Slashdot referenced a study about what women want from IT jobs. Study Here. It claims in the opening statement that: "In order to address the underrepresentation of women in the information technology workforce it is important to understand the values and motivations of female professionals." The study then goes on to talk about career anchors (those things that keep you at your job). Ok fine, but I think people are missing the trees for the forest by taking this approach. It's not the career anchors that are limiting women in the workforce, it's the work itself.
I had someone recently talk to me about a computer science class he had been a TA for in college where most of the students talked about being there because it was lucrative. Very few were there because they had an interest in it. In my job interview at Google one of my interviewers asked me why I thought there were so few women who do what I do (IT). The answer is simple: because my generation grew up playing with barbies and not video games like my male counterparts. With this background, to get where I am today I had to have [1] an interest [2] a desire to lock myself up and learn on my own what I wanted to know. I know maybe 5 women who have done the same thing.
Now let's be careful. Anyone can go get a CS or CIS degree and most people that do aren't all that good at what most (not all) IT jobs demand: rapid programming/scripting skills, the ability to seek out requirements, good sense about technology and the ability to marry it all together to solve problems. That is what the technology part (not the management part) of IT is all about. However, those aren't skills they teach you in school, IMO. At least I've never met a new grad that could do it without training and a lot of experience. This is why I generally find CS/CIS/MIS/etc degrees useless for technical IT workers (e.g., sysadmins, dbas, etc). I've seen PHD CS people who can't code or who can't whittle out an apache config even with the manual and templates (I will concede to arguments that the latter example is simply a matter of patience).
So what is it about the work (as described) and women? The men of my generation grew up playing on their Amigas and Nintendos. A lot of them learned programming in high-school as a hobby, or more recently in college, and weren't afraid to be the social outcasts in their high school (it takes a lot of time to teach yourself these things). When I was growing up, I didn't see many girls wanting to play in those social circles or spending their saturday nights blue-boxing. The girls who were math and science oriented were on the path to Harvard med school or Cal Tech. They weren't destined for IT. The number of women, like myself, who lived during this period and who are now living through the revolution of technology is very small. Once again the academics miss the point.
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Now is the point in the post where I become ironic or hypocritical - I haven't decided which I am yet. I finally wrote my first Amazon review of a 'history' book (quotes intended!) I bought about two years ago that has sat in my todo pile since. I admit it, I read the Da Vinci Code and became all interested in knowing more about the history of the subject. I bought a ton of books (I promise this awful one wasn't the only one - I bought what are surely many other awful books too) on the subject. Now that I have some time to read I picked up the first one from the pile and dug in.
I wrote the scathing review about 75 pages in when the author used the word delirious to label an opponent's work and when I checked Amazon the book had a 4-star rating! This was after enduring the complete lack of editing, citations, references, italics for foreign words, several spelling mistakes, and surprisingly for a book translated from French, cedillas (and other juicy accents). There was no bibliography or notes, maps of the region or any background information, really. (Interestingly Google Books has it in French and not English. hmm) Maybe the American publisher really messed up? Poor translation? I can only hope so. I am half-tempted to say that this is what happens when you let poets write history.
