4 ms·

It would be interesting to know if these issues (lack of advancement opportunity, voice not heard, poor assignment, personality perceptions) are exclusive to te

It would be interesting to know if these issues (lack of advancement opportunity, voice not heard, poor assignment, personality perceptions) are exclusive to technology or if they also occur in, for instance, finance and medicine. This would be informative because it would tell us if tech is doing something uniquely discouraging, or if there is a wider problem.

moomin 10y ago
Broadly, the answer is: they're not exclusive, but tech is particularly bad. Probably because tech has mythologised itself in a very male-normative manner.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  This seems pretty oversimplified? Especially when the point was comparison to finance and medicine, which have similarly male-normative histories. A few decades ago medicine was at least as male-normative as tech; culture said nurses were female and doctors were male and that was that. But med school matriculants are ~48% female at this point. Some specialties are way more than half female, while others remain large-majority male. Meanwhile, finance has hardly budged at all. There's clearly something to learn here, and I think we're losing insight by just saying "tech is particularly bad" without actually trying to investigate.
  - EduardoBautista 10y ago
    Not only that, nurses are still overwhelmingly female, that hasn't changed by much.
  - clay_to_n 10y ago
    Tech has been getting consistently worse in the last 20 years. As far as I know, that is _not_ true of finance or medicine. So we have a unique problem.
Bartweiss 10y ago
The tech/medicine question is a really interesting one. A lot of the issues cited in software engineering, from initial male-dominance to long hours to rudeness from superiors, are overwhelmingly present for doctors. (As are a lot of the upsides, like high initial salary.) And yet new doctors are almost 50% female - though the question becomes much messier if you break down by speciality. Clearly the unpleasance of med school isn't driving women out, but there are massive gender gaps in specialties like surgery. I don't have any conclusions here; I just wish people would make these comparisons more often before diagnosing issues as either universal or tech-specific. edit: "More than" to "almost" - I had seen non-American statistics.
tyingq 10y ago
There are some highly skilled professions where career progression is almost solely driven by tenure. Airline pilots are a good example. Their unions negotiate the pay scale based on years of seniority. That's a huge tradeoff, of course. If you switch jobs to another company, you lose all of your accrued seniority.
arca_vorago 10y ago
You know, the interesting thing to me as a sysadmin was coming to understand that tech is inside every industry, but not every industry is inside tech, if that makes any sense. In that way, I have seen the insides of hundreds of companies, from 2 man law firms to fortune 500 oil companies, and the almost universal thing I have found is that the tech side of the business is usually being underserved and under-represented in the boardroom. Think about how many senior sysadmins you know that answer to a CEO, or to a CFO, instead of a CTO or CIO... What is going on in my opinion is that without someone playing the business-political games for them, tech workers almost always are forced to move companies in order to find upward mobility. I got burnt out in my last position dealing with this very situation, and so I have been spending more time trying to understand how the best CTOs and CIOs do their job, so that I can eventually help other sysadmins/future employers understand how to fill that gap since management largely doesn't understand the technical debt they create by cutting short-term costs in that way.

moomin 10y ago

Broadly, the answer is: they're not exclusive, but tech is particularly bad. Probably because tech has mythologised itself in a very male-normative manner.

Bartweiss 10y ago
This seems pretty oversimplified? Especially when the point was comparison to finance and medicine, which have similarly male-normative histories. A few decades ago medicine was at least as male-normative as tech; culture said nurses were female and doctors were male and that was that. But med school matriculants are ~48% female at this point. Some specialties are way more than half female, while others remain large-majority male. Meanwhile, finance has hardly budged at all. There's clearly something to learn here, and I think we're losing insight by just saying "tech is particularly bad" without actually trying to investigate.
- EduardoBautista 10y ago
  Not only that, nurses are still overwhelmingly female, that hasn't changed by much.
- clay_to_n 10y ago
  Tech has been getting consistently worse in the last 20 years. As far as I know, that is _not_ true of finance or medicine. So we have a unique problem.

Bartweiss 10y ago

The tech/medicine question is a really interesting one. A lot of the issues cited in software engineering, from initial male-dominance to long hours to rudeness from superiors, are overwhelmingly present for doctors. (As are a lot of the upsides, like high initial salary.) And yet new doctors are almost 50% female - though the question becomes much messier if you break down by speciality. Clearly the unpleasance of med school isn't driving women out, but there are massive gender gaps in specialties like surgery. I don't have any conclusions here; I just wish people would make these comparisons more often before diagnosing issues as either universal or tech-specific. edit: "More than" to "almost" - I had seen non-American statistics.

tyingq 10y ago

There are some highly skilled professions where career progression is almost solely driven by tenure. Airline pilots are a good example. Their unions negotiate the pay scale based on years of seniority. That's a huge tradeoff, of course. If you switch jobs to another company, you lose all of your accrued seniority.

arca_vorago 10y ago

You know, the interesting thing to me as a sysadmin was coming to understand that tech is inside every industry, but not every industry is inside tech, if that makes any sense. In that way, I have seen the insides of hundreds of companies, from 2 man law firms to fortune 500 oil companies, and the almost universal thing I have found is that the tech side of the business is usually being underserved and under-represented in the boardroom. Think about how many senior sysadmins you know that answer to a CEO, or to a CFO, instead of a CTO or CIO... What is going on in my opinion is that without someone playing the business-political games for them, tech workers almost always are forced to move companies in order to find upward mobility. I got burnt out in my last position dealing with this very situation, and so I have been spending more time trying to understand how the best CTOs and CIOs do their job, so that I can eventually help other sysadmins/future employers understand how to fill that gap since management largely doesn't understand the technical debt they create by cutting short-term costs in that way.