Women in IT are on a 283-year march to parity, BCS warns It will take 283 years for female representation in IT to make up an equal share of the tech workforce in the UK, according to a report from the British Computer Society, the chartered institute for IT (BCS). BCS has calculated that based on trends from 2005 to 2022, it would take nearly three centuries for the representation …
20%? Extraordinary - in all the places I've been, it's never even got close to that. In my current place, where I've been for 6 years, through lots of staff turnover, we've had ONE out of a total of 15 members of the IT team. It's an engineering company, and still the entire projects, engineering, controls and IT teams remain 100% male now. Every single one. We have a long, long way to go....
In my experience, women in engineering have made up closer to 20% or sometimes more.
IT is less though, I agree.
However, non-parity of numbers does not imply discrimination. Different people enjoy different things. Some of the best engineers are women and it's great to have them on any engineering team. But they ate hard to find. Not just through lack of training, but genuine lack of interest. Engineering can often be boring and frustrating and it takes a certain kind of weirdo to enjoy that.
One of my best friends is the brightest and highest qualified engineer I know. She's a brilliant mathematician and has developed dynamics models for F1 and the robotics startup we worked for. Eventually she quit engineering because it was too boring and slow, she left to do charity work, and she is now going back to engineering again. Engineering pays the bills, but she doesn't really enjoy it.
So, forcing parity of numbers I think is foolish. To do so often requires unequal hiring i.e. preferentially hiring women regardless of merit. This is bad, because it makes it difficult to have equal pay, which is far, far more important.
"However, non-parity of numbers does not imply discrimination. Different people enjoy different things.".
Very much so.
"So, forcing parity of numbers I think is foolish. To do so often requires unequal hiring i.e. preferentially hiring women regardless of merit."
Exactly. A well-viewed YT video with a female CEO discussing this issue...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzmQVejR6a8
"Lack of interest" is a symptom of something else, though. It's not like engineering ability is conveyed by testosterone or something. Every woman I know who is in a technical field faced a lot of hazing just for being a woman in a "male space." A lot give up and do something else instead. The fact is a lot of IT departments are run as boy's clubs and they don't want girls in their treehouse.
I've not really seen that in the companies i've worked for. Admittedly I've only worked in engineering fields such as electronics, robotics, firmware, batteries, web dev, and nuclear fusion. Never "IT" per se.
Women I have worked with have always been treated very inclusively. But as I say, despite that it is hard to get to parity because women who enjoy working with machines are pretty rare. Perhaps because machines are emotionless (for now.. :|), and so anyone, male or female, with a lot of emotional intelligence may find them boring. This theory would also explain why more autistic people end up in engineering/IT than other professions, because we prefer working with an unfeeling machine that simply does what we say without judgement :P
IT does have a particular tree-housey effect though (see BOFH) of little dictators enjoying the power they have over others, and I can see how that could be polluted by testosterone. So you may well be right about IT departments. But engineering as a whole is a much more equal space in my experience.
《....BOFH) of little dictators enjoying the power they have over others....》
Power shmower... Its the defenestration that keeps it fresh.
Every deserving case flung head first through an open window to plummet to his overdue demise. Like napalm in the morning. Actually its better if the window isn't open.
Progress one window at a time.
The sad truth is the vast majority of system administrators (men and women) are pretty decent and highly ethical human beings. Unfortunately this cannot always be claimed for their employers or clients.
If this weren't the case they would long ago be pulling the buried heads of the likes Musk, Bezos, Zuck et al from the asphalt of their own carparks.
I'm not sure what you're insinuating there. If you're suggesting that I or anyone else in my team treat people less than respectfully, then you are dead wrong.
The only case like that which I remember from my past workplaces, was a manager who was overly touchy-feely with people. But he was a COO, not engineering or IT, and he was just as bad with the men as he was with the women. He was eventually fired, for his lack of competence as much as his behaviour.
Part of the problem is that there are some people who see a problem when it isn't there, but then get very angry and insulted (thus creating a problem) if they are told that the problem isn't there. How do you win against that?
Your comment assumes that women are naturally more emotional and interested in emotions and that the tech space is egalitarian because you have experienced it that way.
