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October 25, 2003
nsf research into women and tech
I'm writing this while sitting in the Rochester airport, waiting for the airplane that will take me to Albuquerque, NM for a principal investigators' workshop this weekend.
Along with my colleague, Tona Henderson, I recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the underrepresentation of women in IT education. Computing fields are the only area in higher education in which the percentage of women has dropped over the past ten years, and in our department at RIT the entering freshman (gotta love that word, eh?) class is only 5% women.
Our research is only starting right now (there's an MT-based project web site that details the plan and our progress), but the grant is through a larger funding program at NSF on the Information Technology Workforce, and they've been funding projects addressing all areas of the shortage of women in IT--from pipeline issues in early education through higher ed, and all the way up to workforce environments--for several years now.
The workshop is where all the people working on grants from this program will have a chance to share their research results with each other. Because Tona and I are the "baby PIs" in this bunch--we just began work on our project--we get to sit and listen and learn, which is an amazing thing. Some of the women there are people I've admired for a long time, like Jane Margolis, who architected CMU's amazingly successful effort to increase the number of women in the CS program (they went from 6% to 40% women in their program), and who co-authored an excellent book about that process, Unlocking the Clubhouse.
I'll share details on the projects we hear about on Monday and Tuesday, once we've heard from the researchers.
Posted by Liz Lawley at 12:34 PM in Research | Permalink
Comments
Okay, I guess I'll be the devil's advocate and ask, what's so special about getting women into tech?
I've been working with computers for over 25 years, and I'm at the point now where I don't recommend that anyone go into this field, and particularly not women. The analogy I usually use is that of pro sports--if you're going to get into the field, do it for love or for money, but don't plan on it lasting as a lifetime career.
For love: it's all you want to do, and it's okay that either it'll be a short-term paid gig or a long-term free gig. You do it because you feel driven to do it, and nobody better stand in your way. These folks (both male & female) don't need any encouragement.
For money: you know it's not a long-term proposition, but you're okay with getting in, trying to grab the brass ring and make some serious dollars, and then getting out. These folks (both male & female) are going to pick tech or some other field based on how much money they think they can make in a short-time, and I (personally) don't really care whether they decide that tech's the answer for them or not.
But if you're going to encourage women to go into tech, you need to make sure that they know that it's a field just like, say, sports or modeling, where youth is always going to be more important than talent. They need to know that they're picking a career where they'll be unhirable once they turn 35 or have kids, or even worse, turn 35 *and* have kids.
This isn't changed by getting more women into the field. This isn't changed by a hot job market making employees more valuable (the Internet bubble made things worse, if anything). This is (imo) changed by getting rid of the self-destructive ways in which the field compensates employees, and producing more women graduates doesn't touch that.
So, what's so good about encouraging women to go into tech?
Posted by: Dori Smith at Oct 25, 2003 3:56:02 PM
I think that one of the reasons you're only getting 5% at the college or graduate level is that many girls are dropping out of the tracks that would get them there long before that -- they're not taking enough math and science courses, and this decline starts in junior high. Two ways to fix it are programs to befriend girls at the critical age (around 12 or 13) to keep them engaged so that they still feel they have a choice to apply to a CS program when they are seniors in high school, or to get women in other fields to bootstrap themselves into the profession by showing them that the barriers to entry aren't actually all that high in all areas of the profession -- someone with some determination and some community college courses can still get a foothold in many places in the profession.
Posted by: Lisa Williams at Oct 25, 2003 10:02:09 PM
I just reread Dori's comments above, and I actually agree with many of them, but I think that the phenomena she describes aren't *just* in technology but only *worse* in technology. Take a look at _The White Collar Sweatshop_ or _The Price of Motherhood_ for details. The workplace has become a lot more hostile and less stable for all employees, putting white-collar employees in the same boat that nonunion blue collar employees have always been in in terms of job stability -- that is, no job stability, no social contract between employer and employee. Tech just does it faster.
Wow, that was depressing! No wonder I put so much effort into stuff that most people consider "hobbies" -- at least my hobby can't lay me off or ditch me when I have kids...
