My brother is a Quantitative Developer, my husband is a Broadcast Engineer and while I lived in London my best male friend was an IT Project Manager. All of them, behind the scenes are computer geniuses with skillz, gadgets and bandwidth galore.
Naturally I think information technology is pretty cool. But according to Des Saunders, the Industry Liaison Officer at UTS I am unusual.
In a brief discussion this morning I learnt that high school girls think technical IT careers are "not cool". Software development, for example, is for the geeks and nerds; the guys can keep it.
The university takes this seriously but despite a number of initiatives in place to recruit more women into IT degrees their population remains fairly consistent at around 30%.
Young women leaving high school are clearly not excited by IT or by IT careers. While the university is working hard to turn around the negative perceptions that women have about IT, perhaps it is fighting a losing battle as long as technical IT jobs don’t seem to deliver exciting careers for young women.
It seems a terrible waste – Des advises me that most of the women who do take technical modules are as successful, if not more so than their male counterparts.
More stats from Des at UTS:
In 2009 UTS have an overall figure of 35% females enrolled in IT degrees.
The combined Bachelor of Business/Bachelor of Science in IT has 49.36% girls.
The combined Bachelor of Science in IT/Bachelor of Arts is 50% 50%.
The main IT degree, the Bachelor of Science in IT and the Bachelor of Information Technology Scholarship program both have 25% girls.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
From discussions with other women in the web industry I sense that the majority of women don't feel the way I do. Perhaps I continually fail to understand an essential point of clarity. However, I am constantly perplexed by this discussion.
ReplyDeleteIf women were naturally interested in IT, wouldn't they investigate it? Why don't we have the same concern for women as mechanics or any other male dominated industry. Yes, I know there are other similar initiatives in some industries like engineering.
Sure, a balance is nice, and it does impact on the workplace environment positively, but that doesn't seem to be the main focus and drive for the recruitment of women in IT.
As a woman in IT, I feel a great deal of pressure to get involved in women only events. However i see them as being detremental and exclusive. I would far prefer to be involved in one-to-one mentoring of anyone who wanted to get into IT, regardless of their gender.
Anyone with an interest in psychology who spends any time in an IT environment will quickly notice the majority of IT workers come from only a few personality types (this is why we have geek and nerd stereotypes). The more technical the environment, the more noticible the skew is. The most common types (myers briggs) I encounter as a system administrator are INTJ, INTP, and ISTJ. If you take a look at the gender distribution of technically-minded types in the general population, you'll find that women are outnumbered by men three or four to one. You can argue whether this is caused by nature or nurture, but the issue is not with recuitment. Recuiting women into IT who don't have the desire or skills to excel won't help anybody. If there was truly a demand for the "feminine perspective" in IT, the free market would solve it, by paying women more.
ReplyDelete