I’ve been try­ing to avoid too much sar­casm when post­ing on this blog, but I have to admit I was tempted to title this post “Really?!” I’m includ­ing a sum­mary of two arti­cles that seem to be try­ing to advo­cate for more women in IT, but are just miss­ing the point about why.

These arti­cles came out at the begin­ning of the month, but they are a part of a trend that we keep see­ing in the media. The first arti­cle comes from Brier Dud­ley at The Seat­tle Times: Face­book mes­sage: Girls, too, can do com­put­ers. Okay. So far so good. Then the first line:

If video games can inspire boys to study com­puter sci­ence, per­haps Face­book can have the same effect on girls.

The arti­cle goes on to dis­cuss the fact that even though soft­ware com­pa­nies have been try­ing to recruit more women, there are fewer women study­ing com­puter sci­ence than in the 1980’s (was the inter­net even around then?). Face­book, how­ever is hop­ing to change that, or at least the women who work in devel­op­ment hope to inspire teenage girls who use the social net­work­ing site. Fair, but I still don’t under­stand the first sen­tence of the article.

The next arti­cle by Ellen Mess­mer at Net­work World reports on the Anita Borg Institute’s report that rec­om­mends that there be one viable female can­di­date for every IT job open­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, Mess­mer her­self seems uneasy with the idea, men­tion­ing more than once that this might seem like a “rad­i­cal idea to some,” and also makes the point that there aren’t that many female grad­u­ates com­ing out of com­puter sci­ence pro­grams. The report makes other rec­om­men­da­tions that should help to even out the play­ing field in the IT indus­try such as:

- Build a gender-balanced intern­ship pro­gram for tech­ni­cal positions.

- Use social net­works strate­gi­cally to increase the num­ber of female can­di­dates for tech­ni­cal positions.

- Revise job descrip­tions to reduce gen­der stereotypes.

- Insti­tute a blind resume screen­ing process to reduce the poten­tial for uncon­scious bias.

- Imple­ment dual-career sup­port mech­a­nisms when relo­ca­tion is involved.

- Hold exec­u­tives and man­agers account­able for reach­ing diver­sity goals and targets.

- Mea­sure and eval­u­ate your efforts to increase the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of women.

Both of these arti­cles present a very real prob­lem: there are far too few women study­ing com­puter sci­ence and even fewer in the IT indus­try. But shouldn’t we be ask­ing our­selves why? Per­haps we should address the real prob­lems that are keep­ing women out of the indus­try. Women don’t want to work in an envi­ron­ment where they are not heard or rep­re­sented or where they are harassed. Women don’t want to work in an indus­try where they do not receive the same oppor­tu­ni­ties or salaries as their male coun­ter­points. Don’t get me wrong, many women do work in these envi­ron­ments, and fight to receive the same treat­ment as men. Some women are thriv­ing. But it is hard to con­vince young women to will­ingly enter a misog­y­nist field that is dom­i­nated by men. So although there should be poli­cies in place to inter­view women for IT posi­tions, there should also be poli­cies that work to change the envi­ron­ment of the IT indus­try to allow for women to be as suc­cess­ful as men, include more female per­spec­tives and to for­bid gender-based hate speech and bullying.

By rachel on March 27, 2012 | Posted in IT/Game Development Industry 1 Comment