You know, I’ve noticed issues and heard about problems in math and the sciences before of this sort, but it seems like much more of a problem in IT. Any idea why?
One relevant datum: when I started my studies in math, about 33% of the students was female. In the same year, about 1% (i.e. one) of the computer science students was female.
It’s possible to come up with other reasons—IT is certainly well-suited to people who don’t like human interaction all that much—but I think that’s a significant part of the problem.
I never consciously noticed that, but you’re right. From what I remember the proportion of women in my CS classes wasn’t quite that low, but it was still south of 10%. 33% also sounds about right for non-engineering STEM majors in my (publicly funded, moderately selective) university in the early-to-mid-Noughties, though that’s skewed upward a bit by a student body that’s 60% female.
It seems implausible, though, that a poor professional culture regarding gender would skew numbers that heavily in a freshman CS class—most of these students are going to have had no substantial exposure to professional IT or related fields beforehand. I think we’re looking at something with deeper roots. Specifically, CS is linked to geek subculture in a way that the rest of STEM isn’t: you might naturally consider a math major if you were undecided and your best high-school grades were in mathematics, but there’s no such path to IT. You generally only go into it if you already identify with the culture surrounding it and want to be part of it professionally.
With this in mind it seems likely to me that professional IT’s attitudes are largely determined by the subculture’s, not the other way around, and that gender ratios in CS aren’t going to change much unless and until the culture changes.
CS and IT have become less gender-balanced (more male) in the past 20-30 years — over the same time frame that the lab sciences have gotten more balanced.
IME maths is the most feminine STEM field excluding life sciences. The first few math students I know personally that spring to my mind are all female. (Of course, since I am a straight guy, “springs to my mind” will be a biased criterion, but if I do the same with (say) engineering students, most of the first few are male.)
IT is certainly well-suited to people who don’t like human interaction all that much
Uh, I’m pretty sure this assertion is the result of the particular culture that’s developed in IT, rather than its truth being a cause of it.
Is this claim actually even close to true? To the extent that there are in fact professions “well-suited to people who don’t like human interaction”, by virtue of which problems the professionals are working to solve, I would think of farming or legal medicine first, not IT.
IT jobs require constant interaction with people, because they are mainly about turning vague desiderata into working solutions; on the “solution” end you are interacting a lot with machines, but you absolutely can’t afford to ignore the “desiderata” side of things, and that is primarily a matter of human communication. Our current IT culture has managed to make it the norm that much of this communication can take place over cold channels, such as email or Word documents. I think of that as pathological; but more importantly, this still counts as human interaction!
Then there’s the extra implication in your statement - that jobs “well-suited to people who don’t like human interaction” will attract males more. That may well be true, but it’ll take actual evidence to convince me.
Our current IT culture has managed to make it the norm that much of this communication can take place over cold channels, such as email or Word documents. I think of that as pathological; but more importantly, this still counts as human interaction!
Hey, people on the autistic spectrum and those with overwhelmingly poor social experiences have to get jobs too.
Now that I am done being a sarcastic bastard; many people have social anxiety, are terrible at reading subtle social cues including body language and are less hesitant and more eloquent communicators using text rather than face to face or over the phone. These people are disproportionately male. I strongly suspect that this is for the same reason autistic spectrum people are disproportionately male.
If it is currently true that IT is friendly er to people who are not great socially it will attract more people like that by at least two channels; reputation/common knowledge and affinity chains, people with bad social skills being friends with similar people who get each other, who have much less in the way of communication issues with each other than they do with normal people.
I think IT jobs currently attract people with poor social skills more for the above reasons. I am much more confident that said prevalence deters some people from those careers who could do them and that the deterrence/repulsion effect is stronger for the average female than the average male.
How IT got into the situation where it was abnormally hospitable to people who are bad at normal human interaction I hesitate to speculate upon.
Now that I am done being a sarcastic bastard; many people have social anxiety, are terrible at reading subtle social cues including body language and are less hesitant and more eloquent communicators using text rather than face to face or over the phone. These people are disproportionately male.
This doesn’t appear to be true for the clinical definition of social anxiety. What you’re describing sounds more like a mix of social anxiety and autistic traits than pure social anxiety disorder, but although there is a substantial gender gap in autism diagnosis, it doesn’t look wide enough to account for the observed ratios.
Autism rates combined with the observed gender gap in the rest of STEM come close, but for this to be the whole story we’d need almost no non-ASD folks to go into IT, and that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I think IT may select for people who were nerds in high school and spent time learning to program instead of socializing. (I suspect that if we really want to get more women in to IT, this may be what needs to be fixed—high school girls generally have friends they do stuff with. :P)
See this article on how people who haven’t programmed from a young age often feel intimidated by those who have.
