Women in Tech
I still see a lot of discussion on linkedin where male tech people and computer programmers are saying that the problem isn’t gender bias against women, it’s simply that women don’t want to study tech subjects. It’s just preference and choice. Switching the scenario might help you understand why there is gender bias, why it is unfair and why women are justified in getting their knickers in a twist over it.
Let’s imagine…
When you were child you were born a boy. As a consequence, your family gave you logic-based toys. They bought you lego and various problem-solving type activity toys, you were encouraged to problem-solve. Your nursery practitioners and teachers did the same. Your female peers were given baby dolls, cleaning sets and nurses dressing-up outfits. They were encouraged to develop their nurturing and care-giving skills.
At school, everyone assumed you were good at maths and told you so — if not overtly then in all kinds of subtle ways including the idea that you were not good at arty things like writing and expressing yourself. As you got older, career advice came in the form of “do what you enjoy, what makes you happy”. If felt good to be good at things so you concentrated on the subjects you’d always been good at: maths, science and eventually you discovered computer programming. You took it further and got a university degree in Computer Science. Besides, you’d always avoided arts subjects and arty extra-curricular activities because you didn’t fit in with all the girls. In fact, it didn’t even occur to you to explore and no one encouraged you to do that. So far, no problem. A pretty standard story.
But now imagine a world where you graduate and all the computer science jobs you qualify for are not exactly badly paid but average salaries are about £27,000 and the top salary you can expect over the course of your career is around £38,000. Meanwhile, nurses, a majority female workforce are paid on average £40,000 and can reach a top salary of close to £100,000.
You don’t mind the salary discrepancy, you don’t think about it too much. In fact, at the back of your mind you knew it existed but everyone says “do what you love” and really it seemed greedy to choose a job for financial reasons. Besides, you love your job, it’s your calling, your vocation. Money isn’t everything.
So, you stay in your computer science job but over time you discover new skills and you realise you really enjoy encouraging others, taking them under your wing, helping people, especially when they’re anxious, worried and having a bad day. You realise you’re more suited to being… a caregiver. Hmmm. Also, you notice that it’s not greedy to want money, it’s that money brings security and a less stressful, happier life. Is it really such a bad thing to want that? It seems unfair that you’ve worked just as hard for your degree as nurses. In fact in many respects their job seems easier than yours. Perhaps it is unfair?
Perhaps it wasn’t so much that you enjoyed all the problem-solving, perhaps it was that that’s all you’d ever really known. You remember that, at school, actually you did quite enjoy writing and expressing yourself and you were good at it. You didn’t get amazing marks, but you also didn’t get bad marks and you’re wondering why people said you were bad at it.
So, once you realise this, you decide to try and switch profession. That’s difficult because you need new qualifications but don’t have the money or the time to retrain and it’s difficult to save when your salary is quite low. Besides that, when you read job descriptions, they’re intimidating because they’re full of language such as “must demonstrate that s/he is in touch with their emotions”, “has the ability to believe in her/himself and shift mindset”, “5+ years in building empathic relationships”.
It’s intimidating because you’ve spent so much time with computers, you haven’t naturally had conversations about your emotions and it’s something you find difficult. It’s also intimidating because people talk about how difficult and complicated nursing is and how talented you’d have to be to do it. The little bit of care-giving you’ve done didn’t seem that difficult. Certainly not impossible to learn.
Nevertheless, you persevere. Everyone keeps telling you if you “believe in yourself enough” and have confidence there are no barriers and you can do anything! So you find a computer programming job in a hospital to give you some exposure to the industry. While there you try to make friends, or “contacts” I suppose but that’s quite difficult because people see you as very different and in way, they are also intimidated by you — you’re different. You also find it difficult to fit in because conversation revolves around where they get their hair done and what dress they’re doing to wear on Friday night. You’re a man. You don’t really have a hairstyle as such and you don’t wear dresses so it’s difficult to join in.
