Jezebel Anna North argues that women aren’t entering engineering because engineering is mean to women:
In Stemming The Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering, two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors report on their survey of over 3,700 women with engineering degrees. They found that just one in four women who had left the field reported doing so to spend more time with family. One third left “because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss or the culture,” while almost half departed due to “working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement or low salary” (respondents were allowed to check more than one reason). The researchers also found that among women who got engineering degrees but never entered the field, a third made that decision “because of their perceptions of engineering as being inflexible or the engineering workplace culture as being non-supportive of women.” And, unsurprisingly, “Women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers were most likely to want to leave their organizations.” Writes study author Dr. Nadya Fouad, “Bottom line — it’s not all about family for most of the women who left engineering.”
North argues that this puts an end to the myth of “the underrepresentation of women in engineering fields is entirely due to the choices they make about family time. ”
But does it, though? For one fourth, it’s directly cited as an issue. And half cite a slew of factors including two, travel and (to a lesser extent) working conditions, that can be related to, if not family specifically, a work-life balance that women (in the aggregate) put a higher priority on than men. Ditto for engineering being “inflexible”, if that’s related to inflexible work hours. Low salary is not a gender-specific complaint, nor is (necessarily) advancement opportunities. It could be gender-specific if women within the field (working the same hours, etc) are making less money than their male counterparts or if they are less likely to see advancement. But these are boilerplate reasons.
Now, on to the guts of it. Women are less likely to work in environments where they feel harassed or have issues with their coworkers and engineering is more likely to be one of these environments. This may or may not be gender-specific, and if they are it might be directly or indirectly so. I mean, if it’s “oooh, girl in the server room, let’s harass her!” then that’s pretty unforgiveable. But I suspect that, as often as not, when women are communicated to the same way that men are communicated with in engineering and techie environments, they are more likely to find it off-putting. Which brings us around to the question of whether men should change their work environment to accommodate women that don’t presently work there.
Matthew Yglesias thinks so:
Not that shocking, but important nonetheless. Dysfunctional social norms that drive talent out of key fields are a real burden on the country, as well as on the individual women impacted.
Women are not the arbiters of what is and is not dysfunctional. That they don’t like an environment does not make that environment “wrong”. I say this as an only guy that has sat in teacher’s lounges while the women talk about the hot black dude from CSI and feel pretty uncomfortable in the process. I’m not wrong for being uncomfortable, but they’re not wrong for relating to one another the way that they relate to one another. Different business environments have different cultures. If there’s actual harassment going on, that’s one thing. If it’s just “not for me”, that’s another.
And, as I mentioned in my Geek Flag post, it’s not as though there are no tradeoffs. The same environment that some women don’t like, the men who work there thrive on. People that could have done a lot of thing go into IT specifically because the culture is there. The culture guided them into it. The culture makes workplace tolerable (for a lot of people that, ahem, don’t find a whole lot of social environments tolerable). It’s not exactly great that women are leaving the field, but it is good that a lot of people are really happy with it. You may not be able to address the former without negating the latter.
And to tie this all up, the notion that the women don’t like the men does not make the men jerks. As I say, they are not arbiters of what is or is not functional. And it could just as easily be that the women simply don’t like the men then that the men are doing anything wrong. It could be that you wouldn’t just have to get rid of the irritating things that the men do, but rather would have to get rid of the men themselves (the irritating things being signals more than anything else). So you’re getting rid of the men that like what they do and are good at it, for the sake of women that might or might not be the same. Forgive this former geek for being a little incredulous of the notion that if geeks can reform their image just by being nicer to girls as if the only problem is that we’re jerks. I think that on an individual level this is true, but on a group level, well, it’s as much culture clash as anything (and that does not make our culture “wrong”).
Again, none of this is to say that sexual harassment is okay. Women should not be condescended to (nor should men, of course). But not liking “the workplace climate, their boss or the culture” is not necessarily indicative of something being wrong with the workplace climate, the boss, or the culture.
This article doesn’t gel with my experience at all. Having worked at several large corporations, I found the geeks, the accountants and the operations people to be the easiest men of all to work with and the nicest and most respectful of me as a woman.
The real creeps were in marketing, sales, line management, etc.
Comment by Maria — April 22, 2011 @ 2:26 pm
“And there you have it,” said Harry. “Not that I’ve ever been through high school myself, but my books give me to understand that there’s a certain kind of teenage girl who’ll be outraged by a single insult if the boy is plain or poor, yet who can somehow find room in her heart to forgive a rich and handsome boy his bullying. She was shallow, in other words. Tell whoever it was that she wasn’t worthy of him and he needs to get over it and move on and next time date girls who are deep instead of pretty.”
Of course now, some of these girls are no longer teenage and now believe that their personal value judgments should be imposed on everyone else.
