Women account for just one fifth of the EU’s 8m IT jobs

Re: none issue

That's because IT is a career that really makes a difference, with incredible job prospects, high earnings, and near infinite social status.

Re: none issue

I have actually seen an ad trying to get more men into nursing. (This was in California). Though I suspect it was more driven by a shortage of nurses in general at the time, not specifically because anyone cared about the gender disparity.

If there is an IT shortage, I suppose it makes sense to try and get more women for the same reason. But it should be done in an intelligent, realistic way, not by arbitrarily calling the lack of women a problem and insinuated that the current, mostly male IT workers are to blame.

Re: none issue

But there are schemes to encourage men into nursing, so stop repeating the same tired old stories. You can repeat the "women clearly never want to do STEM" all you want but evidence proves it's not true.

http://www.professionalnursing.org/article/S8755-7223(10)00146-8/abstract

Gender Discrimination and Nursing: Α Literature Review

http://work.chron.com/gender-equality-issues-nursing-careers-11250.html

Nursing remains a predominantly female field in 2012, although the number of men in nursing has increased. About 7 percent of nurses are men, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Gender equality cuts both ways in nursing; men are both more likely to succeed in certain areas of nursing and less likely to be hired in others. Male nurses earn higher salaries overall, but more women work part time than men, which impacts both their earnings and their promotion potential.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11202075/No-job-for-a-man-Meet-the-male-midwives.html

Mountford was assigned to a midwife in a doctor’s practice, where he found objections came from other professionals rather than the women he was supposed to be caring for. “The GPs there just weren’t keen on having a man doing it, so I was sent to be assistant to another midwife in a community hospital.

Re: none issue

Newshock for you: male and female ARE different, and have different interests. Accept it and move on. In my A-level physics class there were zero girls.

Re: none issue

"And the best way to dismantle these barriers is to start with children"

There you hit a problem... No amount of "You Can Be Anything You Want" propaganda at schools over the past say.. 2-3 decades has delivered any real results in this matter. And it's not as if , in any western European nation, a school that explicitly or implicitly promoted gender bias would be allowed to live very long. Especially the ones that are preparing kids for a higher education, like IT.

This is compounded by well over two decades of Preferential Hiring practices, which as the numbers show, still haven't had any real result.

You'd be stupid to go in IT as a woman.. Especially if you're competitive and career-minded. Not when the corporate world offers a career in HR. Why join the tussle for Pasha, when you can be the Grand Visier, and one that's considered Hard To Replace as well?

Re: none issue

You really do not get it. IT is a great field for introvert computer geeks, for everyone else not so much. Biology plays a huge role ie there is a world of difference between making a deposit and having to carry that result of the data extraction from the deposit and it's conjunction with a living data repository, for nine months and then providing additional sustenance and data through to self sustenance.

This produces in the majority inherently different traits, logical genetic traits, ignoring those is stupid. Even in university the difference is profound, spend time in the psychology area of the schools and you are exposed to the intense vagaries of many emotions being shared and expressed, an intense cacophonous interaction of human psyche's.

In contrast got to the IT areas of a university and it because a place of peace and calm, only intermittently interrupted by first year 'this a computer' students. The difference is huge and one kind of student is attracted to one environment (those logically more suited to the intense socio emotional interactions with children) and the other environment suits those who simply do not need to socialise as much, who in fact tend to avoid intense social interactions.

Such is life, of two sexes, one the sacrificial donor and the other the carrier and rearer (whether it be a bug or fish or mammal, one sacrifices and the other nurtures and those different roles produce different genetic outcomes to support those roles, in the majority).

Re: Assumptions

Try getting hired in silicon valley with a grey beard,

I think ageism is the major cause of fewer women rather than outright sexism.

Increasingly you need a postgraduate degree to be considered at the hot big companies, so you start your career nearer to 25. If it's harder to get a job after 35 and any break means your experience of last years hot technology is obsolete - then it's a lot harder to take a couple of years out to have children than it would be in medicine or law.

The same thing happens in academia, it's often said that a PhD+postdoc costs you your first born child - but at least once you get a permanent job you don't have quite such a ticking clock.

Re: Bell end reader?

This has been envisioned actually.

Buttobi CPU

Re: Seriously?

If you really can't see a difference between El Graun and those "men haters weeklies" then you've got to get out more. Those blogs are just awful. But El Graun is relatively sane, modulo Jessica Valenti.

Re: "It's IT, damnit."

If it's in bureaucratspeak, it may be IT, but not as we know it...

Re: Really?

every single male with two brain cells to rub together I ever talked to was unhappy about the low percentage of females in the tech sector

Ahh, but they weren't unhappy enough to get themselves a job in marketing. Mind you it is IT's loss that there aren't more women, largely because IME women make better managers than men. With a few exceptions, women listen when other people talk, and they pick up the social cues that us blokes steam roller right across.