Infosec still (mostly) a boys club The infosec industry remains mostly a boys club. And while there are some indications that it's becoming more diverse, bringing women into the room continues to move at a glacial pace. Globally, women make up about 25 percent of the cybersecurity workforce [PDF], according to International Information System Security …
As many have pointed out, trying to solve the problem after the horse has bolted is the only answer ever offered to get more women into tech. You want more women in tech and science, as father to a daughter at Uni I certainly do, then how about we change society and the education system. ( I never said it would be easy answer! )
You need to get to girls younger, teach them about a more diverse world, that the world doesn't revolve around your looks, your weight, how to please a man, any of that bollocks, it revolves around how you see the world and what you wish to be as part of that world, no matter what it is. We need to stop the the mindless media from still berating women who want to take up things we simply still class as "not for girls", the only way to solve the gender inequality is to sort it out at the root.
When my daughter was born 20 years ago all we got given was silly frilly pink clothes, dollies and "My First Bikini Waxing Kit (tm)"! FFS! Society has to change and stop promoting this pathetic idea of boys need to have "My First Ethnic Cleanser" machine guns for at age 3 and girls get given stupid girly toys. My wife and I rejected all this, we refused to buy the silly girly toys until she knew she wanted one and nine times out of ten she never did, she always found more fun playing with toy cars, LEGO and more generic toys and interests, sure she had a short term love of Barbie that lastest about 2 years and she was done. She grew up with a love of learning, writing and the outdoors. She didn't go into sciences but is studying geography as all the trips we went on a family during her childhood we constantly showed the vast array of different landscapes across the UK, she took up geography as she loves understanding how the land we live in works and how we intereact with it. She still rejects "girly" things, she's proud to be a woman but also very aware that she's her own person who can have any interests she likes and it's none of anyone else's business.
We have to start promoting a more diverse world from the second children are born, not start pidgeon holing them the second we see that have a willy or not when they pop out! Start treating children just little people, show them that the world will accept them no matter how they dress, how they look or what really interests them. Give them the cofidence to go out there and not care what others say or think about them, then maybe we'll start to change things.
I admit I only scanned through your post but got the gist. This "change from birth" idea has all been tried before, over and over, starting DECADES ago, and failed miserably every time.
You cannot deny the genetic programming associated with X and Y chromosomes. Boy and girl babies generally act and prefer things as boys and girls always do. Boys given barbies will treat them like toy soldiers, etc.. It's just part of "the difference" which I am _SO_ glad is there! So giving them "opposite" toys does NOT change their nature. [insert lame man vs woman joke] "a SEXIST would say...!" (could not resist, GG is HILARIOUS)
As a general rule women seem to want certain 'different things' from their careers than men do. Not as a specific, but as a generality. As such, women (apparently) often accept things from a job that men do not, INCLUDING lower pay, although in my opinion a manager who observes that a female employee is being UNDER paid should step in and correct it, because, RETENTION. So maybe THAT is "a fix", of sorts. (OK some labor law out there might already require it, but still).
So, like always,. you cannot up-front claim "discrimination" or "anti-diversity" or "we need more women" etc. until all of the facts are clear. Not that it is not worth pointing out, just not worth an overkill overreaction.
I think you're missing the base point, Bob.
Culture is all-pervasive. Historical sexism is perpetuated in school even today - the boys go and play football while the girls go and play hockey for sport. They're segregated by sex for most physical activity even before puberty and, certainly in my UK Public school upbringing, segregated by sex by school house, severely limiting the cross-pollination of ideas between the two sexes. The days of boys going to woodworking while the girls go to home economics are thankfully mostly behind us but cultural expectations still has a mother expected to look after a baby more than the father. That's codified in one example by maternity leave vs paternity leave law.
I guess the point I'm blundering towards is that it's not just about what toys you provide to children as a parent but about the culture that the child is exposed to.
You can argue that one gender has a fundamentally different nature mentally (I won't argue about the phsyical aspect but also believe that the physical aspect is becoming less and less important every passing year), but until you could actually test this out with children raised without the knowledge of a culture's expectations on them, we're never going to have an answer on what you want answering first.
There's also the idea that "nerds" as a group aren't famous for their social skills, which is absolutely something that girls need to learn to deal with. I've lived on both sides of the gender divide and there are things I can no longer do, - like going for a walk at night. That defensiveness is not part of the "nature" of being a woman, it is absolutely part of nurture.
"but until you could actually test this out with children raised without the knowledge of a culture's expectations on them, we're never going to have an answer on what you want answering first"
Well, it's been done. I know of an Israeli study and that the Chinese have also run a study into this: The findings were that girls tend towards certain interests and boys to others. It's not a clean separation, but it's more pronounced in the study group than was found in wider society, so society is encouraging girls to go into fields they might not naturally be so interested in, and the same for boys.
Why does this difference develop? Well, possibly due to physical differences. As a general rule: Females have better colour perception than males, for example, but males have better spatial awareness. This could be why girls are attracted to colourful things and boys are attracted to shapes.
This does not mean girls aren't as good as boys or vice versa, just that a basic difference in biology could affect the development of interests in things. However, that then leads to the environment a child is raised in redirecting that interest, and this is where nurture can override nature.
In the example of the daughter gravitating to geography: This is a child exposed to changing (and likely colourful) landscapes and parents who were, apparently, interested in such things. Hence child showing similar interest and opting to go into that path of study. Yes, parents can have unintended influence over their child's development - who would have expected that?
Another case I know to: Three daughters to a teacher and a firefighter with an interest in mechanics - One daughter entered education and is a Chemistry (or STEM) teacher, another works for Rolls Royce engineering as a design engineer, and the third is a watch repair specialist.
The main thing is if the child develops an interest and has an aptitude then they should most certainly be encouraged. Hell, just being interested in a subject should be encouraged: It's always good to learn things, even if you aren't that good. Just don't give false hope by false praise: If they're terrible at playing the violin, then they shouldn't expect to become a concert violinist. But if they can spot the difference between two chemical mixes just by the slight difference in colour...
I would appreciate a link to a good study on the subject. It sounds like an interesting read.
