Friday, 1 November 2013

Week 2: Women in IT

I would like you to read/watch and comment on/discuss the presentation Women in IT.  
You will find it at
Discuss it here. 

12 comments:

  1. I think we'll start seeing more women in Computer Science when IT products made specifically by women become desirable. I don't know what exactly will be the tipping point, but as more and more women start using technology as much as men do, there will be applications where women add more value than men. I think the current trends in social web is the beginning of that.

    Overall, I agree that it's important to encourage women to bring their skills into areas where they might not be inclined to do so today. Whether it's politics, IT or science, we'd benefit from a more balanced workforce. Of course, deeply entrenched stereotypes die hard, but with enough incentives to get things going, hopefully we'll get there eventually.

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  2. To be honest I don't know what to say because it is free world everyone men or woman have the same rights and equal opportunity to study computer science.
    I think that they don't start that kind of studies because they think that this kind of studies are difficult and they afraid that they don't manage with this and this is the main reason why for now we have more man then women on that kind of studies.

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  3. On the one hand I see more women in IT. When I was studying for master's degree we had only 3 women for 150 students of informatics. During our last examination session I saw more women both quantitatively and as a percentage. But on the other hand I see that IT job market is dominated by men. I think that there is a big difference between studying computer science and working in computer science area.
    Additionally while I was watching presented video I noticed that many of speaking women seem to be more managers then IT workers. I'm not sure whether we may to compare them with sometimes described "sloppy workers at the desk with computer".

    I suppose that there are many areas in IT where women should be able to cope better than man. As a guy I'm waiting for the described by Wiktor tipping point.
    But generally I don't know whether talking about women in IT is more valuable than talking about men in nursing :-). I may encourage some women for working in IT but if they don't want to do it they wouldn't. I'm not in a favour of the existence equality in all disciplines.

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  4. I'm not sure if I consider this to be a problem. Theoretically, IT/Computer Science should be gender neutral, with nothing that really prevents equal female participation. The problem - if we consider it as such - seems to be about science based professions in general, rather than IT specifically. Gender division in study field choices is based more on stereotypes and assumptions, rather than actual qualifications, but in the end, it is their choice.

    On the other hand, I suppose I could say that my view is tainted by steoretypical image of "government (ZUS, post office, etc. pick your poison) office lady" - as a barely competent worker typing on keyboard with one finger. Granted, these people usually aren't qualified IT specialists, but it does leave a negative impression - and probably not only for me.

    So, I'd say, politically correct answer would be "yes, it's a problem", while less polite one would be "I wouldn't mind, but I'm not going to go out of my way to make it happen." I do believe IT gender ratio is slowly shifting anyway, as it doesn't seem to be nearly as "bad" as it used to be several years ago.

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  5. I don’t think there is any problem. We live in times when there is no limitations for woman in chosing their career path. The only reason why women rarely deal with IT is that they don’t want to. Maybe they just see other disciplines more interesting for them.
    I also don’t think that ability to do IT is an issue here as there are for example more female doctors than male ones and medicine is not an easiest discipline.

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  6. We can read in many books or articles : Men and women are fundamentally different (according to John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus)...

    Apart from this, I personally think that we need more women in IT, actually we need more women in every areas of our life (It's very important to maintain a balance). I think that company without women is really sad place to work (without smile). Without women increase a routine in every companies.
    Example from real world : in my company in one of our programming department works 90 men, but only 5 women so women is desirable in HR department.

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  7. To be frank this topic is quite popular in my workplace. This is because in the IT department (in which I work) women are the majority and men are around 40% of all employees. So every time I hear about such a topic a smile comes on my face. Please don't get me wrong - I just didn't personally encounter any situations that might confirm that such a problem exists and in my current workplace men could raise similar concerns that they are being discriminated!

    On the other hand I must say that I did not hear about any other company in which this is the case. Moreover I can remember my university times, where on the first year we started in a group of nearly 350 people in which there were only 4 women. But I also must point out that all of the girls completed their Masters, where about 150 men failed to do so.

    But from my point of view, numbers are not the biggest problem here - it's the quality of work. I have seen some examples in which women working in IT were great at the things they did, performing better than many men (from my perspective). I highly admire them, as I can imagine how much motivation and hard work they have done to achieve such a level of proficiency.

    Sadly I must say that I have not come across many such women, as most of the ones I met did not have the essential knowledge required to perform tasks that they were designated to do. Sometimes I just get the feeling that companies concerned with gender balance decide to employ not-so-highly-qualified women just to have the right percentage of female workers.

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  8. I think that men and women well find themselves in the IT industry. It is true that there is very little women studying computer science but I think that in the future there will be more! I personally know a lot of women working in IT. Women have coped well, but when it comes to programming there is very little women. Women represent other areas of IT. Many women work as a graphic designer.

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  9. I think there are so few women engaged in IT and engineering because these fields are basically less interesting for women then for man. Even the woman is geniuses usually will chose something different than engineering. But – I am for employing women in IT and popularize this field of science among women in universities because I think women are not inferior to men as regards mathematics. They are just less interested in mathematics than man. That is my opinion.

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  10. At the beginning the IT world was very technical and required really high level of programming skills. Right now it changes - for example in field like Human-Computer Interaction I'm observing increasing number of hired women. HCI is an intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences and design so there is big opportunity for women to use their delicate nature, empathy and emotional intelligence to understand people needs and prepare specially crafted and designed interfaces for better user experience.

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  11. I do not know why women are less represented in IT industry but I suspect that is because majority women believe that working in IT is something really technical. In my opinion women prefer to choose a type of career where soft skills and artistic nature are more important than technical thinking. It is not true that there is no place for that kind of skills in IT industry. Every year IT industry becomes less technical and more social. Unfortunately this stereotype exists and many of woman’s believe in that. From my experience when there is a woman in IT team everything works better. I’m also far from finding that there are no woman’s that are god in technical areas. They are and in many cases they are brilliant in what they do but I think and research show that majority of woman’s preferred different areas of interests.

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  12. In my opinion the problem is non issue really, it is the mock problem. It will go away by itself spontaneously in time. The natural balance between men and women, whether 50/50 or 40/60 or whatever, will come by natural play of economic and social factors. No special help nor push to forces more women in to IT education is needed. Personally, being a woman in IT is great, specially since there are so few of us :). We feel like a raisin in a cake :D

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