Research sheds light on attitudes holding industry back

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.

  • @[email protected]English
    30•1 year ago

    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.

    • Kbin_space_program
      16•1 year ago

      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?

      • uphillbothways
        15•1 year ago

        Men realized it was high paying with low barriers to entry and did shit like this (Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech) repeatedly until women felt like it just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.

        In order to keep barriers to entry for themselves low, they created barriers for others by being loud, forceful and unpleasant. It’s very similar to how other minorities were and are kept out of various fields. It’s not a new playbook. It’s not that difficult to figure out.

        Also, there has been a significant shift in the field since the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s when uber “nerdy” personality types were prevalent to the modern era of “tech bros” that is kind of the result of the same things and due to the same behavior.

        • Kbin_space_program
          10•1 year ago

          Except behaviour like that didn’t exist in my high school, where the IT and IS classes I took were again, almost exclusively guys.

          No one in the class gave a shit what gender you were, no one was harassed, but almost no girls had interest in it enough to sign up. This despite half the class being jocks who literally signed up for the class as an alternative math/science credit because they didn’t pass the grade 11 science / math class(es).

          My mother was in IT in the 1980s but left the field due to a combination of myself, siblings and being laid off due to the change from building sized servers to more modern ones. When she went back she didn’t have the credentials or knowledge to be more than data entry.

          Hell, I recall shop class in 9th grade was an even split, but suddenly in grade 10 it dropped off a cliff and became a sausage fest.

          The issue I can see is that for an unknown reason school aged girls seem to have been culturally dissuaded from IT and IS when the technical revolution in the 1980s took place.

          Taking one extremely isolated event that even in the event’s own history is unprecedented, and extrapolating it across the entire industry is wrong and dishonest. If it was as systemic as you state, then that fair would have always had that issue, not have it suddenly occur this year.

          • uphillbothways
            15•1 year ago

            You may feel that way strongly and want to reinforce your biases with anecdotes. Instead of argue with you in kind, allow me to provide resources going back to 2008 produced by very qualified women that come to similar conclusions. If this isn’t enough there’s sourced material in these and much more found elsewhere.

            The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology - June 2008

            Over time, fully 52% of highly qualified females working for SET companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures.
            …
            Hostile macho cultures. Women in SET are marginalized by lab coat, hard hat, and geek workplace cultures that are often exclusionary and predatory (fully 63% experienced sexual harassment).
            …
            The data show that, for
            many SET women, attrition rates spike 10 years into a career. Across the climates of science,
            engineering, and technology, women experience a perfect storm in their mid- to late 30s.
            …

            Athena Factor 2.0:Accelerating Female Talent in Science, Engineering & Technology - 2014

            In this report, we revisit the SET landscape—expanded to include Brazil, China, and India as well as the U.S.—to determine what has changed for the better and to offer solutions for what has resisted change. The good news: the pipeline of global female talent in SET remains rich and deep, with women being the majority of SET college graduates in many key geographies. They’re ambitious, eager to be promoted, and dedicated to their professions: 80 percent of U.S., 87 percent of Brazilian, 90 percent of Chinese and 93 percent of Indian SET women say they love their work. However, a sizable proportion say they feel stalled and say they are likely to quit their jobs within a year.The fundamental reasons haven’t changed. While no longer subjected to overt bias, women continue to face powerful “antigens” in SET corporate environments. However, our new data identifies newly revealed nuances.
            These include:

            • Hostile macho cultures. Women in SET are marginalized by lab-coat, hard-hat, and geek workplace cultures that are often exclusionary and promulgate bias.
            • Isolation. SET women no longer find themselves the sole female on a team or at a site. Yet they still feel excluded from “buddy networks” among their peers and lack female role models.
            • Scarcity of effective sponsors. Although SET women have sponsors, they don’t reap the benefits to the degree that their male colleagues do. The “sponsor effect” (the differential in satisfaction with career progression for individuals with sponsors vs. those without) is 22 percent for U.S. SET women versus 32 percent for men, 19 percent for Brazilian SET women versus 42 percent for men, and 21 percent for Chinese SET women versus 58 percent for men.
            • Difficulty with executive presence. SET women struggle to decipher and embody leadership attributes, and receive little useful feedback to correct this perception.
              …

            …
            (cont’d - 5k character count limit)

      • @[email protected]
        5•1 year ago

        Tech had a lot of women early when lots of manual labor was needed. Women were making and organizing punch cards, collecting output, and monitoring computers while programs ran. As computers got better the need for these functions was reduced.

    • Dark ArcEnglish
      7•1 year ago

      I feel like part of the issue is cultural. Just like Nintendo putting video games in the boys section of the toy store, Hollywood has made tech out to be a field dominated by anti-social, awkward, and frankly gross, morbidly obese, barbaric dudes that shower once a year. From Jurassic Park to NCIS, tech people are not “sexy” and are typically quite unsavory.

      Some of the newer shows have done better, as have the newer toy isles… and video games and tech do seem to be rebounding, at least somewhat (anecdotally of course).

      • @Aceticon
        2•1 year ago

        In my experience working in several countries in Europe it most definitelly is cultural, apparently starting by the proportion of women that get Software Engineering degrees (i say “apparently” because there I only know how it was in my homeland were I got my own degree, were women in the Software Engineering one were half the pupils).

        As for the work culture, as I wrote in another post the worst place of all I worked in actually had several women, mostly in low-level management, who were there due to gender quotas, were treated mainly as eye-candy by their own managers and were all over the place in competence (from “competent” to “seriously incompetent”). Worse than the “bro” culture is the one were a certain kind of manager gets a huge budget and is told to “hire 10% women”.