I’ve been thinking about why so many technical fields are dominated by men. Here is a great chart about the percentage of men and women in various jobs in the gaming industry in 2010 (for more from this study click here):
You can see here a negative correlation between how technical a job is and the percentage of women holding that job. Some may suggest that this disparity is due to a cognitive difference between male and female brains. In a recent book, authors McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray show that that females in high school and college slightly out-performed males on all standard STEM tests (obviously, the accuracy and implications of these texts can be contested). Despite this, less than 10% of computer science entrants were females. So if it is not cognitive ability keeping women from entering into fields dealing with information technology, there must be some seriously pervasive social, material, or other conditions at play.
I talked in my last post about sexual assault at open source conferences and the role that plays in keeping women segregated into the less technical jobs. That is clearly one material condition keeping women from entering into IT full force.
Another factor could be the masculine culture of technology perpetuated by companies attempting to be gender neutral. By becoming blind to gender, companies are forcing women to adhere to already masculine structures. Instead of recognizing that some women may have different approaches to work, companies remain wedded to the notion that any acknowledgement of gender differences is inappropriate.
Another possibility is the very structure of the new technology company. Research shows that women tend to advance more vertically in a company if it has fairly rigid bureaucratic policies. By so many tech companies rebelling against bureaucracy, positing instead a relaxed and informal workplace, women are not able to advance as quickly (Prescott and Bogg). So the very atmosphere of the 21st century IT company may be exclusionary.
My hunch is that many factors play a role in creating the chart above. Once we get passed the old go-to that women are somehow less equipped cognitively for technical work, we can start examining these other more interesting social factors.
Also, one final thought: I am shocked to see that 70% of the writing done in game design is done my males. I think this has some serious implications for how we teach professional and technical writing. It also suggests to me that we should spend some time looking at our own field for exclusionary gendered practices/protocols/environments/etc.
