Academic achievement is just a start, for most people (if not for Bill Gates and a bunch of uncredentialed, self-starting colleagues whom I admire), since working 20 hours per week for a couple of technical classes is much easier than putting in 60+ hours in a management position. But taking the harder classes lets us mortal types build the reasoning skills that will help us advance later. It isn’t just women avoiding these classes, of course.

This probably sounds trite, but I have not noticed discrimination against the women I’ve worked with in tech companies. If they were sharp and worked hard, everyone seemed to respect them. Some were the targets of disparaging comments, but so were guys, and people didn’t try to knock down the women or underplay their abilities any more than they did the guys they feared / disliked / were jealous of. Not that discrimination doesn’t exist, but it wasn’t strong where I worked.

So the ‘women need to work hard if they want to succeed’ argument is fallacious. Research commissioned by Cisco shows that women and girls have the academic achivement needed to be in the tech sector.

However, girls who show preference at school level for doing further ICT studies or going into an ICT job are often dissuaded by parents, teachers and role models. There are few ICT-related role models for young girls. Parents and teachers have a distorted view of the sector, and pass this on to girls – encouraging them to choose careers in medicine, law and other fields where women are known for being successful.

Is there any bias of sorts happening when it comes to recruitment? If that is so, that can be legally tackled.

Otherwise, just employing more women because they are less doesn’t make sense. That’s like devaluing meritorious candidates. Why are there less women in the industry? Probably more so because women don’t like coding or IT-related stuff than because employers consider them less hard-working…

Katrin

If people want to rise in an industry they must have the talent and be willing to make the sacrifices to be competitive there. In the tech business that will mean taking the hard classes in school, spending more time with technology products and services than with US Weekly or Sports Illustrated, or, as another poster mentioned, putting in more hours than others are willing to, even if it means shorting family or social responsibilities.

Yes, there are boys’ clubs. And white boys’ clubs. And also Chinese and Indian clubs. The clubs can be barriers to women and others, and also barriers to their own success when they won’t look outside for stronger talent. But wielding unfortunate statistics and bogus arguments won’t make winning businesses.

Why our girls are at Atlanta Girls’ School (www.atlantagirlsschool.org) here in Atlanta.

Keep up the good work!

Gender Equality in ICT & Education
http://edutechdebate.org/gender-equality-in-ict-education/

Though our 7-part series we found several major factors to the low numbers of women in technology and several ways to remedy the situation:
- More female IT mentors and role models for girls to connect with
- A greater focus on IT as part of every industry, especially traditionally females ones
- Increased professional development for women already in IT fields

As far as execution of the idea however, the politically incorrect reality is that delivering (on-time, on-budget) products that beat the competition requires a team of pretty obsessed folks. Folks who may not think about anything but a particular technology (AJAX, Algorithms, take your pick) for most of their waking hours.

Currently, the people comfortable with this work-life imbalance are generally young white & asian males. Perhaps there’s a better to do it, but I don’t think it’s an accident that people that have accomplished great things generally had kids later in life or not at all. That’s not anti-family: it’s just that there’s only so many hours in the day. Hard work trumps all.