My main question in response, however, is how extreme the split was. Even if only 40% of girls would be interested in pursuing a STEM field would indicate that something is pushing women out of infosec when the actual split is 25/75.
I wholeheartedly agree with encouraging aptitudes (as long as that aptitude isn't in being a serial killer or something similarly heinous), but speaking as a trans woman, I know how much being open with the world about my real interests would have been punished by what passes for culture at school. I was forced into male interests and away from female interests by the mere structure of school (this wasn't even that long ago, 1998-2010. I'd have ended up in tech either way, but please don't try and pretend that there isn't cultural pressure on each gender to conform to the norm.
"cultural expectations still has a mother expected to look after a baby more than the father"
That is just not true. Ask any member of Fathers for Justice.
When it comes to kids and childcare, fathers are often discriminated against. Like not being able to stay at the hospital after his kid is born and only being allowed to visit his wife and baby during visiting hours.
Swimming lessons are another example. It's ok for mums to take their boys into the boys changing room to change them, but it's not ok for dads to take their daughters into the girls changing room. I honestly don't care...but it is an example of sexism.
Similarly, the legal system over custody of kids is heavily biased in a woman's favour.
Not one woman I've spoken to that harps on about equality, would change the legal system to be more balanced. Which is sexist.
On the point you've picked out, I'm not sure where you see the contradiction between what you said and what I said.
The cultural expectation is that the mother will do more in-person childcare - in the hospital, at swimming lessons, over custody all make it more likely for the mother to spend time looking after the child and then perpetuate the expectation.
Rubbish.
I don't expect my wife to pull more weight than I do with childcare, nor do any of the dads I know. There are way more stay at home dads now than there ever have been. Which I believe is contributing to bigger problems than we realise.
Kids do better if their primary care giver is their mum. That's a fact. Nobody can deny that...ask Jeffrey Dahmer.
But confusing a scientific fact with a cultural norm is a grey area to say the least.
Not being able to go for a walk at night has nothing to do with gender. It's entirely down to the area you're in.
Go for a walk at night in Clapham (a known rough spot) and you're more likely to encounter trouble (regardless of gender) than somewhere like a small town out in the middle Surrey. It's common sense.
Should everyone feel safe out for a walk a night? Yes.
Is every area in the UK safe at night? No.
Is every area, everywhere safe at night? Fuck no!
If you go for a walk at night in an area known to be dodgy at night, the risk is entirely yours. It has nothing to do with being a man, woman, alien or otherwise.
A friend of mine was attacked at night in Croydon outside a pub (another known ropey area) many years ago for absolutely no reason, it was just some random lout passing by that wigged out, his neck was slashed...he survived, thankfully...but does he blame it on him being a man? Fuck no. He was attacked because he was out late at night in a shitty area.
Real quick: I'm one of the girls of this generation. While it is absolutely important to rethink the way we restrict children to gender roles, I'd also like to consider why we think that "girly interests" are so completely incompatible with getting into STEM, or sports, or dinosaurs for that matter. I know that it's important to get more girls into STEM (I am one!), I need to push back on the idea that you do that by rejecting all traces of "girly shit", because that also leads to people acting like girly things are inferior. (See, in your own message: "silly girl toys", and treating toy cars as an inherently "better" and more valuable interest than girly dolls.)
I don't know how to phrase this coherently, and I do think the way you raised your daughter is brilliant and you should be very proud - I just want to highlight that masculinity is not inherently better, or more compatible with STEM fields.
Signed,
My reason for switching to Linux was to make my whole desktop purple.
Why would you expect women to make up a greater percentage of the IT technical workforce than they do the Computer Science undergrad roll?
In the past, when we've advertised a technical role, almost all applicants were male (and often none of them had the required skills). It's not that people won't hire females, it's that there are almost none applying. We need more IT workers, and only a fool would fail to hire a qualified candidate based solely on gender.
If you want to have 50% female IT workers, then get females to take IT courses at university, and play with Linux boxes at home to learn the other stuff that the university doesn't teach you. Currently, there are far more teenaged boys looking at coding as being 'fun' than there are girls, and that moves up the chain. But maybe, on average, girls just find coding as interesting as boys find nursing, teaching, and General Practice (professions with an even worse gender skew in the other direction)
Yeah, this is the root of the problem.
My electronics degree was 99% male. The single female dropped out after 1 year because she didn't like the maths (she seemed capable of it, just didn't like it).
There is a geeky male culture that has created male sub-populations spending virtually every hour of the day attached to a computer. As a result, they end up understanding computers very well.
Now there are girls who have done much the same thing, but not to the same scale.
If we are going down the line of "we must pay them the same (even though the other group has more experience), offer the girls flexible and work from home options" well fine, I see the logic, but that's essentially the line of preferential (not equal) treatment.
I remain of the opinion there is little that stops women being excellent in the IT field. Many are. But the initial career decision and lifetime experience is a difficult problem to solve without significant structural changes in the school systems.
Research has shown that the more egalitarian a given society is, the greater the effect of men and women self-sorting into stereotypical gender interests.
If the difference is supposed to be that from birth males are more trained toward STEM and females toward other fields, one would expect that the more egalitarian societies to have the least disparity in numbers between men and women in various fields of endeavour. In reality, the opposite is true. Women that feel the least external pressure in terms of selecting a vocation are the most likely to go into stereotypically "female" fields.
In other words, it's not societal pressure that keeps women out of STEM fields. It's societal pressure that pushes them into STEM fields (this article being but one example of such). If an individual (of any sex, race, etc) wants to pursue a STEM career, that's fantastic! But if he or she does not want a career in STEM, that's fine too. You can't go around trying to shape people's interests from birth forward because you have some silly idea that the numbers should be about equal in both. Let the individual life his or her life and decide what he or she wants!
Case in point: in the former Soviet Union and parts of the Middle East such as Iran, women are happy to study "traditionally" male subjects such as engineering and computing and go on to find jobs in the field.
Maybe these Californians with a guilt complex should study these societies more?
Any woman who wants an IT job can get one, be brilliant at it and get raises and promotions just as fast as any man. I've seen it in my very closely related field, even to the point of later working for females I trained when they first started with the company.* If a woman has the skill and desire to succeed in a STEM field, she will.