I can assure you that both of these assumptions are verifably untrue.
Also, the lack of true egalitarianism and the false pseudo-meritocracy of tech have a double effect where race is concerned.
@Orv ”The fact is a lot of IT departments are run as boy's clubs and they don't want girls in their treehouse.”
That’s simply conjecture based on your experience, not a fact. 30+ years as a programmer I have not seen ”hazing just for being a woman” in IT or Dev departments. I not going to claim that’s representative of the tech industry, it's just my experience.
”A lot give up and do something else instead.”
Is that true for women in IT? The figures in the article don’t seem to indicate that’s happening. ” Between 2018 and 2021, the proportion of women tech workers rose from 16 percent to 20 percent.” and ”94 percent of girls and 79 percent of boys drop computing at age 14”.
So 20% of tech workers are women is very close to the diversity you would expect, when only 22% of 14 year olds that choose computing are girls. The reason is not because women give up and leave IT it is because girls are just not choosing IT.
This is bollocks.
In my early 20's I used to meet up with a group of what would now be called "cybersecurity enthusiasts" and the group was split pretty much down the middle (one more bloke than women) and we'd take it in turns to organise venues for the meet ups...all of us worked in tech, the salaries were varied (they depended on the role a given person had at the time).
The thing that makes this whole "IT is a laddish industry" thing bollocks is that the men in the group would usually book venues that were subdued, relatively quiet and allowed for a proper technical discussion. It was the women in the group that were booking VIP rooms in strip clubs, S&M clubs and sex clubs for the meets (usually when there was some kind of cyberpunk or steampunk theme night) and the goal they had in mind for those evenings was taking one of the blokes home for some "extra curricula"...the blokes were traded around like pokemon cards (which for me, in my early 20s, was fucking awesome, once I'd worked out what the hell was going on, first time was a rollercoaster...I went home looking like Vince Clortho after being chased by a hellhound)...the blokes mostly were just naive nerds looking to talk about tech. The women were also nerds that wanted to talk about tech as well...but they weren't naive, they knew what they wanted, were able to free their minds up occasionally for something else as well...the blokes were the prey.
Never think of women as being weak or victims. They aren't. Women are just as capable as men at getting what they want. Where "laddish" environments are concerned...women can be just as raucous as men can be...on the flip side men can also be meek and quiet...it's same on both sides...the only difference is quiet hard done by women that are untreated fairly get designated as "victims of gender oppression" whereas men in the same position don't get designated as anything...they have to put up and shut up.
The whole gender bias thing just plays on how women think men see women...and because some men in power do think that, they agree with it. I don't. In my experience and throughout my life, women have never been weak.
Acknowledging that women are victims is just as sexist as making them victims in the first place, especially if they haven't even entered the industry yet...who wants to join an industry where you're treated like a victim from day 1 even if you have never been a victim and you just want to do your job and earn a living?
No, I don't think I do. I think people that think women are victims and should be treated as such need to spend more time around women. I'm a married man, my sentence has been 11 years so far...in that time, I have learned that my wife is as hard as nails...she has had 3 c-sections...anyone that opts to go through that, 3 times, having already been through it once and doing it twice more, is a fucking warrior.
No. Computing was an almost entirely female profession when it was done by hand.
It suddenly switched a short while after machines arrived, despite many of the now-redundant computers being far better equipped to program the machines.
While sexism may be declining, back in the 50s it was considered normal, and in some cases something to boast about.
"While sexism may be declining, back in the 50s it was considered normal"
I'm not so sure, I'm not old enough to have been there...but I do know people that were around in the 50s and some people that grew up then...none of them are what I would consider to be sexist. They seem to have a much clearer view on the differences between men and women however...and they typically agree on those differences.
What I would suggest is that what we think of as sexist has changed.
We see this sort of cognitive dissonance all the time. For example, when there is a rise in reported crimes after an awareness campaign...does that rise indicate that the occurrence of this crime is on the rise or does it simply indicate that the awareness campaign worked and more crimes that would have gone unreported are now being reported?
More people are aware of sexism these days, and more people report it. Does that mean that sexism is on the rise? Does it mean that campaigns to raise awareness are successful and previously unreported cases of sexism are now being reported?
