It’s 2018, right? I still hear men and women explain away the gender imbalance in tech careers with the accepted wisdom that "women just aren’t as hard wired for technology as men are."
Bullshit.
Let's replace that tired, lame, insipid notion with something actually true: "Women in tech tend to engage in open dialog and seek community-oriented problem-solving" -- a quality sorely missing in my field, cybersecurity, which has managed to cut itself off from the female talent pool. "Women made up 11 percent of the information security workforce in 2013" ... by 2015 that number had dropped to 10 percent. (IEEE, the Insitute, May, 2016)
Application development communities, this headline should give you pause: "Facebook rejects female engineers’ code more often, analysis finds" (The Verge, May, 2105). Maybe take a look in the mirror? Ask why, "Compared to ... physics, engineering, biochemistry, or math ... computer science has the lowest representation of girls"? (NCWIT infographic)
Here's the grim truth: There are smart women in tech roles whose male colleagues aren't treating them fairly. There is a soft cultural bias preventing talented women from entering tech careers, and driving them to abandon tech careers.
And here's the irony: Guys in tech fields believe they are enlightened people, articulate, balanced, inherently fair. In truth, tech professions are dominated by really smart guys with massively under-developed people skills. Glibness, evasiveness, snarkiness, information hoarding too often passes for reasonable communication. Too much gamer ethos, too much hero ball, too much emphases on finding 10x superbrain rock stars who collaborate poorly.
Little secret. Men in tech professions fear one thing most of all: that someone will think they don’t have an answer to a technical question. When they don't know something, they duck behind their keyboard and display. Women in technical roles tend to be less insecure. When technical women don't know something technical, they're more likely to seek out someone who does, draw people in, engage in teamwork -- qualities for which they are rewarded by being undervalued, per this headline: "Women considered better coders – but only if they hide their gender" (The Guardian, Feb, 2016).
Women in tech, be aware that many men in tech are weary of the tech nerd guy enclave petrie dish that has mouldered since mainframe days and produced some bad gender religion, including the idea that tech professions are by default gender-fair because us smart and hip guys are by default unbiased -- it’s only macho sales dudes who display gender bias! Ha! They just do it openly.
Women in tech should also leverage a significant trend in their favor -- as tech programs are required to become more accountable and more visible, hiring and retaining people with soft skills that complement their technical skillsets becomes more desirable, and valuable.
Let’s question the accepted wisdom that technology goals are met via technology, that technology problems are fixed via technology, and that this explains why technology careers are dominated by autocratic males who talk to machines well, people poorly. In fact, technology goals are successfully met, and technology problems are successfully solved, by people -- read: women and men -- working together to use technology well.