And that is where the true "problem" lies. Not many women are interested in STEM fields to begin with, and no amount of repressive, I mean "progressive" bureaucracy is going to change that. About the only way to force a change in female representation in STEM is to march into the schools and tell the girls that they no longer have a choice in the matter, they WILL take classes aimed at a STEM career. And when that happens, I want a front row seat for the tar and feathering session when these girls and their families force the Repress.. there I go again, when they force the Progressives into a new career as a sticky chicken.
*And no, I've never been bitter about it so don't even go there. I've already climbed the greasy pole to manglement land and did not like what I saw, so I chose to slide back down again. Responsibility for others, 24x7 availability and spreadsheets on a fixed salary? FUCK THAT. I like things the way I have it now, just a lowly tech who earns an hourly wage fixing circuits, and when I clock out I am done and unavailable. I even work an off-shift, so half the time the only manglement I have to deal with is a lead tech. Heaven, as far as a job goes.
I was given to train my replacement at my old workplace. The person in question wasn't really interested - she was simply told to learn what I did and take over. She worked in IT after all, so she must have the skills, right?
I did my best and she did learn, but without any real interest she was mediocre at best, and she handed her notice in the week I left. She did not teach her replacement: They couldn't find anyone and she wasn't interested in teaching anyone even if they had.
So yes, it is important to find people who are interested else they won't really prosper, and that interest is something that can be nurtured, not forced.
In American high schools, decades ago, me and the rest of the boys had to take shop while the girls had to take home economics. In my school system today, shop is long gone and life skills (cooking, budgeting, etc.) is now mandatory for all students. Why not make programming (probably javascript) or web design mandatory? Starting with computers doesn't have to be as intimidating as STEM makes it sound, but it needs to start earlier than it does.
I agree, however, how did people in days of yore come to the conclusion that males would be better suited to shop vs home economics?
It's dumb to think that people decades ago came to this conclusion based on sexism alone. Mankind has existed for millennia and in that time a lot of wisdom and experience has been accrued. Do we ditch wisdom and experience for the sake of arbitrary equality?
I'm not saying that women and men shouldn't be equal...but we should acknowledge that men and women differ and that at times that makes a difference.
If we decided that literally anyone should be able to become a lumberjack just because they wanted to, should we accept that a 5 foot 6 woman with no upper body strength is equal to a 6 foot 4 muscular bloke?
I'm all for women being treated equally, but any logical person can see that equality of rights is completely separate to equality of ability.
"It's dumb to think that people decades ago came to this conclusion based on sexism alone."
If not pure sexism, then what? It's not like non-muscular kids went to home ec and muscular ones went to shop. The distinction was made based purely on the sexually defined roles of the time. That is the definition of sexism.
Your attempts to make this about some mythic male ability in real life fail because the range of abilities for males and females are, basically, save for childbearing, the same. And we're talking about education, not jobs.
Your lumberjack example reminds me of Monty Python's lumberjack who sings:
"I wish I'd been a girlie, just like my dear ma-ma."
how did people in days of yore come to the conclusion that males would be better suited to shop vs home economics?
SImple: traditional roles at that time were more suited to success than non-traditional ones, though in modern times men and women do not rely on one another in "traditional roles" that way because we no longer seem to NEED that 'family model'. Sadly it probably made the divorce rate higher as people (in general) no longer seem to NEED a marriage for a family to have success.
100+ years ago food preparation was STILL a huge time consumer, and 'heavy labor' (ditch digging for example) was still done the hard way with shovels. So guess what the curriculum taught young boys and girls? SURVIVAL skills!
100 years later that has changed somewhat. Even when I was in Junior High (70's) there was occasionally a "boys cooking" class available [I left that district before I could go there, and I had signed up for it before we moved]. And both shop AND home economics were electives when I was in high school. Maybe it was not like that everywhere, but you have to understand that the world of 100 years ago was really NOT that long ago in terms of human history.
And traditional male/female roles existed because it was MORE SUCCESSFUL that way.
No it doesn't. Thinking that every man 100 years ago was a wanker, beat his wife and treated her like shit is naive.
The truth is, none of us were there and unfortunately the historic record is more likely to have instances of negative treatment of women in it, than positive ones.
Even now, how many women go on TV just to tell you how amazing their husband is? I'll wait. That's right, none. It's very rare for good treatment of women to appear on public record. Now how many women go on TV to talk about how badly treated they've been? Attacked at night and so on? Quite a few...but that doesn't make them a majority, nor does it suggest that the world has a serious problem every man attacking every woman at will.
We decided that because men make better lumberjacks, they must also be better at fixing the machinery, and made it so over the centuries. Historically, men take riskier jobs because birth control is hard and women were pregnant more often. Just because something has been baked into the structure of societies does not mean that it is correct. Practical medicine and computing were women's jobs before they were men's, remember.
"In my school system today, shop is long gone and life skills (cooking, budgeting, etc.) is now mandatory for all students."
It's long past time when life skills were taught. Budgeting is huge and should be a mandatory class the last 2 years of school. Cooking is another good skill to have. A very good meal can be made at home for pence. I've been trying to relearn all of the lessons my gran taught me about canning and preserving. Buying in-season and "putting food up" saves another chunk of change.
At the same time, the manual arts should be taught as well. Shop classes, basic electrical, etc. They are also life skills and if you know something about how these things are done, you have much less of a chance of getting ripped off by repairman/mechanics. You'll spend far less money on blinker fluid and having to replace so many muffler bearings.
Some exposure to programming in high level languages isn't beyond anybody. While many people won't be interested and just plod through to get a good grade in the class, it WILL expose more people and get to some that wouldn't otherwise be introduced to it at all. I mentor kids in rocketry. It's a bunch of fun to just build a kit and launch, but it can lead to physics, math, chemistry, mechanics and all sorts of other things. Just about every engineering discipline goes into rockets but the fun part really helps mask the sciencey stuff. The same could go for robotics as a way to sneak in programming. I spent a nice lunch talking to a woman at JPL that mentored kids in robotics in her spare time and we compared notes. She was told that girls aren't good at science in school and had the sort of personality that made her give them the bird and do it anyway. When I met her, her job was driving Opportunity on Mars.
