Nature, nurture, or what?

Daniel Drezner is pondering women in science and technology: do they leave because they're pressured to, because they think it's unfeminine, or just because they'd rather do something else?

I actually found technology relatively family friendly, if only because women were such a novelty that companies liked having them around. On the other hand, it was definitely a boy's club; I experienced some really stunning sexual harassment during the years I was a consultant, not to mention having to sit quietly at lunch while my colleagues discussed the women they were checking out.

But ultimately I left not because of a hostile environment, or because I worried that it was masculinizing me. I left because I just didn't care as much as the guys I worked with. When I came in on Monday morning and people asked me what I had done, the answer was usually something like going to a club, or sailing. When they asked the guys I was competing with, the answer was more likely to be "I built a fiber channel network in my basement." It seemed likely to me that my career would suffer from competing with the monomaniacal, so I left to find something more in line with my obsessions.

But that's only my experience; I can't speak to anyone else's. Especially since the entire time I was a technology consultant, I only ever worked with two other women, and one of them left to have a baby two months later.

Comments

I'm a DBA and you're quite right about the monomania of the tech world.

I'm unusual among my coworkers in that I like to draw a fairly solid line between work and home, but a lot of my collegues simply can't turn off.

I actually had one boss who criticised me because he noticed that I liked to read non-technical books during my lunch break. He actually told me that it "pissed him off" when he was me doing that. In his mind, if I'm reading anything other than a trade journal or a technical manual on my break, I wasn't being serious about my career.

As it happens, I'm doing okay, but I also recognize that I'll never be in that golden circle of ubergeeks who can command consulting jobs worth hundreds of thousands of dollers a year because I simply am not interested in spending every spare moment of my life on my career.

I do wonder, however: is this really something unique about tech? I always assumed that this was the case in any serious career.

Posted by Andrew Lias | May 19, 2008 1:46 PM

Seems reasonable. As a hiring manager of software developers, I rarely consider anyone who doesn't exhibit that level of passionate commitment to technology. The one sure question I ask in every interview is "What's the software engineering book you've read recently that most excited you?". The wrong answer is 'um' . Extra points go to the guys who are so excited by their open source side-projects that they put them first on their resumes, before recent work experience. Given that sort of dynamic, I never recommend that anyone go into software development, no matter how good the money is. If you're likely to be worthwhile at it, you don't need my recommendation to convince you.

Posted by Dave | May 19, 2008 1:56 PM

Oh good! A recipe for a dysfunctional society of monomaniacs.

Posted by brooksfoe | May 19, 2008 2:07 PM

Technology may well have a surplus of monomaniacs although there are plenty of people in tech and elsewhere who have borderline obsessive interest in things like professional sports teams. That said. I may be misreading your tone but it helps with any job to have a genuine interest in what you're doing even if it's not an obsessive one. There are lots of things I probably could do but that I just don't find especially interesting and thus, I suspect, wouldn't be that great at them.

Posted by Gordon Haff | May 19, 2008 2:29 PM

A recipe for a dysfunctional society of monomaniacs.

What a unique way of describing people who are interested in the contents of their work.

Posted by Dave | May 19, 2008 2:45 PM

There's a difference between passion and monomania. It is certainly helpful to be passionate enough about your work to pursue projects or further educate yourself outside of the job. When this passion becomes a belief that there is only one way to do something or that you are the only individual that can accomplish a task then it's a problem. In my anecdotal experience in IT you often don't see the obsessed individuals at the top of the ladder because they are unable to work in a group or work with others that do not have the same technical background as themselves. Sometimes they have trouble putting business needs ahead of secondary technical concerns.

Posted by joe | May 19, 2008 3:16 PM

As a woman with a B.E., I agree with this. I just didn't care about the work enough compared to the real geeks.

Posted by Tracy W | May 19, 2008 3:17 PM

I, too, work in a profession traditionally unfriendly toward women (management consulting). There are the usual and tired lists of reasons (women can't take long hours; they're more interested in work/life balance (business school code for not committed to career); etc), women who are in the profession are usually treated pretty well, but sometimes as a kind of exotic species infrequently seen in the wild. The boys' club aspect can be pretty toxic, but even so, we're way better, as a group, compared to IT professionals in terms of gender balance.

Posted by szr | May 19, 2008 3:17 PM

For whatever reason, women just don't take to geekdom very well. It is not just technology. I don't know any women who are as passionate about their hobbies as the men I know. How many women do you know get into micro-brewing? Or civil war reenacting? Or history? Or chess? Not many. Some get into crafts or sewing bur rarely with the same kind of energy and passion that your typical male goes after a hobby.

