Women in IT - why bother?
I’ve been browsing the web for stories on women in IT and reading the comments posted online by readers.
Unless you’re talking to the skills councils and equality groups, it’s quite difficult to have a serious conversation about women in IT. The debate will usually dissolve into banter, with comments ranging from the tedious - such as whether women are capable of logic - via the mildly offensive - whether it would be productive to increase the eye candy for male employees - and arriving at the outright bizarre.
For example, one reader at our sister publication The Inquirer wrote: “They do not like IT and do not wanna work in that kind of area... Just like I do not want to work in marketing or human resources, which as far as I know is women and gay biased… every time I speak to an HR guy he has that funny sounds-like-a-girl sound.”
I’m not strictly a woman in IT, but I work on a mainly male IT newsdesk and while I’m taken seriously in all aspects of my work, I’m still laughed at for needing more than 10 minutes to get ready to go out socially with my team.
From what I can see, it’s not just about accepting women in IT, it’s about accepting that they can be themselves in IT, not expecting them to adapt so perfectly to an all-male environment that nobody notices they are female. This has been a long but positive road in the general workplace and IT should be quite capable of catching up quick.