"It's long past time when life skills were taught." AGAIN. I'll add that bit in for you.
When I were a kid, all of us did home economics. for the first two years, same as everyone did woodwork. We also had to study a language (French or Spanish, but we weren't given a choice - we were assigned). Maths, English: They were compulsory, too. So was Physics, Chemistry and Biology, even geography. Third year and we got to choose the subjects we would study for 'O' levels. Or CSE if we weren't that good (or there weren't enough students to do the O level course - hence I did CSE computing, got an 'A' and wanted to do A-level but they had exactly 1 student of sufficient skill and interest... me... so that was off the books). Then those of us with good grades got to stick around for 'A' levels if we wanted.
But we all started out learning a wide range of subjects, including how to cook, and how to measure and cut wood. Add in maths and another language and you have the foundation of life skills.
How things have changed, eh?
If you're in the US, the abandonment of shop and home ec classes was a consequence of standardised testing and Leave No Child Behind policies! I can't find the article now, but there was a very interesting history of the American school system tying it to the current dearth of plumbers, electricians and other tradespeople.
Starting with computers doesn't have to be as intimidating as STEM makes it sound, but it needs to start earlier than it does.
Right. All grammar schools should teach the basics of computer programming (procedural thinking, "if" statements, basic input and output in console mode) as early as 3rd or 4th grade, once the kids learn long division. It should be a mandatory part of the math curriculum, assuming that it is not already there. And for those who can do it already, an "advanced" track separate from the others (self-study with individualized goals).
Maybe Python for beginners (I learned BASIC in high school but I think Python would be better) and Javascript for the more advanced 3rd/4th graders (or languages like C++ if they can 'hack' it). Learning programming should be like learning Algebra, which should also start as early as 3rd or 4th grade [once basic arithmetic has been mastered].
Starting with a "hello world" type of programming assignment, to get used to the environment, and then quickly moving to asking for console input and then reacting to it. ("enter Y or N" "You pressed Y"). And so on.
Sad, but true...but not the way you think is.
Our education system in the UK starts when kids are around 2-3 years old but doesn't become mandatory until 5 years old.
I think you'll find that the kids that struggle are the ones that didn't go to nursery school and those kids are predominantly migrants with a side helping of kids from poor families that can't afford nursery or aren't eligible for a free place. In most areas, you are only eligible for a free nursery place if both parents work. Otherwise you have to pay for it.
Typically, kids that attend nursery are usually able to read to a very basic level (simple words, numbers up to 10) before they turn 5 and have 2-3 years of phonics teaching under their belts. My youngest started nursery in September and he can already write his name and read basic words.
Not going to nursery doesn't preclude the kids from learning this stuff, as they can pick up a lot of this if you read books to them at night and make your own flash cards etc...it's not complicated stuff...where it falls over though, is lack of available free resources...I mean how hard is it for the government to put a free set of flash cards online that you can view on a phone or have printed at a local community centre etc?
My oldest is turning 8 in March and he can already write very basic code...I wasn't particularly hands on with my approach here, I just introduced him to Minecraft at a young age, which lead him to watching Youtube videos on Minecraft where he learnt about mods. Obviously, he wanted to mod his own Minecraft installation so found videos on how to do it, which he followed...many, many times because he couldn't get it right for a while...all I had to do was fix his banjaxed Minecraft install every now and then.
The only firm hand I've played is that both my sons each have their own PC and both machines run Linux. Yeah, yeah...I know "you must be rich" etc etc etc...but you'd be wrong...their machines are nothing spectacular, and they were cheap. £100 each tops, but you can go even cheaper.
They are 4th gen i7, 16GB RAM and a 128GB SSD in each. Both have integrated graphics. These machines are more than enough for a couple of kids to learn the basics on and they're readily available on eBay. A basic 1080p screen can be had for as low as £20. Peripherals I just had lying around in my crap stack that I accumulated over years of my own upgrades.
The reason I went for PC's and not laptops, is because my oldest started out on a laptop and they're not very toddler proof...you will lose buttons off the keyboard and the hinge on the screen will get fucked. Better off with a cheap PC that you can have out of the way in a cupboard or something and only have the monitor, keyboard and mouse visible. They can bugger those up all they like because they're cheap to repair or replace.
For the price of around 3 Playstation games and a couple of pints of beer you can kit your kids out.
Both lads have used and spent considerable time using GCompris, which is an excellent open source learning tool for toddlers and young kids, which is a tool that is very similar to the sort of thing young kids in nursery are exposed to. It will also run on a potato. Any old shitty laptop you have in the attic that can run Linux will run it just fine.
Incredibly cheap, incredibly low effort. You just fire up GCompris, sit your kid down in front of it and spend an hour with them messing around in it. You don't have to follow a strict schedule with the games in it, just let your kids play what they thing is fun at the time. They won't even know it's essentially homework!
"(I learned BASIC in high school but I think Python would be better)"
I learned BASIC, but any language is fine. It's more about the process than the syntax and learning how a program is designed. Just being able to whip up a simple program to do a three-point interpolation is useful. I mention that as I did one at a job I had where I needed to 'cut' antennas to customer specs and all I had was a table of frequencies and element lengths. Being able to provide a very specific antenna was something we were known for after that. All we had to do was stock the sub-model with the longest parts and cut them to size. It took about 15 minutes and cut the company's inventory down quite a lot.
Scratch is really good for getting kids to start on the concepts, especially if you're starting in third or fourth grade, when reading is probably not yet instinctive for kids. It's largely visual, which is also good for teaching the metaphors that make it easier to grasp programming. (And also, are we using different grading systems? Long division is more of a sixth grade thing in my hazy memories of school days)
You're kind of right. The grammar school only approach is a bit shit. All kids should learn to code...no matter what level they are able to reach because even simple coding knowledge is useful and puts them ahead of pretty everyone before them.
I think Python could be an interesting starting point, but I think Javascript would be better because it doesn't require any kind of special environment to practice with, just a text editor and a browser. The key thing with programming, is the kids need to be able to do it at home if they want to...one of the cornerstones of programming is that practice and application is more important than the theory if you want to produce more generally skilled programmers.
