Why Women Don't Like IT?
Ed Frauenheim of cnet put together an article on why women have trouble with IT. So I start talking, and before I know it I'm sitting in CNET's letters section next to one of RMS's rants. Good show!
It's a good article, and I'm pleased to see this subject is starting to be discussed more. When I wrote about this serious loss of women in computing (SF Chronicle, Sept2003, Paving the Way for Systers reflecting on the passing of Anita Borg and the impact of women on technology, I found a real dearth of discussion of this issue in the mainstream and technical press - it was viewed solely as a "woman's issue" relegated to the margins. Yet I received a great deal of email, both from women and men who have lived with this problem when the article appeared - much more than usually is received. And what they shared with quite striking.
It is not the long hours that dissuade women - for example, women in medicine are now at parity with men in most specialties, and I expect that to continue. Take it from someone who did an entire OS with her husband, working morning til night writing and programming with two children in school and pregnant with the third - long hours of work is handled by women all the time, especially by women with 2-3 jobs at the lower economic level. I think we tend to discount how hard women work for their families unless it is some high paying exotic job - but American women and women around the world have always worked long hours. This is a totally bogus claim, and ought to be called out as such by reputable journalists.
Unfortunately, the number of women who have 1) achieved in some area technically and 2) are free to criticize the power structure from which they benefit are very few. We all worry about blacklisting, and in a "slave", uh, excuse me, "ownership" society, a loss of your job can mean permanent career destruction.
Why do we discount women, or act as if they never contribute anything at all? Well, that's an easy one to answer. Women, in particular, find that a higher profile leads to greater risk - work denied, ridiculed, or outright stolen. Women don't and shouldn't risk as much - a woman's first priority from society's standpoint is to her family and community, and raising risk endangers family and community and is discouraged, all the Xena's or Lara Croft's notwithstanding. Any cultural anthropologist could tell you this one - it's Anthro 101.
And since women generally have less credibility with the public in technology precisely because women aren't supposed to "like" technology, as you wrote in your article, it's easy to get away with demolishing a reputation that is a priori unlikely.
It's not pretty, but it is pretty simple. Maybe it's time to just deal with it as such?