Discussion on Women in IT

Thanks Dan for a link to an interesting page on barriers to entry to the field for women. I've been trying to find statistics to test an hypothesis, that IT employers are hostile to career breaks, which creates another barrier later in life.

My in house customer is a woman whose first training was in our application domain, who left work for several years while her children were young, and then trained in programming skills to return to work. She makes an essential contribution.

My mother had a similar career arc in medecine, aquiring a whole new skill set after here children were all at school.

To deliver, we need not geeks but rounded people with domain and life skills as well as technical skills. If those who hire were more aware of this, then there would be more older women in IT.

In the AYE blog, Johanna Rothman comments: "more women seem to be attracted to agile teams, possibly because of the collaboration skills required."

More women watch soap operas; more men watch sport. There is a gender difference in the priority attached to people skills, in our society and perhaps in our biology.

So I expect that there is a gender difference in men and women typically participate in teams. I've very goal-oriented. In my team, the person at the opposite pole, our most relationship-oriented person, is a woman.

But actually neither style is objectively better. Teamwork is a specific style of interaction and skillset, different from the typical social lives of either gender. I'm not convinced that either men or women are, in general, "better" at teamwork.
I'd venture to assert that mixed teams would outperform both all-male and all-female teams.

Fascinating thread. I was surprised that some of the people contributing to it did not realize the issues even yet with our culture as it pertains to women. Women are still earning less than men, and recently the rate has suffered a regression (not front-page news, but it hit all the local papers). My step-daughter experienced gender-bias just 6 years ago, after riding a motorcycle some 7,000 miles on vacation (with her father and I - she was 16 at the time). She had to take the pictures to school to prove that "girls can TOO do that". It wasn't the teachers - it was the other students; mostly male, but some female as well. By the time they get to high school, most girls have been convinced that there are areas where they simply cannot perform; therefore they no longer try. You need a good share of stubborn to get past the cultural agenda. A good teacher or two doesn't hurt either! I had a sixth grade teacher who played chess or checkers during lunch with any student who signed up on the list, and he would always discuss strategies afterwards (and he had no gender bias, the only criteria was putting your name on the list). I still treasure the day I beat him at chess! And in 8th grade I had a math teacher with a wonderful passion for math, and the desire for all his students to succeed at it (he was also very funny, and brought a lot of joy into his teaching style). And then there was my 9th, 10th and 11th grade science teacher, who preferred women for his teaching assistants because they would do the work he requested, rather than screwing around and breaking things in the back lab room. So I had lots of encouragement from the "technical" side, and a good base by the time I reached college. (Of course I had to ignore the many other teachers, many female, who discourage non-traditional roles, as well as my grandfather's words "Sending you to college would be a waste of time and money; girls are too stupid to learn anything".) There are lots of barriers to women that exist, and to get past them you need a couple of skills that are discouraged in women - tenacity, persistence, and a willingness to buck the system.