What Megan observes is very typical in the tech world. I used to prosecute computer crimes. All of the computer experts I worked with build their own private networks at home and then hacked into them for fun. Tech people are obsessed. They have to be.

Posted by John | May 19, 2008 3:22 PM

This is a bit depressing, no? I know many great engineers who were 9-to-5ers. (They also had, and were on good terms with, their kids - compared to the weekend journal readers). They also weren't gunning for a consultancy job though.

I suppose it's good society can harness the socially inept though.

Japan is running out of engineers, according to the nytimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/business/worldbusiness/17engineers.html?ref=worldbusiness

Thoughts?

Posted by Mike | May 19, 2008 3:39 PM

There's being interested in your work, and there is not having any other interests. Megan didn't seem to be describing the former.

I don't think MM's experience is unique to technical fields, though, based on my techie acquaintanceship, it is a bigger feature there than most other areas. But Megan's original question was about why women specifically leave technical industries in droves. I think the answer may be similar to why women leave a lot of other industries in droves, as well - and, IMHO, I think it may be that women and men simply function differently, and certain industries, more than others, have over time been shaped (by the men in them) to cater specifically to male ways of doing things.

Put briefly, and with large caveats that this is a huge oversimplification and generalization, my experience has been that women tend to multitask better than men, while men enjoy focusing on single tasks or areas to the exclusion of other things (whether you call that monomania or simply an ability to focus). Whether this is hardwired or cultural programming reinforced by stereotypical gender roles is sort of irrelevant, but, given the preferences (if I'm right), women in general are going to be less attracted to jobs that encourage and reward a narrow and consuming focus, or even a huge committment of time beyond regular hours. And men are (generally) going to perform less well at jobs that require juggling many different, loosely- or un-related areas of expertise or activity at once.

And, to some extent, those different job descriptions track gender-stereotyped jobs (e.g.: engineer vs. schoolteacher, surgeon vs. nurse). I don't think this is because women or men are necessarily better suited to some sorts of industries or jobs than others - just because they've developed a certain way doesn't mean that is the only, or the best, way to do them. However, I think it's likely that heavily male-dominated jobs have, over time, developed to favor male patterns of work and thought. And vice versa.

The best general demonstration of this I can think of is that most industrial and post-industrial full-time jobs, which women only started occupying on a supposedly equal footing with men relatively recently, effectively require two people to fill them - one to do the job, and the other to do everything else in the world that has to happen, which the first person can't do because they're at work all day. If you think I've just described breadwinner/dad and housewife/mom, you aren't entirely mistaken. But I think there is something beyond the old "second shift" explanation at work (though I believe in the second shift effect as well).

Sorry, I haven't explained that very well and I'm sure I'll tick off someone (or everyone) royally without meaning to (Hi, Larry S!), but I'm distracted - my boss and (house)husband are leaving messages demanding my undivided attention, and I've got to deal with directing groceries, daycare, mentoring and managing subordinates, finding lost dry cleaning, business development, figuring out what's for dinner and planning mother-in-law visits.

Posted by Kathryn | May 19, 2008 3:57 PM

So, Dave, what's the software engineering book you've read recently that most excited you?

Posted by Tom T. | May 19, 2008 3:58 PM

I'm a computer programmer, and so is my husband. He has a personal development project, to which he devotes pretty much all of his free time, and which is his sole hobby. The bulk of my non-work time is taken up by managing our family and household -- I simply don't have the two or three hours of uninterrupted free time you need to be able to do any meaningful coding work.

In the time I do have, I also like to knit, and sew, and read novels, and quilt, and bake, and exercise. None of those require the kind of focus that coding does, so it's possible to split smaller chunks of time between them. I might like coding as much as any one of those things, or even as much as any two of them, but if I want to code, I have to give all of them up and do nothing but that. I don't like it *that* much.

I was a better programmer before I had children, when I did have enough free time to be able to spend some of it on professional development, and still have other interests.

Posted by Emma B | May 19, 2008 4:01 PM

So, Dave, what's the software engineering book you've read recently that most excited you?

Finally got around to http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Topics-Types-Programming-Languages/dp/0262162288/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211228304&sr=8-2
a couple of months ago. Very sexy stuff. More pragmatically (in the 3-5 year time frame), http://www.artima.com/shop/forsale gives some nice insights into one possible direction of enterprise development. I'd post more, but would probably hit the Atlantic's spam filter.

