[UbuntuWomen] Article: Computer World: Why women quit technology careers

[Caroline Ford]

2008/6/19 Tricia Bowen <tricia.bowen at gmail.com>:
> Hi Elizabeth,
> You should submit this article to slashdot. It's a good counterpart to your
> last post: Slashdot "Do women write better code?". I had to give up reading
> the comments on that one because they were horribly one sided. I would love
> to see what the commentary is on this one.
>
> This article hit home for me. I'm turning 40 next April. My career has taken
> the back seat since my daughter was born 6 years ago. Since then I've been
> consulting on a part-time basis. Now that my kids are in school I am force
> to rethink my career choices. Do I want to go back to a conference room
> where men google "anna kournikova" obsessively and display crude pics of her
> on the projector screen before meetings? Do I want to got back to an
> atmosphere where the bosses male lunch buddies get promoted while the few
> women, who have no position of power, are stuck back in the office doing the
> grunt work? Do I want to sit in another stinking "war room" pulling an
> all-nighter to make the higher ups feel good, when I know the reason we're
> all here is because of poor planning. Poor planning that was pointed out
> months before the launch date.
>
> The answer is a big NO. As good as the money was, I'm thinking  High School
> Math Teacher is the next career phase. I've played quite a bit with Edubuntu
> and can't wait to build my lesson plans around it.
> --Tricia
>
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Elizabeth Bevilacqua <lyz at ubuntu.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Another interesting article came across my desk today, aysiu posted
>> this in the Ubuntu-Women forums:
>>
>>
>> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=319212&pageNumber=1
>>
>> Excerpt:
>>
>> "Based on the demographics, it seems likely that they leave to start
>> families. Is that what happens? No. I'm not trying to pretend that
>> work-life balance is not important, but we found four other more
>> important factors about the culture and the nature of the career path.
>> We call them "antigens," because they repel women.
>>
>> Tell me about those. The most important antigen is the machismo that
>> continues to permeate these work environments. We found that 63% of
>> women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual
>> harassment. That's a really high figure.
>>
>> They talk about demeaning and condescending attitudes, lots of
>> off-color jokes, sexual innuendo, arrogance; colleagues, particularly
>> in the tech culture, who genuinely think women don't have what it
>> takes -- who see them as genetically inferior. It's hard to take as a
>> steady stream. It's predatory and demeaning. It's distressing to find
>> this kind of data in 2008."
>>
>> --
>> Elizabeth Bevilacqua
>> http://www.princessleia.com

This is why I went back to work in the public sector administration
and didn't continue my IT qualification. I have far too much self
respect to deal with these people.

Caroline