IT Gender Gap

As an IT professional and a woman, I was naturally quite interested in a link my sister emailed me today, to an article bemoaning the low numbers of women in IT. I was disappointed, however – while attempting to counter some inaccurate perceptions regarding the IT field, it seems to create or perpetuate some of its own.

There is, no doubt, a gender disparity. It was one of the first things I noticed when I interviewed for my current job. Coming from a small company where I constituted the entire IT department, I had little idea what the typical large IT department looked like. As my guide did not take me through the rows of cubicles, I couldn’t get a clear idea of how many women there were, but of those people I saw moving about most were men. (Once I started working here, I mentioned this to one of the women. She suggested that the women had been busy working, while the men had been up and about to get coffee, take a smoke break, or otherwise avoid serious effort.)

After reading the article today, I pulled up our department’s organization chart and started counting males and females. Men do outnumber women, but by less than a 2-to-1 ratio (women make up 37% of the department). This is hardly the “near-total lack of women” lamented in the article.

The article also states that “Girls often have no idea of what the work involves” – but does very little to enlighten us about it. It does explain that work in IT involves “diversity, overlap with different professional sectors, constant opportunities to learn new things, intellectual challenges, the importance of human relations and teamwork.” Of course, that describes most white-collar work these days.

The article does point out that “fewer than 30 percent of IT jobs are for programmers” – a percentage exceeded somewhat in our department but not by a great deal. Other types of jobs in our department include database administrators, UNIX and Windows server administrators, help desk, business analysts, project managers, computer operators, and a handful of others. Some of these require technical knowledge of the sort geeks are known for, but other jobs require more an understanding of the software from a user perspective than its internal workings.

The last sentence of the article, in particular, seems to confuse the field of computer science – a relatively narrow technical field – with the broader realm of IT. I had to take a foundation course in computer science in order to study computer programming, but on-the-job training has been what prepared me for most of my day-to-day work for the past 20 years. (The only use I ever found to use my hard-won ability to translate between binary, octal, and hexadecimal was to create a password no one else in the company would understand.) Some jobs of course require it – probably the high-paying positions in systems level programming that our professor told us about, but which I decided held no appeal for me.

Another odd idea in the article was that young people of both sexes who are comfortable using technology in daily life would – the author seems to think – be expected to pursue careers in technology in equal numbers. I suppose in the early days of computers it would have made sense to see people who were used to using computers take jobs in the computer field more than those who were computer-illiterate. But when everyone does use the technology daily, to suggest that this would lead them to want jobs in the field seems akin to thinking that familiarity with eating food leads to becoming a chef, familiarity with buildings leads to becoming an architect, or familiarity with clothing leads to becoming a seamstress or fashion designer.

I do notice, within our department, that there are a few areas where men or women predominate. As our entire department is only about 160 people, no workgroup is large enough for such differences to be statistically significant, but at least some of them do line up with typical generalizations about gender differences. Nearly all the database administrators are men, for instance. This is a very technical job, where comprehensive knowledge of the intricacies of the database system matter more than interpersonal skills.

On the other hand, most of the business analysts are women (five out of seven). A large part of their work is communicating directly with end users, conveying their needs to IT and IT’s solutions and how to use them back to the users. They need a somewhat deeper level of understanding of the technology than the average user has, but interpersonal and communication skills are of primary importance.

As with any job, having young people exposed to what the work really looks like is important in helping them find their niche. Every year, Junior Achievement organizes a Job Shadow Day for eighth graders in the community’s schools. For about three hours, our department hosts a couple dozen young people, who watch IT professionals doing their jobs, explaining their jobs, and providing hands-on opportunities for the students to do just a bit of the real work themselves. I hope someday a few of those students – both guys and girls – will be back with their resumes, ready to join our ranks.