Nadia is a Recruitment Consultant, a woman and a mum.
Having recruited IT personnel into the banking and finance industry for 3+ years I started to wonder "where are all the women?”
My clients are keen to hire women, but struggle to find candidates who can offer the same skill level as their (predominantly male) existing team members.
It seems reasonable to assume that women are as capable as men when it comes to the fundamental skills that are required to develop C++ software or maintain a Linux server environment, for example. So why are there so few women to be found in those and many other technical IT roles?
Is it a matter of choice? Do women choose not to pursue technical IT roles? Is it to do with the way technology has been promoted to women in the past that makes this sort of career path feel less interesting to women?
Perhaps women encounter more obstacles that hamper their career progress, so that they are steered out of IT careers, following a path of least resistance.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt there would be value in an investigation. I decided to return to my journalistic roots and find out.
I hope to use this blog to report on the progress of my investigation, and am happy to hear from women and men who have an interest or opinion on the matter.
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I am from India. In my experience, i find a few girls opting for a complex development language like C++, or UNIX support requiring odd working hours. But it is not the case with Java/C# there many girls working on it and willing to build a career in development.
ReplyDeleteQuantitative fields require a high performance language like C++ (it generates native machine code where as Java/C# are translated). So most of the women who have good quantitative skills opt to become analysts working on VBA (again interpreted scripting language)
I disagree, that male coders are always good in algorithms or technical analysis. It is that, women dont really take up C++/HPC (high performance computing) thinking it to be a bit macho. Teaching C++ is also big enough to fit into a semester. So most of the universities dont teach C++ in their curriculum.
In India, the IT population is having a good proportion of women. Yes at a later stage in life, women get more obstacles than men some choose to retire but many continue to work.
I'm from Argentina, I graduated from Systems Engineering last year, and I've been working on Java / PHP/ C# programming for more than 3 years now. Currently, I'm thinking on doing something else with my time, mostly because of my male coworkers, who can't bring up any interesting informal talk and continue leaving me aside of every single technical conversation.
ReplyDeleteI never had these kind of issues at college, and most of my friends are men, but now that I work with them, they are putting me aside as well as my recently known coworkers. Maybe some girls do find this issues at college (I've spoken with some of them, and they tell me it does happen)
When I tell my coworkers the things that bother me about this environment, they tell me that I'm just not used to be with boys, which is not true, at all.
On the other side, they keep telling me to get some more girls into the office whenever there is a job opportunity, but although I try hard to find girls, no one feels is up to the job, because of english skills required and the level of expertise on the programming languages.
But boys don't care so much about being at the required level, they go to the interview and try to "sell themselves", they will try to be up to the job after getting it. In fact, many of my male coworkers got the job withouth even knowing english, and having really little experience in programming.