Posted by: Lisa Williams at Oct 25, 2003 10:09:52 PM
Are traditional women's jobs any better, though? Nursing, with night shifts, lousy pay and back-breaking work? Childcare, even more poorly paid, very, very hard work. Etc...
I can't actually think of many jobs you should take if it's not for love or money.
Posted by: Jill at Oct 26, 2003 1:42:20 AM
So the answer is, all jobs suck, and therefore, we should encourage more young women to enter fields that suck? "Your life is going to go down the tubes anyway once you turn 35 or start a family, so you might as well plan for it" doesn't work too well as a motivator, imo.
The problem I have with encouraging women to go into tech is that I think that the people doing it are starting off with incorrect assumptions. But if your assumptions are that the only choices are bad or worse, then why encourage them to do something that they don't want to do? Or in other words, if all the choices are bad, why encourage tech over, say, ditchdigging?
The choices aren't (imo) limited to "traditional women's work" and tech. It's not a matter of black or white, one or zero. There are plenty of jobs out that that aren't pink collar that don't involve writing code for 80 hours a week. Why not encourage women to seek those out?
Posted by: Dori Smith at Oct 26, 2003 3:36:48 AM
At the national level the numbers are a little bit better than at RIT. According to the Taulbee Survey, which is conducted every year among all CS & CE departments at the PhD level (graph) and at the BS & MS level (graph) of the completed degrees 18% are women. They only have the enrollment numbers for PhD students, of which 20% are women. It would have been interesting to see the demographics split out by university ranking, as my intuitively I would say that the top ranked school do better in attracting women to their programs.
Not only do they do this to achieve a better balance in their program, but also because women who were successful as an undergrad in general have had to overcome many more obstacles than their male counterparts. This ability to fight for themselves, and to deal with adversity, makes them better graduate students with a higher chance of success.
Posted by: Werner at Oct 26, 2003 6:51:42 AM
With respect, Dori, I will challenge a few of your assumptions:
- Tech jobs may not be good for women. But might they be good for the *tech*?
- Not all tech jobs are 80-hour codefests. I've never coded an 80-hour week in my life, and doubt I ever will. It isn't just codemonkey jobs that women are locked out of -- it's jobs where tech is necessary, even if it is not the main focus. A lot of these jobs are pretty sweet.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at Oct 26, 2003 10:54:46 AM
Werner, you're right that nationally things are better. Technical institutes like RIT traditionally have lower female enrollment. However, over the past ten years the percentage of women graduating from CS programs has been steadily dropping. I posted some of those numbers on my blog back in April.
Dori, your questions are good ones. I wrote about the "why should we care?" question over on my blog, here, back in July.
(Sorry to resort to pointers, but I'm on verrrry slow dial-up connection in Albuquerque, and won't be on long enough to write lengthy responses...)
Posted by: Liz at Oct 26, 2003 11:00:55 AM
Dori -- yes this country has a serious problem with building a great big Off Ramp for smart women with children. This is, as you say, hardly motivational, but that doesn't make it any less true. I'm at home with kids right now because my job demanded long workweeks that basically gave me a choice between keeping that job or never seeing my child. But did my "life" go down the tubes? Heck no. There's a lot more to life than the cubicle rat-race. My parting with that kind of life was definitely mutual. They didn't want me because I didn't want to invest my whole life in their prosperity, and I didn't want them for the same reason. I don't have a traditional career anymore -- I strapped some dynamite to it and blew that sucker up. Initially a bummer -- but eventually I realized I'm having a helluva lot more fun out here than I did in there. What I did in there made money and prestige, what I'm doing out here makes a difference.
The current job market demands big sacrifices of everybody, and especially of people who want to have families. Personally I'm not sure anybody, male or female, is served in terms of thinking of a "career" anymore. A "career" is a fiction constructed by the employer and the employed so that the employed will work more than 40 hours a week towards a mirage of money, power, and fulfillment that never gets any closer. Seeking primary meaning for life in the workplace is increasingly like trying to get water from a dry well.
