Interesting Article Caitlyn, Thanx for the ref.
Whenever I read and respond to these things, I find my ideas bouncing
around a lot and I'm always short on time, so I apologise for the
incoherence.
The thing I took away from this article is that *in general*, men and
women seem to want different things. That being the case, I think we're
always going to see more male or female friendly occupations and more
male or female friendly companies to work for.
A worry I have about these kinds of things is that, to some degree,
we're talking about changing what people want (or think they want). Are
the demographics (% of women in IT, % of pick-a-minority in IT)
important? If so, why? Let me admit that I'm always trying to get all
manner of people interested in IT, but I suspect that's something of a
remake-everyone-in-my-own-image impulse. Let's hope I don't succeed too
much :)
Being a white male, you could say that I'm in the majority in this
environment so of course I don't see a problem. Looking at it from
another angle, however: I'm also a geek which makes me a minority in
other parts of life. When I was a volunteer fireman years ago, I was
the only fireman with a job in IT. Everyone else did "real mens work" (
storemen, plumbers, builders, construction workers ). They thought I
got paid well, but didn't want my job. Their idea of a good time was a
barbeque, beer and Rugby on a large TV, which made me something of a
social misfit (I hate rugby, I'm ambivilant about barbeques, and I don't
hold my beer well (neat whiskey is another matter)).
I'm not sure that offering a bigger carrot is going to get more *good*
female techs into circulation. Most of us will have encountered people
who work only for the benefits, and their work tends to suck. If you're
going to get good techs (male, female or undecided) you want people with
a fire and enthusiasm for what they're doing.
<THEORY>
Q: Why are female techs (on average) so much better than male techs?
A: Because the "female hostile" environment tends to weed out the bad
ones (to be fair, it probably weeds out a small number of good ones too,
but it shifts the %).
</THEORY>
I'm all outta time, but thats just my $0.002 :)
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