It's easy to look at the number of reported cases today and come to the conclusion "if this is what is reported now, it must have been fucking awful in the 50s"..but the truth is, we don't know and we may never know...as time rolls on that time period becomes more and more abstract.
I find it hard to believe that married men that were married in the 50s treated their wives worse than married men do today...just because sexism wasn't treated as seriously as it is now, doesn't necessarily mean it was more common which is what your statement implies...it was just viewed as less of a problem and it was completely different times. The ratio of men to women was significantly different for example. These days, for people in their 30's/40's, there are more men than women....I'd imagine for the same age group back in the 50s, this was not the case. The actual numbers for the time vary, but when you average things out there were roughly 8 men for every 10 women. Today there are roughly 11 men for every 10 women. Again the numbers vary here, that is just an average. I would imagine that change in ratio does make things feel like society is male driven...simply because there are more men. With no other factors considered, that would make it 10% more likely that a man will be in a given role than a woman...these skewed numbers also have the uncanny ability to skew other numbers...like average salaries. I've yet to see adjusted figures comparing mens salaries to womens salaries that take into account the ratio of men to women.
There are tons of statistical anomalies around gender and I think all of them should be taken with a grain of salt.
There were women programmers in the 1950s because the current stereotype of a programmer that came in with the 1970s was not yet a thing, and they were more than secretaries.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-black-women-mathematicians-who-helped-win-wars-and-send-astronauts-space-180960393/
Certainly during the war women were more likely to do various jobs as men were away fighting, but the scale of war activities was less in the UK (and thr anglosphere in general) afterward, and neither lost the amount of male population in that war that they had in WWI, unlike say Russia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
That tracks with where I'm working now (and all my previous jobs, except one, where they retrained a secretarial pool as desktop support staff, who were great) - 3 of us out of a team of 60-odd in the ops areas. I think there may be one or two in the dev areas. A bunch more in servicedesk/level 1 support.
Only if you're on the Axis Ali Express, Banggood, Wish.com and TikTok etc side. The Allies will comprise Amazon, Apple, McDonalds, Netflix, Reddit etc.
The drones will be shot down (if they haven't exceeded their 3 minute flight time) by Chicken McNugget flak boxes launched out of Cybertrucks by the 31st Ronald McDonald Squadron...they have to hold off those drones until the new NVIDIA tanks roll off the production line after a 9 month delay and at twice the price you expected. Specs will be good, but not quite enough for some use cases...the high end model will constantly go out of stock forcing you buy the next model down, which is alright, but nowhere near as good as the flagship and weirdly worse value for money.
Having said that, earlier in the war we relied on tanks made by Intel, where every breakthrough was just a refresh of an older tank which ran hotter and slower.
Later in the war, it was necessary for the allies to push across a minefield in the metaverse, the mines were clevery thwarted by Colonel Zuckerberg and his platoon of legless virtual soldiers under cover of a Reddit and 4chan meme carpet bombing. Despite the use of rare pepes being deemed a war crime, the allies pushed on with them regardless.
These brave souls were known to go into battle dressed as metaverse civilians, to help them blend in...with their Homer Simpson, Doomguy, Peter Griffin, Lara Croft and Gandalf skins they were able to pass the enemy front line undetected. There was a touch and go situation where cover was nearly blown, but thanks to daring behind enemy lines airdrop, the Steam and EA loot crate division were able to drop in stickers and weapon skins to help them blend in again...following a policy of dropping skins that are "cool, but not too rare so as to blend in", the mission was a success.
Casualties were low but the field hospitals were packed with solders suffering from eyestrain.
My great great grandson fought in this war, but he got lucky, he managed to sustain a minor injury in the metaverse that took him out of the war with a medical discharge, he spent 6 months in a virtual field hospital recovering. His avatar never walked the same way again...his best friend came off worse though, he was captured and taken to a virtual PoW camp where he was forced to doom scroll TikTok until he revealed the location of his fellow soldiers. Despite liking a few posts, he never gave up the information. To this day he remains lost in the jungles of the metaverse...his avatar is presumed dead and has been declared MIA. To this day his family sit beside him in his Secret Lab Titan XL gaming chair with his headset on, hoping that one day he takes it off and comes home...his family refuses to switch off his internet in the hope that one day he'll speak again.
