, more to the point, is my wife. But I would only want a woman to make a free and informed choice of this lifestyle—never a coerced or a manipulated one. If many women choose otherwise, I will not assume they are either enslaved or unfeminine or unconcerned about their families. The reciprocal charity would be most welcomed.
I know a woman who left IT a couple of years ago. (This is of course anecdotal, but not much more so than the comments of the of ten prominent women in IT interviewed in the InfoWorld piece.) She was a Java developer, and is now a homeschooler and stay-at-home mother of three. She was a single mother of one for most of her career, and while her problem wasn’t precisely one of balancing work and motherhood, she has admitted that her heart was just never really in her work. Her desire was simply more for her son than for Enterprise Java. Maybe she could have championed a massive ERP implementation (if massive ERP implementations were not already passé by the time her career would have allowed her the risk), but she never wanted to. Now she stays at home with an infant and a special-needs preschooler and an eleven-year-old. She tells me she loves it. If we want to carp about women leaving IT, why not tell her story too?
P.S. Certain other women technologists might take the trouble to weigh in on this. Am I completely off base here?
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- Posted by Tim on Saturday, February 3, 2007 at 11:58:03 pm PST
- Category: Technology, Culture
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12 Responses to “Women in Information Technology: You Will Join Us Or…Something”
Well, I’m hardly a technologist, though back in the day I guess you could say I was involved in IT — installing, phone support, and tech writing for VAX-based systems.
But now, sigh, I’m bearing the brunt. Homeschooling kids, spending most of my day making/keeping my environment pleasant, keeping tummies full, and building young minds and souls. I really, really long for the days of a psychotic supervisor, a borderline company CEO, and trying to get artists to understand pre-GUI technology. That’s so much way cooler than smelling up the house with fresh baked bread and having your kids get excited about it.
What I will never, ever get is something that was brought up in an article I read several years ago — why do highly intelligent, high intelligence-valuing women want their own children raised by the kind of good-hearted, but, well….the typical kind of woman that makes up the professional child-caring class (acknowledging any and all possible variants from the typical)? You go to work and you act like a high powered ERP-implementor (and I don’t even know what ERP stands for) and you demand of your bosses the necessary resources to ensure maximum quality of your outcome (and you even hope you’ll get some of them) and then you go home to your high school educated, possibly not even English-fluent au pair or daycare worker and tell yourself that you’re giving little humans the best opportunities in life. Way to maximize the resources you need to build your own family.
And then on top of that, you have have InfoWorld telling you that this situation creates the greatest possible good for the greatest number of people. Weird.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 5th, 2007 at 7:55 am |Caveat: I’m well beyond the “three under four, mom cries almost as often as the kids” stage. But still.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 5th, 2007 at 7:57 am |Hmm… was that link to my blog sure seemed like a challenge, Mr. Berglund!
I am certainly not a techhie by any stretch, and when my kiddos were young I stayed home with them …until the divorce…then I had to work.. so my home would be quite unsuitable as a good example; though an example it is of “typical” American life in far too many cases, alas.
That said, I know several couples who are raising kids and both mom and dad cooperate with the child-care side; and in two cases the dad stays at home more than mom. No au pair for these parents…why have someone else raise the kids? yikes.
For a long time it has been the case that mom did not have the education or skills and therefore even if employed, would not make enough $ for it to make sense to be the “breadwinner” so mom stayed home, dad worked the 60-70 hrs a week…and I’m sure you’ve heard the statistics regarding how little kids see thier fathers…. Personally, I think its an improvement overall when both mom and dad share parenting, and careers, and the more they can swing that the better for everybody. Dad works fewer hours (’cause he doesnt have the stress of being the only ‘breadwinner’) and mom gets out into the adult world, and the kids see equal amounts of both parents. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all…. and maybe it would help all those women who are clamoring for IT positions keep their jobs (but heaven knows WHY anyone would want to be in IT….. *grin*…okay your turn Nancy….)
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 7th, 2007 at 11:43 pm |First the clarifying bio. I’ve been in the software/data management industry since I graduated (barring a 2 year detour). I didn’t get pregnant with my first until I was 32. My motivation for having kids later wasn’t to craft a resume for ladder climbing. I was enjoying life and didn’t get married until I was 30 and recognized I was a little immature to be responsible for infants (as if I’m really mature now). Part of my problem was that I liked work and worked hard for my clients.
So when I did get pregnant with my first I switched to part time and it has been terrific for our family. As Susan mentions, my income relieves the pressure on my husband (he’s 100% commission - lots of pressure). But there really are two issues at play in Tim’s post. First are women using IT to get to the executive role or do they go into IT because they like it? If a woman’s goal is to climb the vicious corporate ladder, the family will bear the brunt unless the husband is less ambitious and spends more time at home. What about viewing IT as a great career in which a woman can work hard in her early years and then leverage the relationships and contacts so she can continue work, but do so part-time or in a job-sharing arrangement. Tim tells of the woman who really didn’t like her work so she stayed home. But…if she had liked her work, she could have found a fun job that was part-time. And yes, little projects, those ones that won’t put you in the running for the executive position, can be a lot of fun and very challenging. Oh and those small projects might be less stressful with fewer dollars on the line.
