I have noticed this at every company I have worked at, as well as at hackathons and in college. 80-90% of people interested in this are men. Why is it like this?
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I did a little poking around to see if this could be answered factually. I found a lot of articles that could be cited, and many of those articles contained factual statistics. However, those statistics only proved what the OP assumes - that IT (and engineering and similar technical fields) are overwhelmingly male dominated. The reasons for this gender disparity were based on opinion and not cited facts in these articles.
So with that, I think I’ll punt this one over to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
This article has statistics but does not even attempt to go into the reasons behind them:
These articles all offer opinions on why there is a gender disparity in tech fields:
Technology’s Man Problem
Female IT professionals cope in a male-dominated industry
We Need More Women in Tech: The Data Prove It
Video games? Most girls and women find video games to be boring beyond belief so they go find real things to do instead, but some boys and men enjoy them and then they start tinkering around with the innards of computers and end up in the IT field.
SJW answer: something something patriarchy oppressing women something something prescribed gender roles.
Real answer: men are better at the systemic, logical thinking that is fundamental to computer science.
can’t you even apply a bit of logic to come up with a better answer? I’m far better than 99% of men at logical thinking (have the scores and degrees to prove it) but I find computers to be appallingly boring. I COULD do it, but why? They are just tools. Like hammers. Who cares? Kind of like cars. As long as it runs who cares what is under the hood?
Most probably the real answer revolves around autistic behaviors, which unfortunately afflict many more men than women.
I agree with Rigamarole. On the bell curve of STEM aptitude, the male mean is higher than the female, that’s why.
Sounds entirely too much like “men are smart and woman are stupid” as an explanation.
While I can certainly believe that more men than women have an aptitude or interest in IT the gender ratio seems far too extreme for that. Rather than simply accept it perhaps we should see if there are any other factors influencing who gets into the field and stays there.
I don’t buy that for an instant. There are plenty of careers that split unevenly among the sexes, and almost all of them pretty clearly began as either men’s careers because women weren’t allowed/it wasn’t proper, or women only because it was seen as work that was beneath men. Regardless, men have been the gatekeepers of who was permitted to follow what career until relatively recently.
I find it hard to believe that “women just aren’t as good at complicated math-y stuff because biology” is a more readonable answer than “fields dominated by and enjoyed by men continue to encourage “boys club” mentality, actively and passively discouraging women from pursuing them.”
There may be a degree of difference, statistically, between men and women wrt being able to accomplish science (though I don’t concede that that is the case), but I don’t think that that difference could account for the massive gender disparity in the tech world.
I’d say that men are simply more interested in “systemic, logical thinking” than women, not necessarily better. Even when men are terrible at it, they are often still fascinated by it; as I once heard it put, if a scientist finds some crank harassing them about their private theory that tries to describe all physical phenomena using basic arithmetic, that person will probably be a man.
Males are just as a group more prone to enjoy or be fascinated by things like working with inanimate objects and complicated logical/organizational systems, whether it’s for work or play. On the high level that means more men go into fields like programming, engineering and physics; on the more casual level that means there’s a lot more men interested in things like, say, sorting sci-fi settings according to their demonstrated firepower or coming up with explanations for contradictions in story canon.
And no, that’s not saying that there’s no outright sexism involved. It’s just that the sexism tends to amplify what would be a strong bias towards men into outright male exclusivity. Which is the problem with assuming that “fair” means “equal numbers”; in a fair system, there’s still be a bias towards men simply because there’s more male interest. It’s not fair to force men out or force women in just to make the numbers come out even regardless of the desires or happiness of the people involved.
I have worked with some very gifted female computer scientists, but there is no doubt that the field in general remains very male dominated. Curiously, thinking back, unless I have been working on a project alone there has nearly always been at least one female member of the team. But I have also noted to myself that this was something of a statistical anomaly. (In one place I was working with one of only two female programmers out of a total of 60 programmers in the company.)