Comment by EY — April 22, 2011 @ 2:34 pm
an only guy that has sat in teacher’s lounges while the women talk about the hot black dude from CSI and feel pretty uncomfortable in the process
Ah ha! The thought of your white female co-workers being attracted to a black man makes you uncomfortable. You are finally out of the closet. Welcome.
All joking aside, the situation you describe is a textbook example of a hostile working environment. Not that I’m saying that you should complain, but if you did, you would be 100 percent in the right.
Comment by Mike Hunt — April 22, 2011 @ 2:55 pm
We’re a tribe. The best among us are not people that have jobs in computers. We are computer people. We live, breathe, and drink this shit. We go home after getting paid to code or tinker or fix and then code, tinker, and fix our own stuff for free. We create software for free. We help out family members for free.
Women, unfortunately, are not generally this way. Socialization, genetics, whatever. They just aren’t. It breaks out hearts. Because any woman that lives, breathes, and drinks this shit is awesome. But most of the women who enter the field are looking for a job. They’re looking to get paid. They’re not members of the tribe. More often than they are members of it, they resent it.
I’m not saying that all men are members of the tribe and no women are. About half of the men in IT are. The other half of the men (and, unfortunately, most of the women) got into the field because that’s what their counseller told them to do. They’re riders of the culture. We’re drivers. They’re 9-5.
But you’re missing something, Trumwill. We want the 9-5 people. They’re not the ones killing the job sector. We are. We’re the ones who keep coming up with “free alternatives” to the stuff that people should pay for. We’re the ones that allow Mark Zuckerberg to create a bajillion dollar company, employing virtually nobody, because we’ll make the widgets that make Facebook cool. We’re the productive ones that let the IT companies reduce their staff without taking productivity hits. If more of us were like them, there’d be more jobs to go around.
So let’s kill the “geek culture”. Let’s force the women in. Let’s make it so that we want to leave at the end of an 8-hour day. Bring on the apathy that dominates virtually every other field out there. Let’s spend more time making sure that everyone feels welcome and less time getting shit done. The shit we get done just makes more of us redundant. The wisepeople have spoken (utilizing the technology that we built). They apparently know something we don’t about what’s important.
Comment by Mr. Blue — April 22, 2011 @ 4:16 pm
And, unsurprisingly, “Women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers were most likely to want to leave their organizations.”
Well, yeah. But notice how the writer suddenly stops telling us what percentage of women listed these things as reasons for leaving the engineering profession..
Also, it would be interesting to see what the results would look like if women were only allowed to select one “main” reason for leaving.
Comment by ? — April 22, 2011 @ 5:35 pm
But I suspect that, as often as not, when women are communicated to the same way that men are communicated with in engineering and techie environments, they are more likely to find it off-putting.
I suspect that this is behind a lot of perceived sexism and racism. Other people don’t always treat you the way you’d like them to. Sometimes you’re wrong, sometimes there’s a legitimate difference of opinion, and sometimes people are just jerks. For white men, them’s just facts of life. Everyone else gets to be a victim of racism or sexism.
This inspired me to correct an old XKCD cartoon.
Comment by Brandon Berg — April 22, 2011 @ 5:47 pm
Maria, I think accounting is one of those fields that has actually made a pretty dramatic shift from male-dominated to female-dominated. Every accountant I personally know is female. It makes sense, I suppose, since before women entered the workplace en masse they frequently handled the household books.
Anyhow, glad the geeks are doing right by you!
Comment by trumwill — April 22, 2011 @ 6:35 pm
EY, what’s that from?
Mike, perhaps, but since such things could be the highlight of their day, I wouldn’t want to intrude.
Phi, I don’t understand why those kinds of questionnaires don’t have you rate the factors in order of importance. That way you can look at both the first-level reason and the other factors at play. Or perhaps they did and Jezebel chose not to cite them. Maybe I’ll look it over if I give it a chance.
Brandon, I think that both strips are actually pretty (no pun intended, seriously) illustrative of the dynamics at work. It’s not always easy to tell where their strip ends and yours begins.
Mr. Blue, I’m not sure I agree with your rant. But it’s a fun one and overlaps with a number of things I have said in the past.
Comment by trumwill — April 22, 2011 @ 6:38 pm
I quoted it from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is well worth a read though a little author-tract-ey at points. The relevant context, of course, is Harry discussing Lily/Snape/James
Comment by EY — April 22, 2011 @ 8:18 pm
Mike:
It’s not a textbook case unless men are the offenders.
Comment by Brandon Berg — April 22, 2011 @ 8:56 pm
I agree with you trumwill, but women’s groups are organized and geeks are not.
We’ll see how much of our lives they’re able to destroy.