Think about what we had as kids that doesn't exist now. In the 90's we had endless TV shows that mixed in programming and technical thinking with games. We had magazines with loads of code in that we could type up ourselves. None of this exists now...instead what kids have is stuffy curriculums, classroom led learning and other such crap that sucks the life out of programming.
We learnt because it was fun and interesting, we didn't learn because our teachers told us to. There was little to no structure to it at all...yet we still have coding skills.
I think programming needs to be implemented as part of another subject like maths or science and part of the homework should be to type up a program and run it. During classes, some time should be dedicated to "sandboxing"...weirdly, we did this at school (albeit very limited) and this helped me out a lot. I had a dedicated hour a week, where I was sat at a computer with a programming sandbox that I could bang away at until it did something or, we could go up to a box of code samples on laminated sheets that we could just type up and run. After a while, a few of the kids would go to the box and get a few code samples out and mix them up...what happens if we take the output of this and put it through that? It comes naturally after a little bit of time.
Python should come a little later in school at a point where you can separate off the kids that are doing well at it and have them in a class of their own, and put the slower kids in a different class to keep them coding, but not overwhelm them.
What would really help is if games consoles came with interpreters on them for kids to mess around in. Everything we had as kids was basically an interpreter, a BASIC interpreter. That seems to be lost to time now.
When I went to middle school many decades ago, in the early '80s, all the boys and all the girls had to take wood shop, drafting, cooking, and sewing. The idea was to expose everyone to everything, and to destigmatize the "girl in shop class" or "boy in sewing class."
That was in seventh grade. In eighth, the students got to choose, and even though all of them had both the stereotyped "male" and "female" classes the year prior, the boys and girls self-sorted when they had the choice. My eighth grade wood shop class had zero females in it. I can't tell you how many males were in cooking or sewing classes, as I wasn't in either of them, so I don't know.
I suspect (/hope) that if you repeated the experiment today, with parents who grew up with a more relaxed environment, you would get very different results. My parents would have been very happy for me to take shop classes, and had they existed at my school, I probably would have. My grandmother, on the other hand (a parent of high schoolers in the 80s) would have pitched an absolute shit fit if a son of hers tried to take sewing or cooking classes. Or worse, a daughter in a "boy's class". I would definitely put the self-sorting down to parental influence.
(also, not to make you feel old: I had to look up what "drafting" meant in this context, because I've only very rarely heard of it.)
Although always worth checking into why there is a skew, it seems to me that people always jump to the conclusion that women are being held back or super under-payed in every single industry/instance. Perhaps this might just be something that many women just do not want to do, or at least not as a long term profession? It's been known in academic circles for many years that men and women tend to be attracted to different professions and have different interests. Just something to consider as an alternative to the standard go-to answer.
The thing is that one of the factors contributing to women "choosing" underpaid professions, or to leave work, often do so because of cultural forces. It's still the "norm" for the mother to take time off work, to be the first number on the kids' emergency sheet, to take time off to care for aging relatives (less so in Western countries, but still) and to be the one to stop working if that becomes feasible or necessary. Even when it's a matter of different job choices, those choices are often being dictated by the force of gender roles. (Hence the focus on flexible work schedules, and paid time off - so women don't have to choose between quitting and being seen as failures as mothers.)
I said to one of my daughters when she was about 5 (she's 11 now) why don't you become a footballer. Her answer was "It's a boys sport" and trust me that didn't come from me.
It came from her friends, school and society. She got proved wrong this year on that one. No matter how hard you yourself try as a parent to change things there are many others that keep pushing these societal expectations of what girls and boys should or should not be doing. That is the problem. Until that changes then this sadly won't change.
As for STEM stuff you do really need a prior disposition. It's not something you just move into or learn and you don't get that prior disposition unless it's a valid option. How many girls get meccano or lego rather than just dolls as young children?
Until these issues are dealt with it's sadly going to be a male dominated industry. On the plus side and there aren't many, things are slowly changing from what I can see.
"Her answer was "It's a boys sport" and trust me that didn't come from me."
It is often cultural. It does start at home, though. Even if kids won't listen to their parents as teenagers, they do pay attention when they are younger. I know a couple of women that are a dab hand at auto repair. Their dads encouraged them by having them help him work on the family car. It wasn't about the mechanics, it was founded in spending time with a parent. If teachers and other authority figures also encourage interest in STEM topics when kids are young, the message gets embedded. It is likely a good idea to stomp on bad information they get from their friends. There are plenty of great examples of women in science. I've met a bunch of them and there are many more I wish I could have met (Marie Curie and Lise Meitner are two examples).
The interesting thing with that is that there's a difference between "girls just inherently aren't interested in boy things!" (which is rampant in the comments on here) and "girls want to be like other girls, so they do things they see other girls doing" (which has been both my observation and experience.) It's a self-reinforcing cycle; it's too scary to get into a field dominated by men, so a lot of girls leave, so it's even more dominated by men... I love tech, I love FOSS, I love software development; but I'd have been much less scared of getting into it if I hadn't felt so alone. Which is why getting more representation is important!
I'm a female techy type person and provided my 2 nieces with computers from a very early age, they are now in their 30's.
Whilst they enjoyed computer games and looking up stuff online, they are just not interested in the technical side; one is now area manager for a clothing store and the other works in a school nursery.
Some professions attract women, some don't. Just like some professions attract men and some don't. We need to have equality of opportunity not a forced equality of outcome. Raising our daughters to 'be anything they want to be' includes recognising that they might derive the same pleasure from doing someone's hair as we derive from fixing a technical issue or writing an elegant program.
Yes, we need to stop labelling work as specific to one gender (however many there are currenty; I've stopped counting/caring), encourage our kids to learn about everything to find what excites them and they are good at, so that they stand a chance of having a fulfilling job which they will actually like doing.
Of course beating into HR/manglement that they should employ people for their skills/personality rather than the package they come in, is always a good plan
Pre-1970's required either card punching (like a typewriter, kinda) and maybe even wiring changes (women with smaller hands may have been better suited for this).
The nature of the change was probably that "programming" became more "engineering" and less like "tech work" or "office work".
