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.
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.