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Interesting answers on lack of gender diversity in IT: Most of the men believe the reason is that there just aren't that many women entering the field, while al
by aedron 10y ago
Interesting answers on lack of gender diversity in IT: Most of the men believe the reason is that there just aren't that many women entering the field, while almost all the women blame bias at various stages of education, hiring and promotion. Someone has a cognitive dissonance.
- ohyoutravel 10y agoI don't think it's cognitive dissonance if two different groups believe separate things. Only if one group believes two conflicting things. Being wrong (whichever side that may be) isn't cognitive dissonance.
- bkanber 10y agoMore likely both sides are right to varying degrees. It doesn't have to be black and white, nor are those two issues mutually exclusive.
- jklinger410 10y agoThis is too rational to be correct.
- whoops1122 10y agothere were less than 5 girls on my computer science class, so unless woman are claim that they should have the job without education. I can totally see the reason why there is a gender diversity in IT?
- beat 10y agoWhy is a computer science background necessary for an IT career? I know many, many IT professionals who did not study CS in college.
- kerbalspacepro 10y agoNo, but also yes.
- TooGhosty 10y agoMaybe it is not strictly necessary but someone with a CS degree is obviously going to be the preferred hire.
- onion2k 10y agoFirstly, that isn't true. Huge numbers of people learn to write code as part of a degree that isn't CS - for example, if you want someone to develop a GIS startup you'd be better off with a geography graduate who can write decent code than a CS graduate who probably doesn't have experience of GIS. Secondly, if you hear "startup" and think "developers" then you're ignoring at least 50% of the work necessary to make the business a success, all of which can (and often should) be done by someone without a CS degree. There's a lot more to tech than writing code.
- TooGhosty 10y agoFair points for sure. I would agree with this.
- ci5er 10y ago"IT Professionals" is a broad label. Maybe we can think of getting a 'degree in a field' as a proxy-variable for 'interest in the field'. What's astonishing to me is through the 60s, 70's and into the mid-80s, computer-tech interest in female cohorts tracked with science, law and medical fields. Then it flattened and fell, while female participation in those other three fields continued to expand at the rates they had before. (So, what happened in 1985?)
- rrdharan 10y agoThis Planet Money episode attempted to tackle that question: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-... Their tl;dr answer is that video games happened, and they were marketed exclusively to boys; that's what created and drove the cultural rift.
- tedmiston 10y agoThis data point isn't super useful without telling us the total size of your class. 5 out of 5–10 is great, 5 out of 25–50 might be realistic, 5 out of 100+, not great.
- almostarockstar 10y agoI'm from a class of 30. There were 2 women. This is in Ireland though.
- merb 10y agosame here (tough we were 32 guys and 3 women). - germany, still have relationship with teachers, they barly see more than 3 girls/30 in 5 classes per year.
- Mahn 10y agoWomen are not applying for IT jobs en masse, and certainly not as much as men. That might be because we have issues with our current education system or because we need to do a better job as a society to remove gender bias from the conversation; but that's not up to the entrepreneur to fix. Really, I think it's a bit unfair to point at someone building a company and shout "Cognitive dissonance!" if what they are telling you is that they are not getting applications.
- tedmiston 10y agoTo me the pipeline is not about "women entering the field". It's about fixing the whole pipeline from the beginning — getting a more diverse group started with tech and computers early, say elementary school, and then seeing (hopefully a high percentage of) those groups go on to eventually enter the field professionally. And just like an accelerator reaching successful exits, this whole process takes a long amount of time and we are only right in the middle of it.
- andrewflnr 10y agoWell, those aren't exclusive options. It makes sense that fewer women would enter the field if they think they're going to be subjected to rampant discrimination.
- Animats 10y agoFor the next four years, companies can forget about "diversity".