There was a comment in a recent thread about the relative dominance of sporting skills of men over women at the very high end in sports that did not reward strength. One answer was that men seem to have a trait where they are more obsessive, and this leads to more men that train to the insane levels needed to get to the absolute top performance. No doubt that programming, and many IT related tasks does require a level of obsessive personality to be comfortable with the job. I am constantly reminded by my g/f of my inability to multi-task in comparison to her. Maybe many women just find that the area doesn’t fit what they want to do, and they are drawn to areas that reward a mind process that handles more concurrent tasks, and less so single mindedness.
Spamforbrains puts this thought in more blunt terms above.
One does suspect that there does remain a big structural impediment for women who are more drawn to the area. The very geeky male dominated environment isn’t exactly inviting for many. Which is a great pity. Having even one woman in a team changes the team dynamics in a significantly positive manner.
Women can find better careers. Most of the men in IT would have hard time doing anything more interesting and exciting.
Here’s a take from Kathy Sierra, a popular lecturer on technology topics, co-founder of the JavaRanch website, and author of a series of tech books:
Men tend to have distribution curves with fatter wings than women. It will surprise no one to learn that the tallest people tend to be men. But so was the shortest recorded person in history.
Which gender tends to dominate in the rough, macho world of Scrabble championships? World Scrabble Championship - Wikipedia
Who has a disproportionate number of bankruptcies, prison sentences, homicide victimization, homelessness, suicide? Team XY!
In less measurable ways (I will admit the following are impressionistic rather than based on hard data), who tends to win most Darwin awards, stay too long at Hotel Mama or become wholly engrossed in a hobby for 12 hours straight? The Simpsons: Stonecutters Song "We Do" - YouTube
None of which is to say that men are more put upon than women as a group, only that their traits & outcomes distribution curves have fatter wings on both sides of the curve. When we look at people who are 2 or more standard deviations from the mean, we’ll often find more men than women, whether they’re CIOs, drug-addicted hobos or meditating hermits.
Anyone know if autism is linked to greater use of the task-positive network and lesser use of the default mode network of the brain?
Ever since high school, I’ve also noticed a general tendency for teams to improve when they’re mixed rather than all-male. What factors might contribute to that?
Would some female posters offer info on how all-female teams tend to differ from female-majority teams with at least one male in them?
For one thing, each gender is prone to make different mistakes than the other. They tend to cover each other’s weaknesses when they are together. For another, many people tend to make an effort to act better around the opposite gender.
Not true, although some people do follow the following (i)logic:
- gamers are weird
- I am normal
- therefore Bejeweled 27, “The Victory of the Rhinestone Pony”, is not a game
Most of the people I’ve encountered who did that but not all were women. That’s without even getting into “why and how chainmail bikinis grew some coverage in MMOs”.
Happy to say that this is no longer true, in fact apparently the ratio has shifted in women’s favour. Maybe that will make a difference in future IT gender statistics.
It seems to me, anecdotally, that there are more women in design careers to balance out the disparity in technical jobs. Approaching a similar goal from different directions.
I’m a functional designer in IT and with the current trend that “people must be able to do everything”, my current managers are trying to get me to learn programming (I already can program, but I’ve spent the last 16 years systematically avoiding learning too much of the technical side - the technical side pays less, plus IME people who implement their own designs usually document from their arse if at all). A lack of IT-related degrees hide me from many statistics: I hail from ChemE, which in many countries is “the women’s Engineering”… why? Why do so many of us say “I want to design or work at factories that make chemicals”, but not “I want to design or work at factories that make gizmos”? Why are female engineers so common in Corporate Purchasing and so uncommon in Production? Every Corporate Purchaser I’ve met wanted to be a Production Engineer (heck, I’m a Process Engineer at heart), but nope, we don’t even get called to interview for those positions.
There are multiple choke points in the process of “having a woman become Technical Lead in an IT Project”, and each of them has its own whys and wherefores.
It’s interesting to see that in fields like medicine the male domination has been reversed in a few short decades, while in others, like IT but also philosophy (which I both studied in college/university) that hasn’t happened. It’s certainly not that the women in the field aren’t good. And I haven’t seen any notable sexism in IT, but then again, I’m not the target demo for it so that doesn’t mean much.
Now that people are freeer (freer?) than ever to choose their own education and career, it seems that slight differences in preferences between boys and girls get amplified along the way. And unlike most other fields, IT seems to keep reinforcing first impressions.