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Sep 29 2009   4:03PM GMT

The lack of Females IT workers



Posted by: Yusuf Salwati
Office politics

Why IT is one of those industries with limited number of female workers? Are female, naturally, are not technically oriented or do most females chose a career away from IT to avoid a male dominated industry?

Public perception of female IT workers is poor, the public in general don’t trust a female IT professional to handle their technical problems. Back when I used to work in a call center, most callers would feel uncomfortable talking to a female technician.

In my years in collage majoring in Management Information Systems, I observed that most female students would not excel in programming and networking classes.

Are females inherently inclined to deal with human and not machine, or is it the society who is assigning roles and responsibilities based on gender?

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JennyMack  |   Sep 30 2009   7:51PM GMT

Hi Yusuf,

This is an interesting question. I’m inclined to believe it’s a societal issue — even studies about women in analytical professions like science and engineering point to results that blame society rather than genetics. I have a feeling it’s the same principle here — seeing the IT industry as predominantly male may discourage women from pursuing careers there. This even follows to your point about women not excelling in classes on networking and programming — could it be that their learning styles were not being nurtured to if they were different than men’s, or that they were treated unfairly against a classroom of male students?

I can tell you that when I worked ResNet in college, I was the only female on the field team. Looking back on it, even though I thoroughly enjoyed everyone I worked with, I had to have a fairly thick skin to put up with some of the humor that my guy colleagues bounced around. I’m not saying it was bad — I’m saying it might not have been for everybody.

I’m interested in hearing what other readers have to say on this subject… thank you for bringing this to light, Yusuf.

- Jenny