Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with working in male dominated environments. Personally while I have seen much greater numbers of young women entering the tech sector than when I first started, this does not seem to have translated to a significant overall rise in female participation.
Computerworld has an article on a new Harvard study that finds there is a large percentage of women in IT that completely drop out of the industry after about 10 years. While it is not too unusual for women in their 30’s to take a break from work in most industries the majority of those women eventually return. Not so in IT where more than half of those women never return.
What is concerning is the reasons that most women site for dropping out. While some of these are institutional, the study found the largest contributer was a tendency towards machismo and sexism amongst many (definitely not all) IT workers. This begins a vicious circle where the women dropping out create a sense of isolation for those that remain which causes more to leave. This is a really disappointing thing to learn, we get used to the idea that people in IT are supposed to be on the high end of the intelligence curve yet our industry can remain one of the more unfriendly to women.
For the men in IT it is time we do more than just think about our own actions, we need to be actively speaking out when we see bad behavior in others. It would be sad to think that once we recognised that something was not right we did not take active steps to correct it.