Re: Why the Widening Gender Gap in Computer Science?
On 2008-11-22, Meike Reichle penned:
> Hi Steph, all
>
> Apparently the root of women choosing these subjects does not so much
> lie in their arts aspects but in their interdisciplinarity. I recently
> talked to a gender researcher about this topic and her results showed
> that girls/women feel especially attracted to interdisciplinary studies.
> At least within Europe the women ration is much higher in
> interdisciplinary CS studies like media informatics, bioinformatics, or
> business informatics than in pure informatics. The same goes for
> engineering.
>
> I guess this goes quite nicely with the general observation that men
> tend(!) to prefer digging deep into one subject while women tend(!) to
> prefer having a broad knowledge.
At my current company, we have a variety of software positions. I
see a greater percentage of women doing SQL work and web development
than I do C++ applications. Our DBA team to my knowledge has never
had a woman, but the team is so small that I'm not sure that's
statistically significant. In all software teams, there are more men
than women.
The HR, administrative, and project management teams are primarily
female.
The executive team was half and half -- CEO and CTO male, COO and CFO
female -- when I started, but since then we got a new COO who is male.
The technical leadership positions have been primarily filled by men,
but there have been enough female team leads that I don't think that's
a barrier to entry, if one wanted to pursue that course. Whether or
not a person would actually want that job -- well, that's a matter of
whether that person enjoys a job with long and unpredictable hours and
a high workload. So that certainly could factor into the distibution
of men vs. women. The CTO has children and a wife, but I don't know
if his wife works. My team lead is a single father who has made it
work, but it requires a lot of daycare coordination + the expectation
that when he leaves early, he will generally be working from home in
the evening.
--
monique
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