World War 4: Metaverse DLC man...fuck it's brutal.
Computers being a fairly recent development, which was staffed predominantly by women, and now staffed predominantly by men. Did that change take 283 years?
And what is this 'progress' towards a gender 'norm'? Sod off. Progress is the freedom of opportunity and people sort themselves into their interests.
"The fact that 94 percent of girls and 79 percent of boys drop computing at age 14 is a huge alarm bell we must not ignore"
Why? When 90%+ of the population stood in a field to farm the crops to survive then most kids needed to understand farming. But there are so many career options there is no need to funnel everyone into IT.
"Computers being a fairly recent development, which was staffed predominantly by women, and now staffed predominantly by men. Did that change take 283 years?"
If you had asked the question in the late 70s and the 80s you would have found many more women in IT - nearly all of them working in car-punch rooms transcribing data for input to computers*.
It all depends on what you mean by "women in IT".
* Later replaced by key-to-tape, key-to-disk, and then OCR or direct data input.
"94 percent of girls and 79 percent of boys drop computing at age 14"
That's because most girls mature faster than boys. We should strive to ensure 94 percent of boys do also drop computing by age 14, if possible (to help solve software bloat, security, and blue screen problems, among others).
"Why? When 90%+ of the population stood in a field to farm the crops to survive then most kids needed to understand farming. But there are so many career options there is no need to funnel everyone into IT."
No one is talking about funneling everyone into IT. Perhaps we need more people in agriculture to deal with these massive strawmen that keep getting posted on here, Eh?
In 2023 quite a lot of roles require at least some technical skill.
I agree that we don't need to funnel everyone into tech roles, however, the elephant in the room is not the number of women in tech...the elephant in the room is the skills gap in technical knowledge between men and women in general.
For some reason it is still acceptable for people to say "I'm just not that good with tech"...we all have those customers that say this...what is notable though, with these customers, at least from my subjective point of view, having served several thousand people over the last two decades...is that women are most likely to say this. I'm not sure why this is the case...but the ratio of "I'm crap" women to men is way off kilter...women are generally a lot less interested in sitting down and picking up technical skills...my wife for example...really not arsed at all...the older a women are, the less interested they are...conversely, the older men get the more interested they become...especially if they are still employed...older men seem to wring every bit of advantage they can get out of a set of new technical skills.
The only professional sector where this isn't the case is finance...women working in accounts etc are far more likely to be highly skilled with tech tools than men in the same profession. Women in finance are generally far more skilled with Excel, Sage etc than men in the same job.
Amongst my group of family and friends, it is far more likely that a bloke will come to me to learn something new than a woman. What's really crazy though, is that when women do come forward to pick up a new technical skill, they tend to retain the knowledge better and learn faster.
This is all subjective though, and I'm sure there are people here that will disagree for some reason. I will point out though that my subjective experience as a professional is 20+ years at this point and my overall subjective experience starts from when I was 10 years old, I've been providing some kind of tech support since that age...so 30+ years...and in that time there has been little change...it is getting better, but only the number of people "accepting lack of skill"...the ratio is still about the same.
We need to remove the acceptance that having little to zero technical knowledge is acceptable and that a basic knowledge is necessary (regardless of gender). That will balance things up a lot.
@AC
"We need to remove the acceptance that having little to zero technical knowledge is acceptable and that a basic knowledge is necessary (regardless of gender). That will balance things up a lot."
That is a nicely put together comment. I just wanted to add that years ago it was acceptable to say "I'm just not that good with math". Even had a young lad struggle to count money because he was used to everyone using cards
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Where I live we've now only got 1 male GP in the entire city and most of the vets are female too.... but no-one complains about that either.
We should be looking to equality of opportunity and not trying to force people to study/work in areas we think they should. One small group of women shouldn't be allowed to "IT shame" another group of women.
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More GPs are women because it is a thankless life in the salt mines helping everyday people and men want to be high paid private specialists; they also get preferences in residencies.
