Research sheds light on attitudes holding industry back

Almost one in five men in IT explain why fewer females work in the profession by arguing that “women are naturally less well suited to tech roles than men.”

Feel free to check the calendar. No, we have not set the DeLorean for 1985. It is still 2023, yet anyone familiar with the industry over the last 30 years may feel a sense of déjà vu when reading the findings of a report by The Fawcett Society charity and telecoms biz Virgin Media O2.

The survey of nearly 1,500 workers in tech, those who have just left the industry, and women qualified in sciences, technology, or math, also found that a “tech bro” work culture of sexism forced more than 40 percent of women in the sector to think about leaving their role at least once a week.

Additionally, the study found 72 percent of women in tech have experienced at least one form of sexism at work. This includes being paid less than male colleagues (22 percent) and having their skills and abilities questioned (20 percent). Almost a third of women in tech highlighted a gender bias in recruitment, and 14 percent said they were made to feel uncomfortable because of their gender during the application process.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    377·
    1 year ago

    I’ll bite. This sort of ultra-shallow analysis fails to explain why the sexism of software developers today is apparently harder to overcome than the sexism of medical doctors and lawyers was decades ago. Somehow women managed to break into those fields, so that in the present day almost 40% of doctors and lawyers (and more than half of medical and law students) are women. I don’t see a consensus on what fraction of software developers are women (presumably because there’s no official license to be a software developer) but the numbers appear to range from 10% to 20%. That’s what the fraction of women lawyers was in the late 80’s, and I think it’s going to be hard to claim that today’s software developers are better at excluding women than 80’s lawyers were.

    I believe that the claims about sexist treatment are real - even if software developers were much less sexist than average, one woman in a group with nine men would experience more sexism than she would in a less unbalanced environment. I don’t believe that sexism is what keeps most women out of software development; if it could do that, it would have kept them out of medicine and law too.

    • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      I feel like part of the issue is cultural. Just like Nintendo putting video games in the boys section of the toy store, Hollywood has made tech out to be a field dominated by anti-social, awkward, and frankly gross, morbidly obese, barbaric dudes that shower once a year. From Jurassic Park to NCIS, tech people are not “sexy” and are typically quite unsavory.

      Some of the newer shows have done better, as have the newer toy isles… and video games and tech do seem to be rebounding, at least somewhat (anecdotally of course).

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        In my experience working in several countries in Europe it most definitelly is cultural, apparently starting by the proportion of women that get Software Engineering degrees (i say “apparently” because there I only know how it was in my homeland were I got my own degree, were women in the Software Engineering one were half the pupils).

        As for the work culture, as I wrote in another post the worst place of all I worked in actually had several women, mostly in low-level management, who were there due to gender quotas, were treated mainly as eye-candy by their own managers and were all over the place in competence (from “competent” to “seriously incompetent”). Worse than the “bro” culture is the one were a certain kind of manager gets a huge budget and is told to “hire 10% women”.