Monday 12 May 2014

Gender Imbalance in IT -- It Wasn't Always Like This

I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago at a client's office. This client still uses an IBM mainframe, and the meeting was about some mainframe activities for my project. I realized that four of the seven people in the room were women.

I think the whole mainframe department has slightly more men than women, but it's much closer to gender parity than most IT gatherings.

Then I thought back to my graduating class in Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan in 1980. We were also close to gender parity.

This certainly shows that there's nothing preventing women from getting into and being successful in IT. What it shows is that, during decades when women were increasing in numbers in most professions, things were actually going in the other direction in IT -- women were being driven out of the field.

1 comment:

Andrew McKinlay said...

Over the last almost 30 years at Axon, without a deliberate policy, we've generally had a pretty good balance, often more women than men programmers.

But we're currently at 60 / 40 men to women, and I can see that getting worse since we seem to get fewer and fewer female applicants.