Saturday, March 15, 2008
Women in IT
Eric Chabrow, Editor of the magazine CIO Insight (Ziff Davis Enterprise), responded to my letter of concern that their magazine gives short shrift to the very large number of talented women working at top leadership roles of IT organizations.
In response, he cited several of the magazine’s recent articles over the past year, “in print, online and video about women in IT, including a major feature entitled Behind the Decline in Women in IT.” The links are contained below.
He still doesn’t “get it.” Writing about women in leadership is NOT equal to writing about “why [some] women opt out, quit, fail to aspire.” Writing about women in IT leadership IS writing about women who are at the top of IT organizations and how they succeeded.
One very interesting item from the array of research was that fact that there is a higher percentage of women CIOs at top Fortune corporations compared to the percentage of CEOs, CFOs, or General Counsels. More women came to top corporate board roles by rising up the corporate technology ladder, today, than by any other career pathway.
More women CIOs may result from companies tapping top IT talent from a broader resource pool: technology users in marketing, operations, manufacturing tend to have a broader view of the corporation than nerds who are more comfortable writing and debugging software subroutines. We don’t promote people to leadership positions from cheap, imported, IT programmer labor pools.
But, Mr. Chabrow is really more interested in why women are NOT among the hordes of drone software programmers, today. Perhaps it is because being a software programmer or engineer used to be like sport fishing – exciting, challenging, out on the unfettered seas of opportunity. Today, it’s a job more akin to stuffing tuna parts into cans. It is work that only imported cheap “special visa workers” from Eastern Europe aspire to perform. Today, technical support work is so mindlessly boring that only low income overseas labor finds it interesting. Maybe women are smart to avoid competing with the lower income levels.
Why did hordes of women leave IT from the years 2000 through 2005, as indicated by the research cited below? Perhaps it was due to the entire dot.com bust and venture capital wipe-out that occurred precisely during that very same period. Maybe women moved out of the strict confines of IT (software programmer) and migrated over to the more financially successful IT ultimate customer marketplace (securities analyst, investment advisor, etc.) Maybe women are smarter than we have given them credit.
And, as AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley has pointed out in her studies of the Silicon Valley labor marketplace, much of the entrepreneurial labor pool in the US is now foreign born, who undoubtedly look to their own talent pool as an employment resource.
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~anno/
Lots of reasons, lots of research opportunities, Mr. Chabrow. Try to think differently.
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Trends/Why-Do-Women-Leave-IT/
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Past-News/Numbers-Show-Big-Decline-of-Women-in-IT/
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Past-News/One-Solution-to-IT-Labor-Shortage-Women/
http://blogs.cioinsight.com/research_central/content001/women_in_it/women_and_it_recent_research.html
http://blog.cioinsight.com/parallax_view/content/women_in_it/women_it_leaders_one_step_forward_one_step_back_1.html
http://blog.cioinsight.com/parallax_view/content/women_in_it/getting_women_back_into_it_1.html
http://blogs.cioinsight.com/parallax_view/content/people/the_new_it_gender_gap.html
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Video/Part-1-June-Drewry-Grooming-the-next-CIO/
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Video/Atti-Riazi-Ogilvy-Mather/
Links provided by: Eric Chabrow, Editor of CIO Insight
echabrow@cioinsight.com
In response, he cited several of the magazine’s recent articles over the past year, “in print, online and video about women in IT, including a major feature entitled Behind the Decline in Women in IT.” The links are contained below.
He still doesn’t “get it.” Writing about women in leadership is NOT equal to writing about “why [some] women opt out, quit, fail to aspire.” Writing about women in IT leadership IS writing about women who are at the top of IT organizations and how they succeeded.
One very interesting item from the array of research was that fact that there is a higher percentage of women CIOs at top Fortune corporations compared to the percentage of CEOs, CFOs, or General Counsels. More women came to top corporate board roles by rising up the corporate technology ladder, today, than by any other career pathway.
More women CIOs may result from companies tapping top IT talent from a broader resource pool: technology users in marketing, operations, manufacturing tend to have a broader view of the corporation than nerds who are more comfortable writing and debugging software subroutines. We don’t promote people to leadership positions from cheap, imported, IT programmer labor pools.
But, Mr. Chabrow is really more interested in why women are NOT among the hordes of drone software programmers, today. Perhaps it is because being a software programmer or engineer used to be like sport fishing – exciting, challenging, out on the unfettered seas of opportunity. Today, it’s a job more akin to stuffing tuna parts into cans. It is work that only imported cheap “special visa workers” from Eastern Europe aspire to perform. Today, technical support work is so mindlessly boring that only low income overseas labor finds it interesting. Maybe women are smart to avoid competing with the lower income levels.
Why did hordes of women leave IT from the years 2000 through 2005, as indicated by the research cited below? Perhaps it was due to the entire dot.com bust and venture capital wipe-out that occurred precisely during that very same period. Maybe women moved out of the strict confines of IT (software programmer) and migrated over to the more financially successful IT ultimate customer marketplace (securities analyst, investment advisor, etc.) Maybe women are smarter than we have given them credit.
And, as AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley has pointed out in her studies of the Silicon Valley labor marketplace, much of the entrepreneurial labor pool in the US is now foreign born, who undoubtedly look to their own talent pool as an employment resource.
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~anno/
Lots of reasons, lots of research opportunities, Mr. Chabrow. Try to think differently.
Links provided by: Eric Chabrow, Editor of CIO Insight
echabrow@cioinsight.com
# posted by ChampionBoards.com @ 1:01 PM 