Posted by Dave | May 19, 2008 4:24 PM

As a woman without children, I can't speak to the time constraints of women who do have children, but my own situation is as follows:

1) I have two major interests, one of which is currently my main job and one of which is my main hobby. I might want to switch this order someday, however, so I try to avoid having the main job expand to crowd out the hobby. That would eliminate the possibility of changing careers later. (While a lot of the basic skills transfer from one to the other, they are completely different fields.)

2) I have two other minor interests, one of which complements the main hobby and one of which is basically how I deal with the stress of all the other things.

3) The people around me generally respect the demands of my main job, but they feel free to place all sorts of demands on me that interfere with my other activities. Which is annoying, because ALL of these activities are things that some people do for a living. The fact that I currently get my money by just one of them doesn't mean I always will.

Now, I see that the tech field rewards people whose main job and various hobbies all pull in the same direction and contribute to the same overall goal. Not everyone is like that -- my various interests would land me in distinctly different industries depending on which one I let dominate. And employment prospects for different careers change over time, so I actually think there is some value in preserving this kind of flexibility throughout adult life.

So, are women more likely to think about their careers the way I do? If so, I can see why more men excel in fields that require single-minded pursuit 24/7. But that would also lead to more men becoming embittered drunks when the jobs in their fields dry up, something I have never really seen women do. Most women just say "oh, well" and do the next thing.

Posted by M.C. | May 19, 2008 4:37 PM

Put briefly, and with large caveats that this is a huge oversimplification and generalization, my experience has been that women tend to multitask better than men, while men enjoy focusing on single tasks or areas to the exclusion of other things (whether you call that monomania or simply an ability to focus). Whether this is hardwired or cultural programming reinforced by stereotypical gender roles is sort of irrelevant, but, given the preferences (if I'm right), women in general are going to be less attracted to jobs that encourage and reward a narrow and consuming focus, or even a huge committment of time beyond regular hours. And men are (generally) going to perform less well at jobs that require juggling many different, loosely- or un-related areas of expertise or activity at once.

A funny thing happened on the way to the New-Age PC gender equality utopia: the above-noted mind segregation occurred.

What you describe mirrors my own experience also. I can become engrossingly lost in a hobby or work project, working very fast and very thoroughly, but completely losing time consciousness in the process. The effect is similar to the altered state of consciousness many people get when engrossed in a good book. I also find that when I am focusing on something, an interruption -- especially for a question unrelated to the task at hand -- causes all of my thought processes come to a halt and the result is momentary disorientation. Yes, I can shift gears and answer the question, but somewhere upstairs an intern has to go back to central filing to fetch the relevant data.

Contrawise, I've noticed that in casual conversations that I thought I was following, the women in the conversation can fluidly jump up to eight minutes forward or back in time without re-contextualizing, and they all have no trouble picking up at the new point of conversation. Myself and any other men in the conversation are then left staring at each other with a "did anyone get the license of that truck" look.

Posted by aMouseforallSeasons | May 19, 2008 4:54 PM

Is it possible that women aren't throwing themselves into civil war reenactment, beer brewing, and open source programming the way men are because they don't have the time left for that after you account for the day job, the child-raising, and the housework?

(Btw, I know a fair number of single geeks of both sexes who have singleminded obsessions. What they share in common is that they live in pigsties.)

Posted by Emily H. | May 19, 2008 5:08 PM

Is it possible that women aren't throwing themselves into civil war reenactment, beer brewing, and open source programming the way men are because they don't have the time left for that after you account for the day job, the child-raising, and the housework?

I know of many households where both spouses have reached an equitable middle-ground on all of these issues, and yet for most, the mind segregation persists.

There are always execptional cases both ways, of course. Although FWIW, a couple of the really good female electrical engineers I met during my college years seemed to border on autistic in their social skills.

Posted by aMouseforallSeasons | May 19, 2008 5:14 PM

Many small factors combine to make software a monomaniac's business:

1: It's one of the few high paying jobs where you can take work home. A surgeon can't do operations at home, and so isn't expected to. A nuclear engineer can't build a plant at home, and so isn't expected to. A programmer can take work (and not "work-like things", but actual work) home.

