Women in IT

Why do IT professions fails to attract women?

If you're a woman entering the technology industry after working in the field of adveritising and marketing, there is a strong chance that you may feel no less than a clown walking into a hospice out of place, depressed and bored. More often than not, you will find yourself completely lost in meetings and words like cloud computing, Chrome, Android, Linux, Unix, Symbian will seem like French (only less alluring). Co-workers (tech junkies) who read, speak and breathe technology will seem even more allien.
It would be easy to blame your lack of interest/understanding of information technology on your alma mater. Today most educational institutes have a majority of women pursuing business administration degrees. IT subjects are generally added to the curriculum as an after thought and are neither emphasised nor is their relevance adequately explained. Moreover, women are not interested end up in arts, medical sciences, media or journalism. On the other hand, most computer science departments are generally dominated by males. Women are few and far between.
So it comes as no surprise that a very few among the fairer sex are brave enough to venture into core computing, programming, and telecommunications fields. Any why would they? Educational institutes aside, even parents instill the idea that IT is dull and boring and is a field enjoye and pursued by men only.
Based on general observation, women in Pakistan have been excluded as users and designers from the overall information society. Although a few exceptions do exists, many women in the IT sector do not hold high-skilled, senior positions. One will find more women doing data entry jobs but not many as CIOs, IT managers, software designers and engineers. It is unfortunate that the Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds of this world either intentionally or unintentionally forget that women make up a huge chunk of their users. However, no substantial efforts have been made for their inclusion in the research, design, marketing of IT products.
Not all can be blamed on men. A large part of the blame lies with women who are actually proud of being technologically backward. Others don't have enough trust and confidence in their technical abilities. They fear being labelled a 'geek'. A recent study indicated that 42 million women in the United States which is rougly 53 percent of the 79 million adult women in the country used social media frequently. In addition to this, a survey conducted by the Mobile Data Association reported that 74 percent of women say that they have text messaged in the last two minutes, as compared to 26 percent of men. All these statistics prove that women are technologically forward but don't consider texting or social networking as using technology.
Women generally abandon considering IT as career in their early teens. This is computer clubs and other IT related extra curricular activities to change their perception. What women don't realise is that techology is a part of our everyday lives and shapes. in the live both men and women. Therefore, why should women be left out in the process of developing technology? Secondly, the lucrative IT sector opens doors to hundreds of high paying jobs and women should be able to take advantage of that Women should also develop technical skills because most businesses these days are built on technology and having such skills equals power and prestige in large corporations.
To sum it up, women locally as well as globally needed to break out of the blonde bimbo stereotype carved for them by certain sections of societ in general. Acting stupid and reidicling geeks will only serve to reinforce this stereotype image of the fairer sex. Society is general needs to consider women a viable part of the information culture a part that should neither be ignored nor underestimated.
Orgnaisations, on the other hand, need to change their strategies if they want to encourage more women in IT sector. Although efforts like promoting women, busting steretypes, changing orgnaisation culture and having HR policies in place that level the playing field will help; educating people, designing mixed gender work teams and flexible timings will go on even longer way.