I think the original article missed the point entirely. We are too focused with corporate climbing when we should be focused on finding a vocation we love and then pursuing excellence in our vocation, even if we only have 20 hours a week to devote to it!!!
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 8th, 2007 at 8:32 pm |Good thoughts, Nancy.
I guess what it looks like to me is that the article simply assumes that everyone SHOULD be focusing on corporate climbing, and to the extent we’re not, we’re not merely selling ourselves short — we’re somehow damaging the overall health of the profession and the good of society more generally.
As in, we MUST get more women onto the IT escalator! We simply must! As Tim says, You Will Join Us…or…Something!
Not merely my or your individual belief that we’re better off devoting more time to our families is wrong, but so is the belief of the hair stylist that she’d rather style hair! There must be MORE women in IT!
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 9th, 2007 at 3:46 pm |How come at least three comments disappeared?
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 11th, 2007 at 6:36 pm |Because apparently Spam Karma 2 sometimes reconsiders earlier decisions to approve comments. This is more than a little frustrating.
Substantive discussion to follow later…
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 11th, 2007 at 7:52 pm |pentamom: First off, at the end of the day, “ERP” is the sound you make after you’ve eaten too much and have an upset stomach. Figuratively speaking.
Susan: As a guy who works at home, I fully agree that career arrangements that allow men to see more of their children are a good thing, and should be pursued by men if possible. My youngest has never known Daddy going to work, and my ten-year-old can just barely remember it. However, it seems in general that little children want to see more of their mothers than their fathers. I can’t demonstrate at the moment that this isn’t merely culturally conditioned, but if we could show that it is at least partially due to the nature of the human creature, then that would put a small dent in your fairly [small-e] egalitarian take on career/family balance.
Nancy: I think your focus on finding a calling rather than ladder-climbing is a good one. I think pentamom was getting at when she mentioned hair stylists. But then what if your calling is vicious, mercenary, backbiting corporate ladder-climbing? That’s a tough one.
But seriously, while your choice to work part-time would be considered anathema to the women quoted in this article (or you’d just be dismissed as a non-serious contender), it is clearly a good choice that avoids putting the little ones on a sacrificial altar.
And I have a hard time seeing you as immature. Marriage and childrearing have apparently been good for you.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 14th, 2007 at 7:42 am |I am not sure how to respond to your empirical evidence showing that little children want to see more of their mothers than their fathers. But I will point out 3 things:
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 14th, 2007 at 10:01 pm |1) little children also want to drink more chocolate milk than eat spinach
2) my brother and his wife, and my three other married friends with kids who do the “equal time parenting” thing might not quote the same statistics you do.
3) I’m not an “egalitarian” — even with at small e
I didn’t mean to call you an egalitarian, since I know you eschew the label. I just meant your idea that it’s good for moms and dads to split parenting and money-earning equally is, in the loose and popular sense, “egalitarian.” Which it certainly is, that word’s role as theological jargon notwithstanding. (You’ll have to tell me some time why you don’t like the label. It seems honestly descriptive of you. Mind you, I would never wield it as an epithet.)
And you are right: if I could show that small children’s preference for Mom isn’t culturally conditioned, I’d also have to show that majority time with Mom isn’t bad for them. Even as a thought experiment, that is too uphill a battle to consider.
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 14th, 2007 at 10:59 pm |Thanks for your balanced discussion. I’ve noticed that people are very fond of saying what women *ought* to do - whether that is to stay at home or to work in a particular job, to put family first or career first. It’s nice to see someone recognising that women can make their own decisions!
I was reminded of an article (by Paul Graham I think, but I can’t find it now) on why women are underrepresented in scientific research. As I recall, he argues that, on the whole, it’s not due to prejudice or deficient education but to women making sensible decisions about what they want out of life.
It’s interesting that the article you comment on jumps from an imbalance in the statistics between men and women in certain jobs, to assuming that there’s a problem that must be solved, in the absence of any actual complaints about mistreatment or the glass ceiling.
I’ve personally done two degrees, worked as a teacher, as a software developer and researcher and am now a housewife. I think they were all useful and worthwhile things to do. While I have a duty to myself and others to do the best I can with my life, I have no duty towards the collectors of statistics to make the numbers come out nicely!
Comment Permalink | Posted on February 17th, 2007 at 2:38 pm |It strikes me as odd that anyone would think that IT is an especially good route for climbing a corporate ladder. My observations of people say that the sort of people who are good at and like technical stuff are not good at the skills needed for climbing corporate ladders, and vice versa. For example, the upwardly-mobile types can’t afford (seriously) to get too bogged down with details, and the ones I’ve known are definitely not inclined to. But if your job is technical, it’s pretty important to get all the details right. There are other examples, but I should go to bed.
Comment Permalink | Posted on May 3rd, 2007 at 11:49 pm |