Women working part time as GPs is a sign of the double shift--women working two jobs because men refuse to do half of one aka doing their share helping to raise kids, and society doesnt provide the support needed.
More gender equity means more full-time GPS.
Yes, they don't say anything about representation in garbage collection.
It's that IT is almost always in an office, and (for a while) you could get a fair bit of money for being able to do it.
In my office (admittedly this is government) the women are mostly in management, or front help desk. I can see complaints about lower pay for help desk, but it's not like the managers aren't getting paid.
My experience is women face hazing in IT. I remember talking to a woman who was a cryptography expert, and who complained that a very detailed post she made on a professional crypto mailing list was responded to with...several marriage proposals. Guys in IT don't want women in their club unless they can view them as sex objects to attain.
I haven't seen hazing, but I have seen testosterone-heavy environments and I have seen (male) management who assume that the quiet (but very competent) female programmer isn't worth as much as the loud and confident males. I've seen talented people leave the business because of the environment and lack of recognition.
Where I work now things are better. We have excellent people who are respected for what they contribute. OK, the people are still more male than female, but I don't get the feeling that the women are talked over/not listened to. We're short of people in IT and driving good people out because of a "lad's club" environment does not help
Don't forget about onshoring, where corporations can bring their outsourced IT staff to the country and pay them marginally higher than minimum wage thanks to very low skilled worker going rate and (faux) shortage occupation discount.
Now take that huge student loan to get into IT so that you will never be able to pay it back.
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Especially primary education? Care?
You can find all kinds of examples where there's "imbalance", but the reality is, maybe people don't want to be forced around in to roles they don't fancy, just to balance a spreadsheet somewhere.
I don't think there's anything inherently anti-female about IT. My wife doesn't work in IT as such, but she works in a deeply technical role, and writes documentation using a markup language (DITA) and has a lot of 2D and 3D cad experience. She wants to do that, but not a lot of females necessarily want to.
Maybe we shouldn't go looking for problems where there aren't necessarily any. But I get it, it's easier to just blame soft targets and prattle on about nothing than actually tackle real issues affecting females today (or any other group, for that matter).
The nasty thing it subtly suggests is that 'success' is, in aggregate, showing exactly the same patterns of employment as men (or white men if we're talking about racial demographics). For instance, the largest source of the "gender pay gap" in unmarried single individuals comes down to working hours; I don't know if men choosing to burn up their free time in ruthless pursuit of money should be considered mark of personal achievement.
《The fact that 94 percent of girls and 79 percent of boys drop computing at age 14 》
These stats reminds me strongly of the situation with mathematics and physics which also hasn't changed a lot.
In chemistry there is an asymmetry between physical/theoretical (M>F) and organic/inorganic which is mirrored in physics eg theoretical v. astronomy whereas the balance is better in the life sciences (biochemistry, microbiology, physiology etc.)
The mathematical content and the lower relevance of interpersonal skills are distinguishing features of these dichotomies which may or may not be mutable.
As an aside I am curious what stats at 12 years, 14 years and 16 years look like as one post suggest a male developmental lag might account for part of the 94% v. 79% at 14 years. ie M@16 years ~ F@14 years.
I suspect cultural background does play some part. Certainly in this part of the world, Australasia, the vast majority of women in IT I have encountered have been (east) asian and mostly ethnic chinese. My guess is certain backgrounds are more supportive of female aspirations than others without becoming mired in pointless nature v. nurture arguments.
The BCS needn't be too concerned as their whole country is currently enduring terminal embuggerment by a self proclaimed world best practice government. In the ruins abacus operators will be overqualified.
I suspect that the backgrounds you name are supportive of getting well-paying employment. I'm not sure, though, how far that culture can hold out before being absorbed into the broader stream. Apart from anything else, smart kids will figure out where to power lies in the corporate world, and who gets to declare whom redundant. A co-worker, born in Asia, reported that a lot of her friends' kids were off getting law degrees and MBAs.
There's a very limited supply of zero experience junior management positions.
When they can't get a job in an oversaturated market those kids will be in trouble, they won't even get hired by burger flipping outfits. Who'd hire direct competition when you can get grateful art grads!