Do not forget that a woman invented COBOL, Rear Adm. Grace Hopper. (While in the Navy at the Orlando base, I saluted her once when she was still a Captain, having the need to go near her office for some reason).
"Pre-1970s required either card punching...."
It also required an ability to solve problems and think at different levels of abstraction, just like it does now. The card punching was not generally done by the programmers, but by cheaper clerical staff. Don't confuse the input method with the skills required to do the job. Maybe women are quitting infosec jobs because they tire of being patronised and belittled by their male colleagues.
Admiral Grace was indeed one of the primary movers behind COBOL. Since we are playing "fun games with history", let's ask the question, would a male engineer of that era have had the thought: "We need to make this accessible to people who aren't computer programmers"? This was one of the drivers behind the COBOL language design. It's fair to say no-one would build a language that way now, but we've had decades of learning since those early experiments in high-level languages.
"The thing is that up until about the 1970s, computer programming was pretty much entirely done by women."
It's an indoor job that doesn't involve any heavy lifting and much more respectable than anything that has to do with religion.
I liked working on rockets, but during the hottest part of the summer, I really could have been happier doing something else. The same went for the dead of winter too. The test range didn't have HVAC. I suppose the 'ventilation' part was about as good as it gets.
I think it was the home computer era, celebration of the non social "geek" heroes in magazines, tv and films.
That made it seem like being a successful IT person meant having no personal hygiene or social skills.
Before then IT was something for complex organisations who analysed their markets. and made sure not to make costly mistakes. "Move fast and break things" wouldn't have been welcomed at NASA in the 60's.
I will say most women I've met who are successful in IT are better than the men working at the same level.
1. In fairness, boys do that too. A lot.
2. Think of gender as a spectrum with big piles at either end, like an inverted bell curve - I find it's an easier way to conceptualize things. New pronouns aren't new genders, just new experiments in labelling sections of the curve.
The article says...
"It is human nature to support and champion those like you," Bailey said.
Could it be that women are attracted to industries where they don't have to interact with so many men?
In my view there's no single prong of attack to this issue. Everything starts with early programming in our childhoods and school friendships. Throw in some toxic masculinity or general boys vs girls BS and who would blame females from staying away from male dominated roles, *and* equally why would men choose to go into industries over represented by woman?
Male Nurse.
Male primary/early years teacher.
Male hair dresser.
Read those three lines and tell me you've no underlying bias of what kind of man would choose to work in those fields. Show me a man working in those fields who hasn't had their masculinity questioned. Sure not everyone does think this way, but enough do.
I'm a hiring manager in a tech industry. In the 25 years I've been doing this I've held hundreds of interviews, and iirc 2 were women. I can't hire who doesn't apply and where I work they would be treated with respect for their skills. Some of the best engineers I know are women and there's too few of them.
"Show me a man working in those fields who hasn't had their masculinity questioned"
I know a male nursery teacher. He's godfather to my son. He's also been the subject of complaints from parents at his nursery, not for anything he's done (he's an outstanding nursery teacher), but simply because he's a man, the only one on the staff. They weren't questioning his masculinity, I think - worse than that.
"Show me a man working in those fields who hasn't had their masculinity questioned""
My mother was a nurse for decades and confided in me that the vast majority of male nurses were gay. It's surprising as it's a very in-demand job and can be very high pay. After my mom retired she worked for about a year looking after some small children with rich parents. She travelled quite a bit with them and made a pile of money doing it. She was hired mostly due to her nursing background. If you are going to hire a nanny, a licensed nurse is a good way to go. Other wealthy parents might like to have a male nanny with nursing qualifications and a teaching credential.
I worked in entertainment for a number of years and male dancers were mostly gay. There's another odd situation. If you happen to like hanging out with lots of very pretty scantily clad women, being a dancer is a job for you. Certain jobs in the movie industry almost make being gay mandatory or at least one could come away thinking that. Lucky for me, sound, lighting and staging was primarily heterosexual.
One of my friends at school did ballet. One of my very-much-not-friends once accosted him with "Oi, [$name], you do ballet - you a puff?". To which he responded along the lines of "you do rugby. I spend my time getting my hands all over girls who can put their ankles behind their heads.
You spend your time grappling around with other lads. No, I'm not a puff. Are you sure you're not?" This provoked a brief fist fight, but since said dancer could literally lift a girl over his head, he more than held his own. (He also played a bit of rugby, but then it was Wigan, so everyone did)
"This provoked a brief fist fight, but since said dancer could literally lift a girl over his head, he more than held his own."
At my school we had a pair of ballet dancers visit from a major theatre and put on a performance for our theatre department. The guy was built like a tank and could lift the girl one-handed no problem. The tech crew took them to the beach and got them into roller skates and we got a huge telling off for that. Their teacher/minder freaked since an injury would have been very bad and neither of the pair had ever skated before. She would have been less angry if we took them out drinking.
I did gymnastics for a couple of years in school and wound up solid as stone. Went from there to just playing hockey in a local league since I too was labeled a puff for the gymnastics, but some of the best looking girls in the school were in that class and seeing them everyday in leotards led to many cold showers, but was well worth it. The teasing never ramped to fisticuffs. Everybody knew I played hockey as well so they figured I could take care of myself in a fight. I prefer women exclusively and always have, BTW.
Ridiculous.
Do hospitals not have emergency response? Do they not have the concept of things under attack? Are nurses not taught about disease vectors and threats?
Are women not able to get on in the armed forces because of the real military 'machismo' or is it just the pseudo bit they find offputting?
How many areas of IT actually expose one to any of those phrases? Id imagine your average tester, developer, web designer etc wouldnt know a threat vector from a dustpan and brush.
Do hospitals not have emergency response? Do they not have the concept of things under attack? Are nurses not taught about disease vectors and threats?
They do not, as far as I am aware, like to pretend that they are fighting wars rather than diseases. I think it pretty safe to assume that most "infosec" workers look this this chap.
Are women not able to get on in the armed forces because of the real military 'machismo' or is it just the pseudo bit they find offputting?
Yes, it's the pseudo bit. I imagine that women who enter the military expect to use military language and expect to work with male soldiers.