2: It takes 40 hours a week to stay up on what's new out there. Especially in something that changes fast, new modules, patches, best practices, libraries, security holes, etc come out every few minutes. You've got to be able to filter out most of it that's irrelevant, apply the few things that will make a (huge) difference, and figure out how it all works with what you already have. This means the 9 to 5 worker gets zero done. The 50 hour a week worker gets ten hours of work done. The 60 hour a week worker gets twice as much done as the 50 hour worker.

3: It takes a good deal of time to get spooled up mentally on a modern software project. Today is not the day of vi, cc, and libc, where your tools were ancient, reliable, and unchanging. Software people live in an ever-changing ecosystem of software, some of it yours, some of it your company's, and much of it from your language-community. It takes a good deal of time every morning to gain the situation awareness of how all the bits fit together. Once you're there, you might as well keep working.

4: Cognitive demands. It takes a certain level of skill to handle a project of a specific complexity. That skill must be contained within one programmer. There are jobs that one kind of programmer can do, and another kind cannot do, no matter how much time you give them. If you need one good programmer he's worth whatever it costs, and ten mediocre programmers are worthless.

All this adds up to a business (like banking, which shares all the characteristics) where if you're in the game, you'd better be on all day, all the time, everywhere, and you expect to make coke-and-hookers money.

Posted by secret asian man | May 19, 2008 5:16 PM

Is it possible that women aren't throwing themselves into civil war reenactment, beer brewing, and open source programming the way men are because they don't have the time left for that after you account for the day job, the child-raising, and the housework?

An inadequate hypothesis, as it doesn't say anything about the relative paucity of single female geeks.

Btw, I know a fair number of single geeks of both sexes who have singleminded obsessions. What they share in common is that they live in pigsties.

One thing I recommend to all my junior developers as they move to becoming senior developers is to take some of their new-found wealth and hire cleaning help. It removes an amazing amount of stress, costs a relative pittance, and in the long run is more likely to help them romantically than that BMW they were looking at would.

Posted by Dave | May 19, 2008 5:22 PM

Why is it so important that women be forced into these professions just for the sake of numbers? Let them choose for themselves!

Megan made a choice and offers a perfectly reasonable justification. To non-bloggers, I bet she would now personify the monomaniacs that she encountered in techworld, just relocated into the web commentary world. Follow your bliss!

Besides, aren't we turning out an astounding number of female lawyers and doctors these days? What's wrong with those jobs?

Posted by Mike | May 19, 2008 5:46 PM

The generalization pointed out by Kathryn, and embraced by Mr. Mouse, would lead one to believe that women were, in fact the preferred managers. Multitasking is the sin qua non for successful management, and yet men dominate the ranks of management, especially upper management.

So, there are a couple of possible explanations here: (1) the generalization is driven by biological factors, but companies are unbelievably terrible at hiring the best and the brightest managers; or (2) the generalization is a rationalization for the fact that the working world, despite very real improvements, is still stacked against women in high paying professions.

For the record, I don't think this is because men are raving sexists - I think it is an artifact of many things, like our mid twenties to mid thirties being prime career advancement years and prime reproductive years; and women's more hesitant attitude toward bargaining for a higher wage when joining a new company, compared to men.

I also am inclined to think biology doesn't play nearly as much a role in this as social factors. I don't have any specific evidence for this belief, except that social change that benefits women was often fought by opponents who cited biological factors as being a reason to deny there was a problem - like the anti-female suffragists. History has not been kind to their arguments.

Posted by szr | May 19, 2008 5:46 PM

Mouse:

1: Heh.

2: Not sure if the male/female "mind segregation" we both note occurred on the way to gender/race/orientation/&c-neutral utopia, or just became obvious as men and women increasingly started functioning in the same spheres. I'd wager it's the later - even with my grandparents I notice the same thing, even though they had semi-reversed gender roles, with my (schoolteacher) grandmother being faaaar better educated and earning a lot more than my (engineer) grandfather. And raising 3 kids, cooking, cleaning, the usual.

I can't decide how interested I am in whether the difference is intrinsic or environmental, given that I wake up in the real world every morning, where the distinction is mostly academic.

MC: My current job (in the male-dominated world of M&A) doesn't leave me enough time for proper hobbies, but my outside interests are generally totally different, and I do frequently imagine ways to turn them into alternative career options. Maybe it is a female thing. Or maybe it is just cultural - after all, if I were to suddenly announce "my job sucks, I'm going to quit and write smutty historical bodice-rippers and play with my kids instead," and my family was plunged into penury for it, 80% of respondents polled would consider our poverty the fault of my no-good stay-at-home husband. If roles were reversed and he made the same decision, 80% of respondents would ... say exactly the same thing. Culturally, women have the space to make riskier decisions with their careers (i.e.: we have more options), because earning a ton of money isn't seen as our primary role. Even when it is.