> 《The fact that 94 percent of girls and 79 percent of boys drop computing at age 14 》
The published report (linked to in the article) does not include this claim of Julia Adamson, focusing instead on the 16-64 age group.
I suspect the drop rate needs to be put into the context of just what is meant by "computing" and the drop rate of other subjects (STEM or arts); I wonder if someone was obsessed and lost sleep over pupils at my secondary school dropping the second foreign language to study computing GCSE subject...
just what is meant by "computing"
Exactly. To the vast majority of people - particularly noisy people, morons, and policy makers (but I repeat myself), "computing" is "anything electronic". So, that's everything from the IT Labourer changing printer cartridges to the theoretical algorthmic researcher. It's the same as saying "working in schools" covering cleaning the toilets to financial director of a 3,500-pupil academy. "I've got you a schools job. Waddya mean, you don't want to clean toilets? IT'S A SCHOOLS JOB! YOU SAID YOU WANTED A SCHOOLS JOB."
Where I work:
- Marketing 66% female (in charge of selecting nice stock pictures of happy young "diverse" people for our brochures).
- Human resource: mostly female (and instructing us to prefer female during recruitment process, preferably ethnically "diverse").
Not many in delivery, where the real work has to be done and customers kept happy. This is too hard.
Whilst I sympathise with women in the quest for parity with men, in more than just IT, btw, it is just not good enough. Replacing overwhelmingly white, privileged, middle and upper class men with white, privileged middle and upper class women should merely be part of the road to genuine equality of opportunity for everyone, whatever their sex, sexuality, race, colour etc. And, as has been said and upvoted many times in the above posts, 283 years is far too long to wait. Here in the UK we have seen what happens when over-privileged upper class women get 'equality' with over-privileged upper class men, and get the jobs that previously went to the 'right sort of chap' and they are just as crap and self entitled as the men were (and still are - watch the Covid inquiry if you don't believe me).
It's often too late to convince women to enter STEM fields by the time they graduate, you want more diversity in STEM then start teaching it properly in junior schools and even introduce simple tech and ideas around mechanics to kindergartners, make STEM subjects as mundane and run-of-the-mill as maths and English and then you'll get more diversity automatically.
Forcing diversity quotas and such like does not work as all you get are mediocre applicants who have no passion for the fields. If you're going to work in tough, well paid careers you need to have a passion for those careers, that goes for any career path, if you don't have people with passion then you will not get the results from those working in it.
It's often too late to convince women to enter STEM fields by the time they graduate.
I've had this rant before. It's too late to convince ANYBODY to enter STEM fields by the time they are APPLYING TO UNIVERSITY. For engineering subjects, if you haven't already been fiddling in it for at least half a decade BEFORE UNIVERSITY, it's too late. If you're going into electronic engineering, you need to have been building your own radios at 12 years old. If going into mechanical engineering, you need to have been stripping down motorbikes at 12 year old. If going into computer engineering, you need to have been constructing your own computer hardware and/or software at 12 years old. Entrance to university is too late to be picking up an engineering subject.
There are other subjects like this. Spend your teens mucking out stables on the way to going into vetinary care. Spend your teens growing plants on the way to going into horticulture. Spend your teens writing (probably very bad) fiction and poetry on the way to doing creative writing-y stuff. These are subjects where it is an expression of innate skill, interest, and aptitude, applying to university is too late to be thinking "I wonder what I'm interested in."
What's the gender ratio at the BCS?
And are these biological genders, because that is so 20th century. Do try to keep up.
If what you really, really want is numerical parity, sack blokes until you have it or force women to choose between learning IT and prison. Problem solved. Society fixed. Not difficult at all. I should get paid for this. Then you can start tweaking for the racial mix, which (shockingly) doesn't get a mention.
Men and women are paid the same.
If you have evidence of women being paid less than men for doing the same work then report it to the police.
There is a "taking a career break to have kids and then making your career not your top priority" pay gap. Obviously.
The solution to the pay disparity, if you want one, is to ban women from raising their own kids - for their own good, naturally. Any takers?
Obviously you'll have to force women to choose careers they don't want too, if you want 50/50 representation. Ban them from choosing teaching, nursing, etc.
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