Reply to post: The same Mark Pesce?

The gender imbalance in IT is real, ongoing and ridiculous

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

The same Mark Pesce?

Is this the same Mark Pesce who's keynote presentation at linux.conf.au 2011 displayed sexual images in a public place? If he had owned that he had once been part of the problem then this article would have been so much more convincing.

In retrospect "home computers" were used almost entirely by boys. But I wonder if ascribing that to sexist marketing is the whole story. I saw it at the time as a continuation of the "tinkerer" culture (which was already male-dominated). The boys who spent hours tuning carburettors in the 1970s spent them tuning computers in the 1980s.

Once programmers left home there were other issues preventing the progress of women as easily as happened prior to the 1980s.

Programmers were being paid serious money. Not rock-star money, but certainly a lot. If you were an entry-level programmer in the the public service in the 1980s you were paid the same as a "senior officer". That is, the same salary as a person holding substantial responsibility (a "senior officer" can be called to testify to Parliament). There are a horde of "bros" which follow the money -- you can track their progress through sales and then banking finance -- and they arrived in computing in the 1990s, elbowing aside everyone else.

The vogue of "software engineering" didn't help. Engineering already has serious sexism issues. Adding computer science into that department didn't lead to CompSci making Engineering less sexist, but the depth of Engineering's disease obscuring that CompSci had issues.

I see the lack of reasonable working hours as a major issue preventing more women in IT in the current era. You don't see much material on IT and work-life balance, but I wonder if that's because of the low proportion of women rather than there not being a serious issue.

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