But I think we are arguing at cross-purposes: I take it your central point is (and restate if I'm wrong) that people should be allowed to choose whatever work they want. I agree. My central point is that the work climate in the US is increasingly hostile nearly across the board, and that men and women should take preventative measures to keep their potential for a good, fulfilling life by adopting and encouraging interests and loves that transcend the workplace and by saving a lot of money, because layoffs will happen to you.
Posted by: Lisa Williams at Oct 26, 2003 12:06:20 PM
i think you're all missing the very real political side of this; people were promised these wonderful dreams of jobs that only take 30 hour work-weeks, but it doesn't happen because the rich people would rather make one person work a 90 hour work-week and fear for their job. this is part and parcel of the "career" idea where a person's indenture to an employer is theoretically perceived as an asset to them. this (and runaway globalization and de-regulation) is the root of all the employment conflicts today.
fact is that when you overwork one person you get far less intellectual or otherwise productivity out of them, and you increase the burn-out rate of a given worker -- the 30 hour work-week would actually be great for employers if they were a little less short-sighted.
--random noise
Posted by: anonymous at Oct 26, 2003 12:56:20 PM
" I take it your central point is (and restate if I'm wrong) that people should be allowed to choose whatever work they want."
Not quite, although I don't disagree with this. My point is that I agree with you & others that there isn't such a thing as a career any more, at least not in the tech world. So, why are we encouraging people to spend their time and money preparing for these non-existent careers?
Take a 12 year old girl. Encourage her towards her wonderful future CS career, for which she'll graduate at age 24. At age 36, she's unhirable. At that point, she's spent 1/3 of her life preparing for a job, and 1/3 of her life doing it. She's just paid off her student loans, and poof! can't even get a job in QA. What then?
What magical thing is it that 20-something women bring to the tech world that 40-something women don't? If there isn't a difference, why aren't the people encouraging teenagers into the CS field also creating programs to help 40-something women stay in the tech market? Hell, the latter are already trained and already interested; they just can't get hired.
Maybe it's just the emphasis on youth that's bothering me (I'm also bothered by society's emphasis on youth in general). If your whole thesis is that young women don't see older women in the CS workplace, and therefore, younger women need more encouragement to be in the CS workplace, maybe your assumptions are wrong--instead of creating new female 20 somethings to be used up and spit out by the field (along with their male 20 something counterparts), maybe the effort should be put into figuring out how to get those 40 something women who want to be in the field back into it (thereby solving the lack-of-role-model issue).
Posted by: Dori Smith at Oct 26, 2003 5:14:46 PM
Dorothea: not ignoring you, but I think that your questions got answered in the last one.
But I want to respond more precisely to "Tech jobs may not be good for women. But might they be good for the *tech*?"
Why does tech need teen and 20-something women more than 40-something women? Especially when the latter already have degrees, experience, and a strong desire to be in the biz?
Posted by: Dori Smith at Oct 26, 2003 5:39:25 PM
I wonder how relevant you think this article about early-career obstacles for women in science is to women in technology....
Posted by: Betsy Devine at Oct 26, 2003 8:11:12 PM
Hello,
I just stumbled onto to this site and have to comment that I am 44 and I have been working and continue to work in Technology (as a Trainer). I am investigating a graduate degree program that will allow me to 'fill in the holes'. But I disagree that women aren't hirable in technology after the age of 35. I didn't even have my first technological job until the age of 39.
I get the impression that technology doesn't fare any worse than any other traditionally male profession in the department of life after babies..
While I have your attention I'm wondering if i could get comments about something that has happened to me. I used the term "pink collar professional" in a non attitudial, factual way in a conversation and I was accused of discrimination. Asked to leave the premises!
Is 'pink collar profession' a pejorative term?
Posted by: Michele Ciccone at Dec 6, 2003 7:38:10 AM
hi michele, i have never heard "pink collar professional". and i am more than curious as to the full circumstances of your being asked to leave the premises. yikes. what was the context of the comment? actually, i really wanted to support your quest for graduate studies to help fill in the gaps. i am 39 and also researching a few graduate programs. one of my main issues is "part-time executive program" vs. quit and go to school full time...good luck.
Posted by: bachan kaur at Dec 6, 2003 8:51:57 PM
