A great blog discussion from the WSJ regarding women in IT has stirred quite a bit of debate.
The percentage of women working in information technology departments, which wasn't high to begin with, is dropping. With an IT-labor crunch looming, it's time to ask: What is it about IT that may be repelling half the population?
While women hold 51% of all professional poistions in the workforce, they only made up 26% of IT pros in 2006, down from 29% in 2004, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. Only 13% of corporate officers at Fortune 500 tech companies are women...
While the focus of this post was to delve into the reasons behind why women are being discouraged from pursuing IT careers, the comments to the post pushed the conversation in a much more interesting and controversial direction. The first response as to why women are not pursuing IT careers in the same numbers as men came from "Common Sense":
Because they don't want to! Imagine that, the amount of people of one demographic in any one job might not match up with that of the United States as a whole! Next you're going to tell me something crazy like white males are under-represented in the NBA, since (obviously) there must be discrimination against whites.
Well there you have it. Is the United States losing its competitive edge because more women aren't in the IT field or pursuing math and science careers? Does everything in this country need to be demographically balanced?
Thank god for Microsoft. They have figured out that more women will pursue technology careers if we can make IT sexier.
