- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Almost one in five men in IT explain why fewer females work in the profession by arguing that “women are naturally less well suited to tech roles than men.”
Feel free to check the calendar. No, we have not set the DeLorean for 1985. It is still 2023, yet anyone familiar with the industry over the last 30 years may feel a sense of déjà vu when reading the findings of a report by The Fawcett Society charity and telecoms biz Virgin Media O2.
The survey of nearly 1,500 workers in tech, those who have just left the industry, and women qualified in sciences, technology, or math, also found that a “tech bro” work culture of sexism forced more than 40 percent of women in the sector to think about leaving their role at least once a week.
Additionally, the study found 72 percent of women in tech have experienced at least one form of sexism at work. This includes being paid less than male colleagues (22 percent) and having their skills and abilities questioned (20 percent). Almost a third of women in tech highlighted a gender bias in recruitment, and 14 percent said they were made to feel uncomfortable because of their gender during the application process.
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In my experience, most discrimination is subtle. For 18 months, as the only female sysadmin on a team, I was routinely left off of important email chains, “forgotten” to be invited to critical meetings, not given access to important tools to perform my job, and asked to perform secretarial duties for my male counterparts. Any suggestions I made were met with “thanks for the input, but we are going in a different direction”. Weeks later, one of the males would be praised for coming up with the same idea i had proposed earlier.
We have multiple trainings telling us how not to be overtly sexist. What they don’t cover, is the common micro aggressions that are easily overlooked. Were my coworkers overworked? Yes. Do things get overlooked? Yes. Can you forget one person on a team of 5 for 18 months straight? No.
I’ll bite. This sort of ultra-shallow analysis fails to explain why the sexism of software developers today is apparently harder to overcome than the sexism of medical doctors and lawyers was decades ago. Somehow women managed to break into those fields, so that in the present day almost 40% of doctors and lawyers (and more than half of medical and law students) are women. I don’t see a consensus on what fraction of software developers are women (presumably because there’s no official license to be a software developer) but the numbers appear to range from 10% to 20%. That’s what the fraction of women lawyers was in the late 80’s, and I think it’s going to be hard to claim that today’s software developers are better at excluding women than 80’s lawyers were.
I believe that the claims about sexist treatment are real - even if software developers were much less sexist than average, one woman in a group with nine men would experience more sexism than she would in a less unbalanced environment. I don’t believe that sexism is what keeps most women out of software development; if it could do that, it would have kept them out of medicine and law too.
The question to me is what happened in the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in women no longer going into CS based fields?
Why is it that developers used to be 80-90% women, whereas computer engineers was the male dominated field and now IS and IT are all functionally male fields?
That sounds like an easy way to identify bottom performers.
Except, unfortunately, in the business world, some of the most well-promoted people are those who do almost nothing and take all the credit for themselves, who tend to be the exact kind of people those articles describe.
We don’t have as many safeguards against sociopathy in career-building, it seems, and the whole stupid fucking game seems rigged towards the interests of narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths, especially with the frequency they are represented in the C-suites in the US.
So these misogynistic chucklefucks often rise to the top.
