Tech needs more women, but computer science probably doesnp~
Source: Tim Green
Here's what you've been waiting for: a white man's views on women in tech...
I have this running joke with my 15 year old son that every night, when he’s asleep, I creep into his room and whisper ‘petroleum engineer, petroleum engineer’ into his ear.
It’s all because I was listening to a Planet Money podcast, which looked at the college courses that led to the highest earning jobs.
Well, no need for me to tell you what came out on top.
The podcast cited the example of one student who got a paid summer internship, which turned into a full-time job after she graduated. At age 24, she was on $110,000 a year.
So the question is: why don’t I creep into my two daughters’ rooms for a little whispering?
Well, two reasons:
1. They couldn’t care less about science.
2. They often have friends over and I don’t want to be arrested.
My son is on course to study maths, physics and economics at A-level. My daughters? Drama and music.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the arts. I’m a pathetic art history graduate for Christ’s sake.
But thanks to the the ridiculous debt students leave college with, it’s only natural to hope that your kids choose lucrative careers.
So what about tech? The Planet Money stats also showed that third on the top earning courses was ‘maths and computer science’.
Is that another door closed to my humanities-minded daughters?
It would seem so. Most research indicates that around 18 per cent of computer science graduates are women. Why is that?
Some would say it’s social engineering at a young age. That girls are taught to believe maths is boring and uncool. If only we could change this, goes the argument. we would happily arrive at a 50/50 split.
Personally, I think this is silly. I look at my own kids and my nephews and nieces - all raised in liberal environments with no pressure to go in any prescribed direction.
The boys build stuff on Minecraft. The girls spend hours on Instagram.
It’s obvious to me that, as a generalisation, boys are more obsessive and competitive than girls. Females are just more social.
Obviously, there are plenty of women who love science and maths. So surely the important thing is to make this totally socially OK rather than pushing for a 50/50 split in every walk of life.
I have a mate who runs a software company of about 100 people. I asked him about his female programmers. He said simply that about one in six of applicants are women and that these women are no better or worse than the men.
As a result, one in six of his staff are women �C and yes they perform no better or worse than the men.
Should he be doing more to get women to apply? Or just accept the norm and create a workplace that’s fair and friendly whatever gender you are?
I’d say the latter. He’s in business, after all, not politics.
For me, all the arguments about getting more women into tech focus on the wrong thing, which is how to get more women studying computing.
Instead, it should be about re-enforcing the idea that tech is not just about programming. It’s about solving problems. The best tech is invisible to the end user. And women are end users - in some cases (Tumblr, Instagram, Etsy) more so than men.
If women (generalisation alert) have different skills from men, they should be encouraged into tech to bring new perspectives to the building of tech products.
I think back to the 90s when I was writing about video games. Some publishers tried to crack the female market by taking a traditional challenge-based template and dropping a princess into it.
Girls didn’t bite. But they did start playing The Sims.
What they wanted was a new way to play, not window dressing.
So I hope that if my Instagram-obsessed daughters and nieces have an idea for a new service �C an idea that maybe wouldn’t have occurred to their brothers �C there are no barriers to them pursuing it.
And maybe, ironically, tech is the answer here too.
Thanks to crowd funding platforms, the market is more open to new ideas than ever before. From anyone.
I got a shock insight into this when I attended a Bitcoin event recently. The speakers were talking about the democratising power of crowd funding and how it liberates entrepreneurs from the traditional financial gatekeepers.
During the Q&A a black guy asked what could be done to make the whole Bitcoin thing less male and white.
He got the expected sympathy and encouragement. Then one panellist effectively said to him: “Haven’t you been listening? If you have an idea, go off and build it!”
I really hope my daughters and nieces feel liberated enough to determine their own futures in this way.
If they can switch off Instagram for long enough.
Girl with keyboard image via Shutterstock.
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