Snort. Still funny.

Not because I “made it so far in a male dominated world” or any other reason like that that makes it sound like I worked any harder than anyone else.

I made it through determination because I love working in web and in IT (rather than web for marketing or another similar).

I’m lucky because I work for a manager who believes that it doesn’t matter what lies between your legs, that it’s what you can do with your brains that matters. So because of that, all three techy women in my department are working for him. It’s not that the others discriminate – often the only candidates that are put forward are males.

And I’ve hit this before.

Recruiters are as much to blame at times for girls missing out on techy spots as society is for putting girls into non techy roles.

I know of a manager who put in for two roles. One was a desktop support engineer, the other a project admin role. The project admin role received all females (some with very impressive degrees and experience) from the recruiter and the desktop support engineer was all males.

Now. You might say that maybe that was all that was provided for each role… not so. On chatting to one of the females for the admin role, as it turned out – she applied for the desktop support role!

There’s a lot that needs to be changed. Society needs to encourage people (in general) to do what they’re good at – not what is the “done thing”. Feminists who push the hardcore views that turn off some girls from being seen as “tough” need to back off and let girls do what they can do without it becoming a campaign that she’s working in a male dominated area. And finally – we all need to stop looking at the sex of the worker and start looking at the skills and push people towards what they’re good at.

But that’s just my thoughts…

The message that sends does not help the ‘women in IT’ cause one bit.

That said, what few women were in the game back in the 70s/80s were as competent and geeky as the good male geeks… there were none that had got into the game for the money.

My gut feel is that when it comes to defining ontology and taxonomy for the semantic web, data labelling, etc, the more subtle linguistic skills required are found in a higher proportion of females than males.

It would be interesting to see some detailed breakdowns by type of work and seniority, although it would be hard to do a useful breakdown, between the no-BS “Alice from Dilbert” types (who have always been great to work with) and the power-dressing political types (who have made my life miserable more often than not).

Cheers,
-Tennessee

Your battle with the ‘employee’ notions that the universities have in order to boost students’ understanding of startups is a classic example of that kind of dinosaur thinking, Sarah!

No women in tech? Witness the rise and rise of ‘mumpreneurs’ who don’t have formal qualifications, don’t go to industry conferences, don’t self-promote “Look at me, i’m in TECH and I’m a chick, wow!!” but learn on the job, get the work done and get on with their lives.