In 1992, I left the broadcasting industry. There a lot of reasons; the culture of the industry was a holdover from the “Mad Men” legend in many, many ways; the radio industry in the 1980s and 1990s was an amazing throwback to a much more depraved era. The culture of the industry…
…oh, who am I kidding? I left radio because I was making $7/hour, was married,and had two kids and another one on the way. I needed to make some money.
And after I left, not a single academic launched a single study. Because there was a time that people entered, and left, industries because the change made sense to them; because the money was better; because their goals in life had changed since college; because they discovered engineering didn’t enthrall them like cooking did; just because they felt like a change in their lives.
That was then.
Notwithstanding the fact that technical studies majors – engineering, computer science and the like – are among the few academic areas where men still outnumber women in college, the LATimes is wondering why there are fewer women in the world of technology.
I’m not going to bother with a pullquote; the writer, a woman who went from the CBC to Wikimedia, cites the usual reasons; misogynistic men, pay gaps, lack of female role models in management, and so on.
The article misses two points, I think.
For starters? Everyone leaves technology, eventually. And by “everyone”, I mean that eventually, some people decide that the romance has left the idea of sitting up and grinding out code for thirty hours at a shot; that they don’t get the same thrill out of slaving for months on a solution that gets vetoed by some marketing dweeb with a degree in political science; or they just decide that the things that excited them when they were 20 don’t have the same effect now.
Is it different for women? I’d imagine so – as individuals.
But if women are leaving technology in droves for any reason different than men are, the LATimes article doesn’t explain it…
Yet no one seems to worry about how lopsided the ratio of women to men is in college admissions and employment as school teachers. Weird.
Where I work, if I make an error in my circuit that gets past the levels of checking it’s a minimum of a $4M new mask order, not to mention the cost to find and debug the chip, so the usual cost if I do something stupid tops $10-15M. And it’s not like I can hide behind a vast wall of checking, either, as I’m pretty much the only designer of a certain specific part of the chip. Given the costs involved, how many mistakes do you think I get to make before I get to spend more time with my family?
When you work in a business like this, design reviews get ruthless and if you can’t take having your ego shredded for a mistake or overlooking something, you’re not long for working on chips. It’s not a warm and fuzzy atmosphere if you’re the one on the hook for fixing something that was overlooked. It’s not a nurturing environment; you get teams, but they’re perfectionist teams that don’t tolerate making mistakes twice. Some women can work in that kind of environment, but most don’t like the stress, much less the crazy schedules that come when you have to recover from an oversight.
On the other hand, when I listen to the internal politics of my wife’s all woman office, I couldn’t handle that. The petty squabbles over the most inane things last forever and I’ve never worked in a tech company that would tolerate or survive that kind of hit to productivity.