IT-girl: What is the attitude of women in technology?
Masha Vorslav
IT-sphere is one of the fastest growing and important today, so sexism - which is present in one form or another everywhere - is especially noticeable in it. Western sites with expression peculiar to them almost daily explode with reports of disrespect towards women, in the Russian space no one talks about it, although with equality we are still worse off.
Silicon Valley - in talking about IT, it’s worth taking as a starting point - seeks to support the principle of meritocracy, that is, to create equal conditions for capable and hardworking people. Nevertheless, with equality in the workplace there is almost as bad as in Russia - with the construction of a state of law. There are many more men-developers in the industry: Dave Weiner, a well-known developer, entrepreneur and author, says that during his entire career he worked with thousands of programmers, of whom 999 were men. His experience is subjective, but this does not lose value. From the objective - the figures of the Girls Who Code project: among 25 engineers, only three are girls, and the number of graduates of the “computer science” specialization in 2014 is three times less than twenty years ago.
Women in leadership positions in IT in general can be counted on the fingers of one hand; Not far from technology, the person will immediately call Marissa Mayer, the president and CEO of Yahoo !, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer and author of the very same book, "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead." For the sake of fairness (conclusions, not universal), it is worth noting that the position of women is not much better in IT - this is a good study of the law firm Fenwick & West, according to which in one hundred leading US companies the ratio of male and female directors is about six to one.
In the fresh series about startups "Silicon Valley" so far only one adequate female character
The second red flag - the mindset of people involved in one way or another in the field of technology, and there are a million examples. The leaders of large and cool projects turn out to be sexist: the CEO of the RadiumOne advertising platform, on whose account the contract with Condé Nast, beat his girlfriend (after learning about this, TechCrunch refused to cooperate with the company); and CTO Business Insider Pack Dickinson posted a series of offensive tweets, for which he was rightly pecked by the media and fired. On hackathons design humiliating applications: Titstare allows you to photograph the facial expression of a person staring at his chest; There are online programming schools where the “teacher” gets naked if the user successfully masters the code (the fact that the CodeDicks mirror site appeared almost immediately after CodeBabes does not justify the first one). The story of the confrontation between Julie Ann Howarth and the founder of GitHub (along with his wife’s attention) is multidimensional and confusing, but also revolves around the relationship to a woman in IT. If you want, there is only one adequate female character in the fresh and acceptable plausible series about Silicon Valley startups.
Developer Louis Franco aptly compared the situation of contemporary female developers and lawyers of the 40s. For the sake of interest, we looked at the reports: in fact, in the first half of the last century, women, although they studied law, only substituted men and did not become “real” lawyers; equivalent professionals recognized them thirty or forty years later. It seems to us that this is happening now in the IT sphere. Yes, there are no major socio-demographic triggers like the Great Depression and world wars, and we hope there will be no, but society is making significant progress in establishing equality between all its members. However, existing attitudes like “non-feminine is a profession” and “we want to see a man in this position” (hello, 40s) are nothing more than sexism, which in the same IT results in 74% only 0.3% of the older students who are interested in mathematics and computer science, choose the specialty "computer science". Like any other discrimination, it is destructive and inhibits the development of both the individual and the whole society, and therefore it must be fought.
Photo: cover photo via Shutterstock