Tech Jobs and Female Privilege: Women Are Under-represented in the Tech Field

Women, who outnumber men in college and are more likely to graduate, are underrepresented in computer science fields. That’s female privilege, unless we condescendingly presume they are making the wrong choices in college.

Overall, women received 18 percent of Computer and Information Sciences undergraduate degrees in 2013, yet were 26% of the computing workforce in 2014 (PDF). Women make up 30% of the workforce at tech giant Apple; at Intel, they represent about 24%; 22% of leaderships positions at Google are held by women.

Compared to their rates of participation in STEM majors in college, women also receive disproportionately higher job offers in IT, engineering and physics.

What should we do about their overrepresentation? Well, Intel is upping the ante, adding additional incentives including referral bonuses that are double for women candidates than male. 25% of Intel’s workforce is female; moreover, 35% of its recent new hires were women, both well above the rates at which they are awarded computer-related degrees. This affirmative action decays into reverse discrimination when they introduced a quota system to draw 40% of recruits in 2015 from underrepresented groups.

It’s female privilege to choose to major in English, literature, communications and gender studies in college. These curricula, it should be no surprise, lead to work in areas like social services, health care, education, and public administration.

What’s wrong with that? The market will decide what those professions are worth. Nevertheless, Google knows best, and is dumping money into programs steering women and minorities into STEM programs -- which implies away from the humanities. But we could all use a bit more humanity, and women should be applauded for pursing the “helping professions.” Besides, there’s also a shortage of healthcare workers,

At the end of the day this is just another effort by Liberals to force big wealthy corporations (Google, Boeing, General Electric, etc.) to “spread the wealth around” to members of the various self-identified victim groups.

Whether they are capable of making a contribution or not.

Silicon Valley is going to end up hiring a bunch of blacks to sit around and do basically nothing. Mark my words.

I have a 12 person team of devs and QA. Only three men in that group.

How many of them are educated as software engineers? (That's both men and women.) My experience is there are tons of people, male and female, in IT, particularly developing software, that couldn't engineer/architect their way out of paper bag. Good coders are rare as well. I think a lot of this has to do what is being taught in college these days and there are many working in IT that have little more education than a few corporate IT training classes.

I’m a women who worked in the IT field for a number of years. I liked it because it was full of men and only a few women. Men never stood around at my desk talking about their weekend, kids, etc. The manager of the web services department was a women. She was extremely domineering and management knew not to make her anyone’s direct supervisor. I finally left the company because of her. She wouldn’t allow me to talk directly to people I was writing code for and was always trying to turn me into a non-technical paper shuffler like her.

If everyone is exercising their free choices about what career fields they are interested in, what exactly is the problem?????

None - for logical, reasonable people. But we're not dealing with any of those. Understand that the totalitarian mindset DEMANDS that you agree with its proponents. They are smarter and better intentioned than you - you (and me, and everyone who is not them), who are both stupid and evil. They not only want to win (i.e. dictate the results on any particular issue), they want you to be punished for daring to even THINK differently. Maybe, maybe if you publicly repent and identify yourself to the world as being stupid and evil, you will avoid too much punishment.

These people are the evil ones, and they will never stop as long as there is breath in their bodies. They are political versions of the Terminator. Understand and remember what they are, and you will be much better off.

I don’t hear any women complaining about a lack of female truck drivers, construction workers, plumbers, pest control workers, sanitation workers - AKA, dirty jobs.
STEM is only gaining the attention because it pays better than most positions.

The end result of these diversity mandates are more women as software testers, tech support, configuration management positions, requirements collection, first level tech support AND classified as STEM workers by the company.

Clearly your filter is broken.

1. An ME is NOT the lone criteria for an engineering position.

2. I’m not talking about ratios in the general defense industry population, I’m talking about the proportion of women in management positions WHO ARE RUNNING THINGS.

125,000 are employed there....so I’ll take that “sample of one”.

You apparently don’t know statistics. Tell me out of all the managers at Boeing ( or where ever you work) how many women are ENGINEERING managers? How many women ENGINEERS do you have?

Your sample is still a sample of one because you are talking about one work location in one company.

So what are the numbers?

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