Every once in awhile I see an article about women in IT linked from slashdot or on another site I browse. Now if such articles described real discrimination or genuine unfair practices they would be an important contribution toward gender equity. However, this article like most of those I run across describes the difficulty many women in CS/IT have with work life balance or the pressure they feel at being one of only a few women. Now I don’t know how much genuine discrimination persists in a field like IT but presenting what appears to be perfectly fair treatment as if it was gender discrimination trivializes any discrimination that might be occurring and makes sure that people see anti-discrimination efforts as pure political correctness.

Given women make up a minority of CS students the article needs to do a lot more than note the rarity of women in the IT profession to even suggest unfairness in the industry so it offers five personal experiences by women in the IT industry. But the worst activity mentioned wasn’t really even an allegation of unfair treatment.

As part of that coaching, she tells women to get past feeling defensive about the male-dominated IT world. Case in point: sports-centered small talk. “You go into a meeting, and it starts with a discussion of whatever sport was on TV that weekend, and instinctively I don’t have much interest in that,” Beck says. “But I remind myself all the time that it’s just the icebreaker. You have to peel back the onion and see what’s really going on.”

This is just a problem that everyone who isn’t into sports shares. Women may be statistically less into sports than men but they actually have it easier than guys like myself who hate sports. Of course it suggests that women might feel more comfortable if there were more women in IT but similarly nerd buisnessmen might feel better if there were more CEOs who played video games. All this says is that we should all be more careful about not always discussing a topic that leaves someone out whatever their gender or reason they aren’t interested.

The only other comments that might even possibly be interpreted as accusations of unfair treatment were mentions of the difficulty of finding a work/like or work/familty balance. But no allegation is made that it would be any easier for men to spend an equal amount of times with their families. While it’s probably true that relative to men (for whatever reasons) women tend to put more priority on family compared to business success this just represents a choice made by women (whatever the reason¹) and not an unfairness imposed on them by the company. Sure if the company purposefully rigged it’s leave policy in a way that arbitrarily catered to men rather than women that could be discriminatory but no such allegation is being made here.

If the article was just a nice human interest story this would be fine but it takes these anecdotes and frames them with the following unsupported allegations

So, what’s gone wrong here? Some blame lingering stereotypes of geeky programmers working in isolation; others point at societal messages that discourage women from pursuing math-and science-oriented careers. Once on the job, the peer pressure to put in punishing hours — the “last jacket on the chair wins” mentality that pervades some IT shops — can also be a turn-off, especially for women, says Jenny Slade, communications director at the NCWIT.

And problems for women in IT sometimes extend beyond work/life balance, says Eileen Trauth, professor of information sciences and technology at Pennsylvania State University. “I’ve heard women talk about pinups, not being invited to lunch and the kinds of jokes people tell,” she says, emphasizing that these are anecdotes from her research, not problems that all women have encountered.

Frankly I don’t whether women frequently experience unfair treatment in IT jobs. Obviously some women are going to be treated poorly because they are wrong. Of course people get treated badly for all sorts of reasons (height, religion, attractiveness) and I’m not sure how prevalent poor treatment based on gender is in IT and neither this suggestive but pretty contentless blob at the front nor the interview with these four women was going to change that. Unless someone was going to allege some industry standard practice or bite the hand that feeds this article was never going to give anyone a good reason to believe women in IT are treated unfairly (or that they aren’t).

Why does this bother me? Because it seems that the default narritive template the media uses for IT or any other industry with few women has become women’s struggle against an adverse industry. No doubt for some industries and some points in time this is the right narrative but it’s indiscriminate application does nothing but harden people’s views and deny any meaningful knowledge about what is actually going on. However, I choose to post about this article because of the irony of an article like this sugesting that being a woman in IT was such a big deal when fear of being the only woman or the responsibility of representing all women was the most frequently cited difficulty by the women they interviewed.

And Dickinson is quick to note that women software engineers do feel the impact of being in the minority.

It’s not unusual to be the only woman at a meeting, she says, and because of that, there’s often a tendency to remain silent unless you think you have something really remarkable to say. “As one member of a small group, you feel you have no right to be mediocre,” Dickinson says. “You’re not just representing yourself; you’re representing [females] with a capital F.”

Maybe it’s just me but publishing articles like this seems the best way to make women even more anxious about being the lone women in their IT department. Given the studies showing that women’s math performance falls when they are reminded of their gender it seems this sort of story just makes the problem worse. Obviously the media can’t refuse to pursue the truth because it causes some harm but this piece is hardly a hard hitting objective look at the state of women in IT.

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1. I’m not arguing that this isn’t the result of some unfairness at home, e.g., guys aren’t willing to stay home to take care of the kids. Even if so it is an unfairness at home and it is hardly an unfairness of the industry not to rectify an unfairness imposed somewhere else. After all it isn’t unfair of the company to pay the programmer more than the janitor even if it was only discrimination or poverty that kept the janitor out of college. ↩