How many areas of IT actually expose one to any of those phrases? Id imagine your average tester, developer, web designer etc wouldn't know a threat vector from a dustpan and brush.
Quite possibly, but the article is about "infosec". Hut-hut-hut.
About 150 years ago in the UK, around half of miners were in fact women. A fair chunk were also children. The women were legislatively evicted from the pits after a bunch of prissy, upper class women got into a tizzy over the fact that these working-class women often worked topless, due to the heat. That push to take women out of the mines was considered progressive at the time.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/the-scandal-of-female-miners-in-19th-century-britain/
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/19thcentury/overview/coalmines/
No info on demographic balance but certainly sources referencing women working underground hauling coal that were legislated out of a job by parliament.
Your point, I presume, is that it would be unlikely to find equal numbers of men and women in jobs requiring physical strength. That's a fair point, but the corollary is that we should expect to find equal representation in jobs which don't require physical strength ... like information security.
I don't know the percentage of teenage hackers that end up in infosec careers, but I would bet the ratio of teenage boy hackers vs girl hackers is a lot higher than the 3:1 ratio in infosec.
Probably encouraging more teenage girls to be hackers wouldn't be the best way to address the infosec boys club, however :)
What we actually need if a way to get the women who are useless OUT of IT so we can actually see the wood for the trees.
As it is noone wants to be the one to sack the hopeless IT bod because its a female...so she gets shunted up to a Team Lead role where shes also useless and impedes her team at every turn but is out of harms way and ticks a box.
As a male but most certainly not part of the 'boys club' I saw it firsthand. The 'boys' in the club would do male things together especially play golf. Women were not invited.
I made it a point to support any women or ethnic minorities in my team. We would do 'team' things together with members of the team taking it in turns choosing a topic.
As a result, I was given lower than average reviews by my manager who was in the club. He was a useless software developer and an even worse manager. We all rejoiced when he left. Sadly he was replaced by another 'boys club member' who was even more misogynistic.
How can we overcome this? I tried and eventually called a 'spade a spade' to the MD when we were actively prevented from completing a project on time.
It worked for a few months. We were taken over by a US Multinational. Guess who was first out the door with the inevitable redundancies?
This tactic backfired on them as my team followed me out the door and we set up a company together.
The next five years (which ended in 2007 by the financial crash) were a blast.
Science used to say this, before science became The Science™ and turned to political correctness instead of, you know, the scientific method that was invented by dead white males.
This doesn't mean women are worse than men. They just do thing differently. The world would suck if they were the same, because women by and large balance out a lot of the stupid shit that guys do. For example: monomania. To be great in a leading-edge engineering field like IT securiy, you need a level of monomania that is unhealthy in almost every other aspect of life. Women are generally good at avoiding this sort of self-destructive behvior. Not always, but they're nowhere near the middle of the Gaussian distribution. Good for them! However, because people with the combination of intellectual capacity, strong work ethic, and crazy monomania are relatively rare and extremely useful, the laws of supply and demand say they get paid a lot. Therefore you wind up with uneven pay.
If it was just sexism, this could never work. You're pitting the trope that corporations are insatiably greedy and heartless (I'm not going to argue against this) against the trope that women usually get paid less for doing the exact same work. If the latter trope was even close to true, then the greedy corporations could very easily make more profit by hiring women instead of men and look great in the press at the same time. If this were true, nobody would hire men. I'm a man, I'm greedy, and I'm a bit of a prick, and I would never in a million years hire a guy if I could genuinely get a woman to do the same work for cheaper. I'd be like: "Don't let the door hit you and your overpriced Y chromosome on the way out, you smelly motherfucker."
We don't need more or fewer women in any field. We need women to do whatever makes them happy and fulfilled (STEM or not), not living their lives according to some academic twat's spreadsheet idea of what they think the world should look like based on nothing more than their secular religious faith.
We don't need more or fewer women in any field. We need women to do whatever makes them happy and fulfilled (STEM or not), not living their lives according to some academic twat's spreadsheet idea of what they think the world should look like based on nothing more than their secular religious faith.
See also: "But the slaves are happy picking cotton. Listen to them sing!"
"To be great in a leading-edge engineering field like IT securiy, you need a level of monomania that is unhealthy in almost every other aspect of life."
I don't believe that's true. I think because some early home computer successes came from that kind of person (Jobs, Gates etc) that it because seen as a requirement. Being able to take in a wide range of diverse information and see how it fits with the situation, the people and the culture is also useful in infosec.
Women in IT, public or private in my last 25 years in workforce told me they never never felt discriminated against. Same pay, same exploitation by the PHBs. Most of them were good at confronting peer idiots who were rare. However I notice a difference in volunteer organisations. Older women seem to be better managers of people. As one grandmother running an effective state Emergency Services unit put it, "We spent our lives managing people, from children to adult grandchildren". However, its mostly the blokes who pickup the chainsaws or are in the flood boats. The women prefer to carry the debris away or do situation updates on stroppy software.
Where local unit differences show gender role differences is the relative isolation unit locations. Usually the smaller country units that do messy jobs (vehicle accident cleanups, body retreival or bush fires) tend to be blokey, excluding males also if they are not in some kind of boys network. These were sometimes usually run by a dominating male with ego issues. The country units that do storm or flood jobs mostly have an even distribution of members,sometimes female dominated. The bigger city units are more evenly distributed in age and gender usually.
I suspect small sample size, random chance and perhaps the effects of personality differences between rural and urban dwellers would affect unit participation rates and roles between genders. There were always exceptions to every general case. During the 2019 bushfires I noted that women did a huge amount of unreported spontaneous volunteer support work out side of any organisations that would have logged the hours which would have more than equaled the reported long hours of the volunteer fire fighters.
In short, equal access to education and oportunities is needed, but dont expect uniform outcomes.
I don't see many articles stating that women are sick of not being able to get a job where they too can lift bags of plaster up flights of stairs, hump bricks up a ladder or strip cable till their fingers are numb.
If you want equity, then it has to be done at every level and every job, not just the white collar stuff, otherwise it's just ideology hiding other objectives..
Kinda irrelevant, no?
