Comments on: Can smaller T-shirts help solve the lack of women in tech?

By: n074v41L4BL34u

n074v41L4BL34u — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 08:10:21 +0000

“I’m always surprised there aren’t more women, because if you look at technology, it’s a very new field” – there aren’t many women in tech precisely because it is new/innovative. Well, at least it was.

I don’t know the cause, some of it might be social in nature but most of it is probably genetic – women are mostly non-innovative creatures. New fields of knowledge are very rarely created by women.

If you want to know what’s brewing in the world just look what the boys are doing – 10 years form know it’s going to me an innovative field, and 20 years form now it will start to become mainstream and only then more women will start to enter the field.

Women have centuries old tendency to lag behind. It’s nothing new, it’s normal. Men and women are different in this respect, they have always been that way and it’s unlikely to ever change. It’s nature.

Though, one negative thing about female employees emerges when one reads the article. You can already see a trend in classic female whining: all-male boards, all-male interviews, wrong sized t-shirts etc. I mean, c’mon! IT is an efficient business precisely because nobody gave a damn about such petty things. Well, it seems that is about to change, unfortunately.

Then again, I do recognize that women have other qualities that will probably be useful in IT. They are hard working and pay more attention to detail so it’s possible that the overall software quality might improve. We’ll see.

By: anaredmond

anaredmond — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:43:21 +0000

Maybe they should use their venture, grants, acquisitions to encourage women. So far, it just looks like they are doing it for PR, without any skin in the game.

By: TantienHime

TantienHime — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 15:37:36 +0000

Reblogged this on Women In Technology Hamilton and commented: I agree: Don't make the shirts pink! DevTO had better get on this too. ;)

By: jeffmartens

jeffmartens — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 04:57:05 +0000

I just ordered t-shits for my company the other day, and I made sure to order 1/3 of them in a female specific style. Learned my lesson the first time ordering shirts when my wife said “wtf, I don’t want to wear a mans shirt!”

By: P. Oppenheimer

P. Oppenheimer — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:16:22 +0000

The number of computer science and engineering degrees granted to women reached 37% in 1984. The sharp decline started only about 10 years ago when women became concerned that there would not be any jobs. Many of the women who graduated in the 80s and 90s are still in the computer field. Some are C-level execs. Others are software engineers, network engineers, hardware engineers, Q& analysts, managers, etc.

By: keninca

keninca — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 21:09:04 +0000

From those stats you provide, women hold a disproportionate share of jobs in the computer industry, relative to how many are actually trained in CS. If only 14% of the CS graduates in 2010 were women, it might be safe to assume that the percentage was probably no greater than 10% 10 or 15 years ago. However, they hold 20% of the CIO positions at Fortune 500 companies, which means a female CS graduate is more likely to advance to CIO than a male graduate. And even though they only comprise 10-15% of the CS graduates, they hold 25% of the computing occupations.

While I am generally skeptical of statistics, these numbers seem to imply that the main reason for the low percentage of women in tech is due to the low percentage of women studying CS and engineering. It’s not a corporate culture issue, but one of supply.