System i Addict

I have a few opinions on this article. They may not be popular, but I will give you what I know and have seen in the last 17 years.

CIO Insight has an article that points out that the number of women in IT is dropping. They may have the numbers right but I think the reasons are wrong.

Over all if you were to stand on my chair in my IT dept right now, and I do stand in my chair alot around here to see what is going on, I can tell you that IT has less women in it, but if you look at the numbers over the past 30 years and I don’t have those numbers but it would be more of a guess based on conversations and common sense I would also be able to conclude that the numbers for women in IT up way up compared to 1980.

In fact I find that to be one of the problems with the article is that they have only reviewed IT since 2000, when we all know IT was so big in IT they has vacancies and people filling jobs of both sexes that truly had no training and no reason to be filling those seats other than they needed a warm body to hold that position because there was no one to do it anywhere. 2000 was in fact a very odd time indeed.

If you were an alien from outerspace doing this study you would throw out the hiring informatin from 1998 - 2001 just because it does not tell anypart of the story over the past 100 years. It skews the numbers and make no sense other than it was a very odd time.

I would also guess that the ratio of women to men in IT or DP as it was called in 1980 would have been about 20:1 or maybe even greater. I know in the first IT dept I was in it was about 12:1, I had to count this out and remember what the department looked like in 1990. Today it’s about 4:1 and that number moves all the time. I also still don’t see many men taking time off to have a baby or staying home to raise a family while the female in the house works. If it would be lucrative for the women of the house to work in IT as she may have done in the past and like IT was in 2000 then I would see more women in the workplace and in IT. Since the IT bubble burst its now a much tighter market and instead of fighting other IT people for a position they may see more value in staying home with the kids or trying something else a little more near and dear to their hearts.

I think if you ask most men if they would rather do something rather than IT they would say yes. IT pays the bills and still does a pretty good job of it. If you were to tell me I could do photography and make ask much money as I do in IT. I would have not posted this and grabbed my camera. Women seem to have more talent at being flexible and at the end of the day more aptitude for doing what matters to them. Men on the other hand are not wired that way and will punish themselves to make sure they bring home enough money for everyone to be happy and will do it at any cost.

In the end I applaud the women who have left IT to do more positive and more productive things in their lives. In fact I kind of envy them. I would love to stop doing IT, shot photography and hang out with Gino more. Working sucks and what the CIO Insight article says to me is that women are still the smarter bunch. They figured out that IT is still a crappy and thankless job and at the end of the day they still don’t pay me enough money to do this. It’s way to many hours and way to little pay not to mention most IT managers and IT directors go home and have life after work while the rest of us slave for what ends up being pennies on the dollar from 4 AM - 10 Pm at night all while they get paid tons better and work far less.

I do need to work my way into middle managment or win the lottery so like the smart women of IT now get to do what they truley love…..live life without IT.