Women want to be given a fair crack at getting these particular technical jobs that use their brains and skills, and if they get the job, to be treated fairly and thoughtfully as equals. It's pretty straightforward.
Go talk to The Register of construction about those other careers.
"If you want equity, then it has to be done at every level and every job"
Uhm, why?
Edit: My "why?" meant: why does it have to be all or nothing? Why can't we start with IT seeing as we're an IT crowd.
C.
I believe that women are indeed given a fair crack. In fact I suspect that they get a little extra help - not as a result of them asking or even desiring it, but because women are seen with less agency than they actually have. It's a well meaning type of condenscenion in my opinon.
Now if you head over to some non-western countries then you will definitately see what discrimination and misogony look like.
The way that you phrase that makes me think that you're suggesting that they discriminate based on sex. As such, wouldn't that make the quite hypercrital and also in violation of anti-discrimination laws? We've seen this before and most people know that positive discrimination for one group is negative and unfair for another.
Of course, if all you're saying is that they should consider employing women based on their skills & knowledge then that's fine - but would just mean that they are doing as most western companies do.
One of the biggest problems is the persistent view that infosec is a technical discipline. IT security may be (but not entirely) but the wider role of information security is primarily a management discipline (albeit with a definite need to liaise with the technical). The ladies may well be put off by the geeky technocentric emphasis, but as that's what also contributes to a high proportion of security failures maybe we should re-define the public image of the discipline by formally distinguishing between IT sec and infosec. That might in the long term help to address the gender balance as there's no shortage of ladies in management.
... I can take a year off work, paid, and be guaranteed by law that my job is there when I decide to come back. And then do it again a year or so later, rinse and repeat as often as I like. My paternity leave was two weeks, both times.
Also: the number of men I know who took their paternity leave then decided at the last minute at the end of it that, y'know what, I don't fancy going back to work at all thanks, even though my employer has been legally obliged to hold it open for me, is zero. Meanwhile the number of employers I know who've had to hold a job open for a year for a woman to return to it, only to be told the week before their return date that they now had to recruit a replacement, is well into double figures. Frankly it sometimes baffles me why any company would hire women of child-bearing age at all, given the disproportionate burden they place upon the company even if they were actually paid less.
... I can take a year off work, paid, and be guaranteed by law that my job is there when I decide to come back.
Whether you are male or female, you can. It's called shared parental leave.
Or are you just upset that this fact has been pointed out?
Note: this isn't a comment on IT employment, it's a comment on ALL employment. If I'd decided to twice take a year off work for my own reasons in my early 30s, I think I'd rightly be ignored if I started bleating that it had adversely affected my career. If I'd stated upfront in job interviews that I intended to take a whole year sabbatical a couple of times and expected my job to be kept open for me, I don't imagine I'd ever have got a job in the first place.
If you think clearly about this it's not a criticism of women, it's a criticism of capitalism.
In just five years, the percent of women in the field more than doubled, yet the author calls that "pretty dismal". I'd call that not only a success but also an opportunity to learn what worked so well in those five years and to keep doing it.
I work in IT. I see the lack of women in IT every day. My team are customer facing, so I try and employ women if I can. It's important because we've found that women users are often more comfortable dealing with women than they are men.
I think the problem is that computing in general is very much seen as a boys only club. This probably does put off women from working in the industry. There is also an attitude amongst some men that Women are somehow less capable than Men on computers. Given the same access to computers, and an interest, I can categorically state this is not the case. I know plenty of women who are *very* capable at development jobs.
Three women I know spring to mind.. All have degrees in Computer Science. One get a job with one of the intercontinental internet carriers advising people on international telecommunications. One is an internet security professional, who advised corporations on security and the third is currently running the team that develops and maintains the online banking systems for one of the big four banks. At least she was last time I heard from her. All three are very highly qualified (way above degree level).
This post has wandered a little, but the point is that given the right education, tools and help (if needed - none of the women above ever needed help AFAIK), women are more than capable of equaling or even beating Men in computing jobs.
I think it's a good thing that there are charities that exist to offer courses designed to encourage girls and women into coding.
No surprise that Google promote the Jesuit line: indoctrinate them from a young age. Creepy.
Women should be paid as much as men etc, obviously, but even if they were, I doubt you would get parity in the more anal tech fields. Just as with mining and fishing (where it is the physicality) in tech it is the need for an aspie geek brain. You just get that more in men. You see it in everything from trainspotting to book collecting.
We need to guarantee equal opportunities (educational and career), equal pay and a safe, non-abusive working environment, so that women who are good at tech and want to do it, can, and can be fully rewarded.
But if you want numerical parity, you will have to indoctrinate girls from kindergarten Chinese-style (which is generally frowned upon when undertaken by parents trying to push their kids to an unhealthy extent), or force women to do tech against their will, just to get the numbers up. Not sure that is a good thing.
Women in the tech industry are absolute sharks. And I mean that in a very positive compliment. They are brilliant, motivated, professional, and tough. Always a pleasure to work with, whether as peers, supervisors, or elsehwhere.
I agree, we need more women in tech. NOT because of some sort of math problem about equality. But because they do a damn good job.
In almost 20 years at this computer lab we have only had one woman apply for a role here, she was pretty newly qualified. We offered it to her but she was not prepared to move here for the job as she just wanted to work remotely which is impossible with our air-gapped systems.
Literally not another female has applied.
In fact I've never met a heavy nerd, Linux loving, network head, coder in my life... does even such a creature exist?
Whole article seems like hokey to me, based around an assumption of discrimination rather than a reality of general female interest in the field.
If a some here are suggesting, you want to get everyone exposed to programming at an early age, you have to solve the basic problem of poor teaching. Every IT course i have ever been on is mediocre at best. Rare is the gifted developer who decides to go in academia for lower pay longer hours, expensive holidays and daily abuse from unappreciative little horrors. Plus you don't get to develop software. Which we actually enjoy.
Hence the interest has to largely come from within.
This idea that you need to even up the numbers is nutts. Make sure everyone is given the same opportunities, then let them pursue what interests them. We have enough bad developers, let's not make the problem worse by forcing people who don't have the passion to muddle through. I think we're all sick of clearing up the mess.
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