Women and men in the IT profession

Abstract

Fewer women work in or achieve the same job levels as men in corporate America today. In the IT profession, recent estimates (2006) suggest that women make up only 26% of IT professionals in the U.S. where they're outnumbered by men six to one in leadership positions [3,6]. What explains these lower levels of professional achievement for women in IT? Unfortunately, few facts are available to inform the answer, though numerous suppositions have been offered, including that women have less innate ability or interest in the "hard" sciences, that their educational experience dissuades them from careers in IT, and that they are simply less com-fortable working in what is, and has always been, a predominately male environment. However, the validity of such assumptions has not been tested extensively in the IT arena. What is needed is a large-scale study able to distinguish fact from supposition. Here, we report on such a study we conducted in 2003 that examined the attitudes and experience of 815 male and female IT professionals working in multiple organizations across the U.S. (see the sidebar "Study Respondents and Scales").We examined several key questions regarding gender differences in IT: Do women share the same motivations or reasons for entering the IT profession Fewer women entering IT drives the underrepresentation problem.as men?; Are women as well socialized as men into the profession?; Do women have the same types of experience as men in the IT work force?; and Do men and women develop similar attitudes regarding the desirability of the profession? They helped pinpoint potential causes for the lower numbers of women in the IT profession. We used a Webbased survey to collect data from a variety of IT professionals from U.S. organizations. MOTIVATIONS, SOCIALIZA-TION, EXPERIENCEA better understanding of why women are so underrepresented in the IT profession begins with the reasons for a person entering the profession in the first place. For example, common wisdom suggests that men may be more attracted than women to technology-related careers [6]. If true, then men seem more likely to weather inevitable career bumps because they feel a strong association with the work itself. To assess this, we asked our participating IT professionals about the influence a variety of motivators had on their decisions to go into IT, including: love of technology/computers; using state-of-the-art equipment; opportunity for task variety; opportunity for gratifying work; opportunity for advancement; opportunity for job autonomy; job security; level of income; ease of entry into the profession; flexible work hours; and professional prestige.Our results suggest that men and women share some but not all motivations for entering IT (see Table 1). Both groups cited opportunity for job autonomy, advancement, task variety, professional prestige, income, using state-of-the-art equipment, and gratifying work. There were also notable differences; for example, men were significantly more likely than women to identify "love of technology/...

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“…In the IT research, McKinney, Wilson, Brooks, O'Leary-Kelly, and Hardgrave (2008) report that in comparison to men, the surveyed women in IT reported many common motivators for entering the profession and more often indicated that job security, ease of entry, and flexible work hours were the primary reasons for entering the occupation. Prior research has specifically recognized some facets of job satisfaction (e.g., opportunity for advancement, job security, gratifying work, and compensation) as potential motivators for entry into the IT profession (McKinney, et al, 2008). Moreover, Davis and Kuhn (2003) found that many of these same facets (e.g., salary and nature of work) were important factors for IT workers leaving a job.…”

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