Comment by SFG — April 23, 2011 @ 9:49 am
One thought that comes to mind is that when engineers and IT types and other geeks try to approach women in the workplace, their lack of skills means that their approaches are crude and offensive even that wasn’t their intent. In contrast, if a financial analyst or bond trader makes a move on a female co-worker, he’s much more likely to do so in a skillful manner, and the woman is less likely to see this as heavy-handed or offensive.
Comment by Peter — April 23, 2011 @ 2:04 pm
In contrast, if a financial analyst or bond trader makes a move on a female co-worker, he’s much more likely to do so in a skillful manner,
Nah nah. Those are likely to be the worst to treat a female co-worker. Geeks aren’t crude or offensive.
Comment by Maria — April 24, 2011 @ 3:12 pm
Maria wrote: “Geeks aren’t crude or offensive.”
Except on the Internet.
Kidding aside, every techological female worker I’ve ever known (except blogger Megan, who was single) was married to a similar man. The two or three I can think of who quit, well, the guy was doing pretty well in a similar field and they were having kids. Then again I don’t know many females in engineering or similar work.
The workplace horror stories I hear about dealing with men are in finance and law, and having been through it myself I’m inclined to believe them.
Comment by stone — April 25, 2011 @ 12:05 am
Oh wow, Harry Potter fanfic! I can’t wait to get to this, EY. Great line.
Comment by stone — April 25, 2011 @ 12:07 am
“But you’re missing something, Trumwill. We want the 9-5 people. They’re not the ones killing the job sector. We are. We’re the ones who keep coming up with “free alternatives” to the stuff that people should pay for. We’re the ones that allow Mark Zuckerberg to create a bajillion dollar company, employing virtually nobody, because we’ll make the widgets that make Facebook cool.”
The last part is an overstatement, to be sure, but this is the most interesting comment of the thread, IMO, because it taps into the conflict between capitalists and hobbyists that’s been at the heart of tech since at least the 1970s. There was a documentary in the mid-’90s called Accidental Empires which touched on this, in origins of Microsoft. The doc featured an impassioned open letter by Bill Gates to the hobbyist software community in the mid or late ’70s, about how people should pay for software and it shouldn’t be given away freely. And that, of course, came to pass in short order.
You’re right that capitalists got a free ride, to some extent, on geek culture (less so now, I’d argue, given the money developers are raking in during the current Internet 2.0 bubble). But geeks wouldn’t be getting paid salaries to work in the field if it weren’t for capitalists turning it into a hugely profitable industry, instead of just a hobby.
A related post that may be of interest to readers here is this one from Innovation Breakfast: ?
Is Freestrapping Killing Our Startups?”.
Comment by DaveinHackensack — April 25, 2011 @ 6:53 am
Also, related to this post, something started in NYC that seems to be spreading: GirlDevelopIT (see also its co-founder’s blog: Girl Developer).
My girlfriend (who works in finance, not tech) went to one of their classes (CSS/HTML) and signed up for a Java class. One thing she found surprising from the first class was that a number of the women taking the class who were working in tech (in UX, community management, whatever) without even knowing HTML. So maybe there’s a pro-woman bias happening in parts of tech?
Comment by DaveinHackensack — April 25, 2011 @ 8:58 am
The only real bias I’ve seen, to date, is when I was working for Falstaff. They had two different teams that did essentially the same thing, one using XML and the other an archaic WYSIWYG format. The first group, which got paid more, was almost entirely male. The second group almost entirely female (except the team lead). Some of the guys - like me - got put in the first team due to our technical backgrounds, but a lot of people came in with no real relevant experience and it was eany-meanie-minie-mo where the girls always ended up on the lesser-paying, less technical team.
Comment by trumwill — April 25, 2011 @ 1:00 pm
The workplace horror stories I hear about dealing with men are in finance and law, and having been through it myself I’m inclined to believe them.
Yup, and marketing and line management. . .Guys with high verbal IQs tend to be a lot more offensive than guys who don’t have high verbal IQs. . .
Who’da thunk it?
Comment by Maria — April 25, 2011 @ 2:24 pm
As EY alluded to, a good looking, charming, guy has a LOT more leeway in dealing with women than an ugly, autistic, man does.
Therefore, the guys in finanace and marketing, while being more obnoxious and crass in their ways, can get away with it.
Comment by Mike Hunt — April 25, 2011 @ 7:06 pm
One of the barriers to women in “geek” fields is that entry-level “geek” classes tend to be overpopulated sink-of-swim/weeders, and guys who have prior geek experience (by having taken HS classes, or having hung out with other geeks) have a leg up. More generally it would be good to have basic programming type classes required for everyone in HS, as its an increasingly useful skill for modeling and solving business problems, even if one is not a programmer as one’s profession.
Comment by Escapist — May 1, 2011 @ 10:49 pm