Posted on 12/05/2017 12:44:13 PM PST by nickcarraway
As the relative lack of women in tech jobs increasingly gains public attention, a new report suggests that women workers are primed to change those numbers for good.
A report released this month on the digital abilities of U.S. workers found that women are slightly ahead of men when it comes to developing tech skills needed for employment. Created by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, the report "Digitalization and the American Workforce" examined Americans' progress in adapting to a rapidly more tech-heavy job market, and gave women an overall score of 48 in this area, while men received a comparable but lower score of 45.
To assess workers' ability to perform in jobs involving the use of technology, researchers looked at information on "the knowledge, skills, tools and technology, education and training, work context, and work activities required" for a wide range of industries and professions, categorized by occupations' high, medium, or low requirements for digital skills.
In total, the Brookings team examined the digital requirements and performance trends of 545 occupations covering 90% of the U.S. workforce across all industries since 2001.
After analyzing changes in those areas between 2002 and 2016, researchers found that digitalization scores rose among 517 of those 545 occupations, bringing the overall average score from a "low level" of 29 in 2002 up to a "medium level" of 46 as of 2016, representing a 57% increase.
"At the same time," they noted, "the degree and pace of change has varied widely." That includes the fact that women workers, as a group, have pulled slightly ahead of men in acquiring the digital skills required for many available jobs.
See also: Women's Advocates Sue Trump Admin For Arbitrarily Ditching Equal Pay Data
Nevertheless, the report found, men continue to outpace women in filling the most
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Usually I see it off to the side of the freeway with other great muti-taskers trying to figure out the smashed in grill.
I wish more women were competent and excited by developing tech... many decades into this field and its largely a sausage fest... I have met and worked with many competent and capable women, but they are by far the vast minority, and it isn’t because the industry is rude or sexist to them, at least in my experience, its that most choose other fields to pursue.
My wife is!
Men are hunters.
I have always enjoyed that categorization...:)
hah
“nanosecond”
IIRC that was a wire one foot long representing the distance light can travel in 1 nanosecond, illustrating the need to code efficiently. We have come a long way from that kind of thinking. Amazing Grace would be appalled at the state of things today.
“sausage fest”
That is especially true about software. I am convinced that one day soon, a software bug is going to cause a lot of money to disappear, or a lot of people to get killed, or both. The question “How is software made?” will be asked at very high levels. The answer will not be flattering to the industry.
What a load of bull.
Not all guys are men.
My anecdotal experience says women have far less problem working with what technology has created, than they do in choosing and mastering the academics for those who dream up, engineer and code the technological creations. There is a world of difference between the two areas. Yes, we are talking averages here and not implying that “all” women are less inclined to become technology creators; just that on average they don’t see either as inclined or having acquired what it takes.
Yet, who in the hell started this thing of assuming the “natural” course “should be” men and women working in EVERY occupation in equal demographic percentages? Such a thing has no “natural” basis. It merely takes a political position and pretends it is a “should be”, with no basis.
Brookings: Supplying all the leftist results you’ll ever need!
Larry Niven’s works often involve species where the males and females are very different and where one of the sexes isn’t sentient. In Kzinti, males are sentient. In Chirpsithra, the females are.
Disclaimer: I’m a woman with a decade in IT, mostly engineering software support.
And my general observation is that most of the good programmers are men.
The effort to put data managers, configuration managers, drawing control, drafters, requirements analysts and general tech support people (including those working only on a script) in the same tier as programmers improves the “diversity” metrics but not quality of work. The addition of too many managers, many of them women, hurts quality of work.
When you include rote IT tasks like data entry for PDM systems, mass data cleanup on imports, repetitive user setups and document checking on upload, yes, women may be better. I’ve done those tasks myself. But it is closer to detailed accounting entry in Quicken or inventory management checklists than PROGRAMMING.
And programming along with system administration and hardware support is the central, male dominated area in IT.
Personal observation plus politics:
* Most women don’t want to do “overwork”, the general over-time and long weekends at work. Hence more women having the ideal life of working part time and a percentage of women wanting to be stay at home spouses even without kids.
* IT and STEM in general is known for demanding long hours. This discourages women.
* For the few women who have been in engineering and IT like myself, when you have kids and the constraints that come with them, you either leave STEM, try to move to management or quit altogether.
These things are not sexism but sex based differences. But liberals assume ALL differences between demographic groups are only systemic oppression because they assume if the culture is totally egalitarian, we’d all be exactly the same.
Scary to think their ideal is the Borg, you will all be interchangeably the same ...
I actually chose the professional engineer career path at my company, it was a better choice for me as a working mother. At my company, if you go into management, the company owns your soul, there is no such thing as work/life balance, and there is absolutely no due process for managers.
As a senior engineer, I’m paid the same as a second level manager. I basically manage myself, set my own working hours and don’t have to deal with budgets and HR melodrama. I’m very happy that I didn’t go into management.
Yup. Mine as well.
Screwing up several things at once is not multitasking.
Not my sweetheart. She’s on it 24/7. Its hard to keep up with her.
There is some truth to it too.
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