I recently made an observation in my daily work life, 9 times out of 10 I am the only female in the meetings at work. I am a project manager for an enterprise system implementation. I have a 21 person team and only 3 women are on the team (including myself). So I started to wonder if this was just my experience or if this is a wider norm. I polled a few trusted (male) pals and they shared experiences that contradicted mine. In fact, my polling prompted a discussion on the following topics:
- the seemingly male dominated IT world - perception or reality?
- the dynamics of a the working relationship between males and females vs. same sex workplace interactions
- and the future of application development (and IT in general) with the looming certainty of total offshore development.
Each of these topics really peaks my interest and I plan to devote several blogs to exploring each. I would love to hear any initial thoughts to get my creative juices flowing.
2 comments:
Women in IT seems to be in patches. Like you, I've spent much of my career being a small minority in a room of men. However, moving sectors (especially into UK Public Sector) I found large parts of the sector where the balance was almost female dominated. I understand that a research team from BCSWomen (http://tr.im/tiuy) a few years ago found some research that suggests that once a critical mass happens (a relatively small proportion) then a tipping point is reached and the role models are joined by other women until the group of women is in proportion much closer to the ratio in the normal population.
Change sector or organisation and you may find the proportions are different.
There is a tendency to say that IT is traditionally a career that men will be more likely to typed towards. However, with girls now out performing boys in school science and maths, there must be something else at play to see the numbers of professional women in IT falling recently.
Diversity does seem to help teams work more effectively and holistically but it can make communication difficult sometimes. A little salt in the receipe works wonders.
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
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