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What is an epistemic root system, and how can they be dense?
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Here’s hoping LW can do better at this than my own professional community.
That’s not a high bar. I love my IT job, but IT is shamefully bad at this.
You know, I’ve noticed issues and heard about problems in math and the sciences before of this sort, but it seems like much more of a problem in IT. Any idea why?
One relevant datum: when I started my studies in math, about 33% of the students was female. In the same year, about 1% (i.e. one) of the computer science students was female.
It’s possible to come up with other reasons—IT is certainly well-suited to people who don’t like human interaction all that much—but I think that’s a significant part of the problem.
I never consciously noticed that, but you’re right. From what I remember the proportion of women in my CS classes wasn’t quite that low, but it was still south of 10%. 33% also sounds about right for non-engineering STEM majors in my (publicly funded, moderately selective) university in the early-to-mid-Noughties, though that’s skewed upward a bit by a student body that’s 60% female.
It seems implausible, though, that a poor professional culture regarding gender would skew numbers that heavily in a freshman CS class—most of these students are going to have had no substantial exposure to professional IT or related fields beforehand. I think we’re looking at something with deeper roots. Specifically, CS is linked to geek subculture in a way that the rest of STEM isn’t: you might naturally consider a math major if you were undecided and your best high-school grades were in mathematics, but there’s no such path to IT. You generally only go into it if you already identify with the culture surrounding it and want to be part of it professionally.
With this in mind it seems likely to me that professional IT’s attitudes are largely determined by the subculture’s, not the other way around, and that gender ratios in CS aren’t going to change much unless and until the culture changes.
CS and IT have become less gender-balanced (more male) in the past 20-30 years — over the same time frame that the lab sciences have gotten more balanced.
IME maths is the most feminine STEM field excluding life sciences. The first few math students I know personally that spring to my mind are all female. (Of course, since I am a straight guy, “springs to my mind” will be a biased criterion, but if I do the same with (say) engineering students, most of the first few are male.)
Uh, I’m pretty sure this assertion is the result of the particular culture that’s developed in IT, rather than its truth being a cause of it.
Is this claim actually even close to true? To the extent that there are in fact professions “well-suited to people who don’t like human interaction”, by virtue of which problems the professionals are working to solve, I would think of farming or legal medicine first, not IT.
IT jobs require constant interaction with people, because they are mainly about turning vague desiderata into working solutions; on the “solution” end you are interacting a lot with machines, but you absolutely can’t afford to ignore the “desiderata” side of things, and that is primarily a matter of human communication. Our current IT culture has managed to make it the norm that much of this communication can take place over cold channels, such as email or Word documents. I think of that as pathological; but more importantly, this still counts as human interaction!
Then there’s the extra implication in your statement - that jobs “well-suited to people who don’t like human interaction” will attract males more. That may well be true, but it’ll take actual evidence to convince me.
A lot of people in IT interact plenty with other people in IT, so they like and can sustain some types of human interaction.
Hey, people on the autistic spectrum and those with overwhelmingly poor social experiences have to get jobs too.
Now that I am done being a sarcastic bastard; many people have social anxiety, are terrible at reading subtle social cues including body language and are less hesitant and more eloquent communicators using text rather than face to face or over the phone. These people are disproportionately male. I strongly suspect that this is for the same reason autistic spectrum people are disproportionately male.
If it is currently true that IT is friendly er to people who are not great socially it will attract more people like that by at least two channels; reputation/common knowledge and affinity chains, people with bad social skills being friends with similar people who get each other, who have much less in the way of communication issues with each other than they do with normal people.
I think IT jobs currently attract people with poor social skills more for the above reasons. I am much more confident that said prevalence deters some people from those careers who could do them and that the deterrence/repulsion effect is stronger for the average female than the average male.
How IT got into the situation where it was abnormally hospitable to people who are bad at normal human interaction I hesitate to speculate upon.
This doesn’t appear to be true for the clinical definition of social anxiety. What you’re describing sounds more like a mix of social anxiety and autistic traits than pure social anxiety disorder, but although there is a substantial gender gap in autism diagnosis, it doesn’t look wide enough to account for the observed ratios.
Autism rates combined with the observed gender gap in the rest of STEM come close, but for this to be the whole story we’d need almost no non-ASD folks to go into IT, and that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I think IT may select for people who were nerds in high school and spent time learning to program instead of socializing. (I suspect that if we really want to get more women in to IT, this may be what needs to be fixed—high school girls generally have friends they do stuff with. :P)
See this article on how people who haven’t programmed from a young age often feel intimidated by those who have.
It’s just a shame that dense epistemic root systems tend to produce an equally dense foliage of jargon :-)
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