According to a recent study, almost one in five men consider the male dominance of the IT industry to be due to the fact that women are less suitable for the field.
According to a recent survey, more than 72 percent of women working in the IT industry have encountered sexism at work. deagreez / Artwork Vector
According to a recent report, the so-called “Tech Bro” culture is still firmly entrenched in sexist stereotypes, which forget the female pioneers who coded the huge advances in the IT industry.
Almost one in five men in the IT field justifies the male dominance of the field by the fact that “women are naturally less suitable for tasks in the field of technology than men”, says The Fawcett Society charity organization and telecommunications company Virgin Media O2 investigation report carried out.
The survey revealed that sexism related to the Tech Bro work culture drove more than 40 percent of women in the industry to consider leaving their work role at least once a week.
In addition, it showed that 72 percent of women in the IT industry have experienced sexism at work in at least some way. For more than a fifth, it was a lower salary level than male colleagues, and for a fifth, it was about questioning their skills and abilities.
Almost 1,500 employees of the IT sector and those who have just left the sector, as well as persons with higher education in the fields of science and technology, participated in the survey.
Almost a third of women highlighted gendered recruitment practices in the IT industry, and 14 percent said they felt uncomfortable because of their gender during the application process.
In a separate 2023 Women in Tech survey, it was revealed that a number of early misconceptions about “young girls’ low level of education” prevent women from entering the industry.
The research report emphasized that “seeing more female role models in the IT industry, young girls begin to see the IT industry as a more realistic and attractive career option.”
Questionable history of the problem
In 1970, only 14 percent of US computer science degrees were awarded to women. By 1984, the figure had risen to 37 percent, but it later declined. By 2011, it was only 18 percent, hovering around the same figure ever since.
However, women helped to establish the IT industry and provided it with a strong frame against which the industry was built.
Historian Mar Hicks, an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, has found that women filled early IT departments in the 1950s. At that time, the work was seen as less exciting and less attractive from a career point of view.
Instead, women trained men in the field so that they could move to more promising departments. In the book “Your Computer is on Fire” that criticizes the history of the IT industry, Hicks tells the story of a female programmer from 1959.
– He spent a year training two new employees on critical and long-term computer projects at the US government’s main computer center, despite having no previous computer skills. At the same time, he handled all his work tasks in programming, operation and testing as before.
The problem, according to Hicks, was “men’s lack of technical competence in these positions and often a lack of interest in IT work, partly due to its feminized history.”
With this trend, an early software company was born Freelance Programmerswhich was developed by Stephanie “Steve” Shirley. He was denied a promotion in 1950, after which he developed his own company. Freelance Programmers came later Xansauntil it was sold for more than 540 million For Steria in the year 2007.
Shirley’s employees included Ann Moffatt, who coded the black box for the legendary Franco-British Concorde supersonic aircraft. Moffat became the company’s CTO and managed more than 300 programmers.