Last week, Cheryl Segal of Cox News service reported
on a survey commissioned by accounting, tax, and consulting firm
Deloitte & Touche, which found, among other things, that:
- Only one in 10 of the high-tech professionals surveyed worked for a
company headed by a woman.
- Only 56% of females working in the high-tech sector wanted to
continue in the field, compared with 69% of males.
- Only 40% of females working in high-tech said they would pursue it
as a career if they could start over, compared with 55% of men.
- A majority of women respondents thought the high-tech industry is
governed by "traditional attitudes and practices" that favor males over
female workers.
Well, that may be true, but I don't believe that it is so much a
deliberate male conspiracy to exclude women or to place "glass ceiling"
obstacles in their path to advancement, as a fundamental difference in
the way women and men address technology.
Car Talk
While I was reflecting on this, I happened to read a Time magazine
essay by Garrison Kiellor in which he recalled his father and uncles
gathering around his grandmother's deathbed many years ago. The men sat
in solemn and contemplative silence for a few minutes - and then began
talking about cars.
This anecdote made me smile, because it is the same in my family. I
can't recall ever attending a family funeral, wedding , birthday party,
or reunion at which the male cohort didn't sooner or later (usually
sooner) get around to talking about cars. One of my late uncles, musing
on this phenomenon, once told me that it was the same when he was a kid
during the first two decades of the 20th century, except that then they
talked about horses. And in recent years, especially among the baby
boomer and younger generations, an alternative topic competing with car
talk, is computer talk.
I don't notice this happening among the female members of my family,
most of whom drive cars, and many of whom use computers. I suspect that
whatever the female members of Garrison Kiellor's family found to
discuss while his grandmother was dying, the comparative virtues of
Dodges vs. Fords didn't come up.
This is not to suggest that there are no female car freaks, and I'm
confident that there would be a significantly larger proportion of
female computer aficionados. There are some very competent female
journalists covering both fields. However, I would venture once more
that when, say, Jean Jennings of Automobile Magazine is hanging out
with female members of her family or a group of her old high-school
girl-buddies, debates about the relative superiority of the big block
Chrysler 440 versus the Chevy 454 rarely come up. My guess is that when
Mean Jean wants to have some serious car conversation, she is obliged
to hang out with the guys, and I'm sure she gets a respectful
hearing.
Even among women I know who genuinely love cars or computers, I
rarely sense the gut-level enthusiasm and excitement over the hardware
itself that most (not all) males I know find irresistible. Women tend
to be more practical and software oriented in their computer enthusiasm
than men, more interested in what they can do with the computer rather
than in the machine for its own sake. This is a generality, but I think
it is a fair one based on observation, and, I can't emphasize this
enough, exceptions are acknowledged.
Information Technology
That more practical, utilitarian approach may well make women better
IT workers, more effective software engineers, and so on, than men, but
it appears to me that women, as a rule, just don't get the sheer kick
from the hardware aspects of computing that most men do. That, more
than gender politics, may explain why they get less satisfaction from
working in the industry.
I have two teenage children, one of each gender. Both grew up around
computers and both were encouraged equally to learn and experiment with
technology. My son is now more knowledgeable in the field than I am. My
daughter, while she genuinely loves her PowerBook and has even
collaborated with me on a couple of articles for MacOpinion.com, values it as a tool - a
means to an end - and is simply disinterested in the nuts and bolts of
computing. It's the same with cars. She likes cars, but has no passion
for the technical points of the hardware. [A good example of that
perspective on computing is the Acoustic
Mac column by Beverly Woods - ed.]
There are, of course, other factors relating to discrepancies in
male/female satisfaction and advancement in the IT field noted in the
Deloitte & Touche survey. However, don't hold your breath waiting
for things to even out, at least until you find groups of women at
weddings and parties hanging around discussing fuel injection vs.
carburetion.