Eventually you manage to get a foot on the ladder by getting a job as a hospital porter. You continue to show an interest in nursing, you ask for work that will help you get more experience, you ask for advice about what qualifications you should work for, you actually do manage to get some qualifications but then you’re not given any work that allows you to practice your new skills. It seems like there’s a no at every opportunity and you can’t figure out why. You are consistently ignored, told that you should stick to computer programming because that’s what you’re good at and some people even question your motivation — “are you sure you really enjoy care-giving?”, “I’m not sure it’s really in your nature?”. You try your best to be proactive and suggest areas where you could help and make improvements but everyone keeps saying no and worse, almost laugh at you for even suggesting that you’d be capable of such things.
You also notice that the nurses often fix code themselves. They get by but you thought you could help because you do actually have more experience in this area. When you offer they get offended because you’re just a lowly technician and what have you really got to offer? Then a job comes up that would be a promotion for you, you could move from being a porter and use some of the training you’ve been doing. You interview for the position, there’s something really strange about the interview process, you get the impression people are not being honest and eventually they give the job to a woman who worked in the hospital laundry. I mean, I’m sure she’s a caring person but she hasn’t really been working with people and it doesn’t seem that she really has the right experience… It feels as if they gave her the job because she’s a woman. Other people say this too but by this point you are too exhausted to fight it. Besides, you’ve been told your whole life that sexism doesn’t exist, so it can’t be that, can it?
Eventually you get a bit cynical, annoyed and frustrated at being treated like this and you quit because it has become too stressful and frustrating.
When you get to your 30s you decide to have a baby. It is something you wanted but there was also a lot of social pressure on you. Since men are the primary care-givers and you earn less than your care-giving spouse, you stay at home to look after the baby. That’s actually quite exhausting and is not an ideal time to think about retraining or getting back to work. In fact you’re not sure that you’ll ever be able to find a job that will be worth going back for. Most jobs you can find are so low-paid that they don’t cover the cost of childcare and are not worth you missing out on time with your child. You’re stuck and was any of it really a free choice? Was any of it really your fault?
That’s basically my story and if you want to try and explain to me why I shouldn’t feel angry about this, please feel free to leave a comment on my blog (despite the name!): www.donttellmenottobeangry.com or follow my Facebook page.
I hope this helps you to understand how unconscious gender bias has caused women to lose out*. Not just in tech but other areas too. I don’t believe that STEM or ‘profit-making’ is more valuable. It’s just that we, as a society, have chosen a socio-economic system that favours STEM, profit-making and men. Either make more effort to remove barriers for women or choose a new system that values the things we are good at more. Value nurses, care-givers and the arts more. Choose to value care-giving, vote in favour of it and life could be very different.
It’s important to say that I don’t believe anyone has intentionally tried to stop me from doing anything. No one single individual has ever been intentionally mean. I think we are all trapped in a system that give certain people economic advantages and disadvantages others and those advantages and disadvantages turn into beliefs. E.g. people from low income backgrounds tend to have parents who are more stressed trying to earn money, tend to have less stable home lives, tend not to do so well at school, tend not to go to university, tend to take jobs that discourage growth and learning, tend to have lower confidence. Then we believe that they are ‘stupid’ or that their lack of career success is down to not being confident and not ‘selling themselves’ instead of recognising that they had fewer chances of success in their early life. I’ve suffered from this too alongside gender barriers.
It is this unconscious bias, stereotyping and misunderstanding that is currently the most damaging. And changing it requires more than mindset. In the end, money brings a certain type freedom to make choices, a certain type of power — it’s empowering. Women and any marginalised groups won’t be empowered without shifting to a fairer economic system and we won’t be able to look after the planet without doing this either. If we are serious about tackling discrimination of all forms then we have got to move beyond sharing cute quotes on social media and being an ‘ally’. It’s time to start thinking about what a new system might look like and how it could happen. It’s political. Everything is political.
*I think you could switch the roles in this analogy and demonstrate a similar thing for any bias and stereotyping. E.g. we do the same to POC of African origin when we have expectations that they are good at sports, singing and “being gregarious” and not good at becoming doctors, lawyers and “being serious”.