Frankly, I think this is a pretty fantastic time and place to be working woman - we've gotten a lot of the freedoms, but we haven't quite gotten tagged with all the related responsibilities yet. Yes, I know that we still have all of the old domestic responsibilities, as Emily H notes, and that any woman with a man "pulling his weight" at home will tell you that the man does chooses half of the chores he thinks need to be done and believes magic brownies do the rest. But I truly feel for my male coworkers when they talk about their mortgage and their wives' decisions to quit working to stay home with the kids (but not downgrade the house) and then yelling at them for not being home to help with their "share" of the domestic duties. They may not be able to legitimately argue that they've got the short end of the stick, but they're stuck in this awkward phase of the transition to equality-utopia, too, and they can't say boo about it without being called chauvanist pig-dogs.

Posted by Kathryn | May 19, 2008 5:50 PM

Extra points go to the guys who are so excited by their open source side-projects that they put them first on their resumes, before recent work experience.

Oh, yeah. I've been in the business long enough that one of the interview questions I used to ask was about what kind of computer the applicant had at home. This was back when a PC cost as much as a good used car. Many of the women, but almost none of the men, had no PC at home. Which made the next question moot -- what kind of software have you developed just for fun? Women applicants didn't do that sort of thing -- for them it was a job.

Incidentally, this really doesn't require single-mindedness -- most of these guys had plenty of other hobbies. They were in a band or just messed around with a guitar, they were backpackers or mountain-bikers. Or, yeah, they brewed their own beer. Or all of the above. Yes, most of them were a bit obsessed about the gear involved in their hobbies, but certainly no more than a lot of women are about handbags and shoes.

Posted by Slocum | May 19, 2008 5:50 PM

I think Megan is on the right track. The idiot savants are always dominated by men.

Contrariwise, however, I've been reading that corporations are starting to prefer women, especially mothers, in management positions because they are better at time management and handling people and handling multiple simultaneous tasks.

Posted by MikeS | May 19, 2008 6:02 PM

I'm a woman in science, with a bachelor's in math from MIT and a master's in CS from Cal.

I *hate* the kind of people who think talking about their open source project is fun.

I love physics. I love math. I love theoretical CS. But that never made me enjoy a single day of software engineering. I personally think IT should be done by monkeys, not humans. Writing code isn't the only type of science and engineering, and why women leave software eng isn't the same as why women leave other science fields. but to the software issues: for me, software was just a tool. I was much more interested in the problem I was solving using a tool than in thinking that "look how cool I am for making another tool."

I left because raising children was so much more fun than going to work. But even before that, I preferred real companies to startups because largely speaking, I couldn't stand the idiotic male geek culture in startups: the constant foosball, the stupid beanbags, the men who smelled bad. They weren't professional, and they didn't want to be. I was tired of the men not grokking that their jokes were sexist. I was tired of them acting like teenagers in a locker room while they were in the conference room. I found that a company with diversity in people's ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientiation was less likely to have geeks acting like teenagers in the locker room, and more likely to have people acting like professionals.

Posted by Mouse | May 19, 2008 6:14 PM

Mouse, is this a bad time to point out that some of the very successful companies (e.g. HP, Google) were started by two or more guys goofing around with their hobbies?

It seems to me that high-tech, in order to succceed, needs a critical mass of energetic, rambunctious dreamers to prove that the concept can get off the ground.

Once it does, then it becomes time to calm down and start dressing professionally on a regular basis, because now that you have proven you can do it, you have to present a consistent and reliable image to the public in order to sell and support it. If by any chance women have the same attitude toward this dynamic that you do, they may be a lot less likely to enter a software or technology business on the ground floor, and consequently will have to work with whatever structure it attains during those critical growth years. If that structure was built by men who see things differently, then guess what...

Posted by aMouseforallSeasons | May 19, 2008 6:38 PM

Megan wrote: ...not to mention having to sit quietly at lunch while my colleagues discussed the women they were checking out.

And why was this objectionable?

It's what we men do...and it's what you women do as well!

We may go about it differently, but the way you wrote this makes it seem like these men were disgusting, vile criminals for doing what comes naturally to us men.

Posted by Dave from Hawaii | May 19, 2008 6:41 PM

Do you like it when your female coworkers start talking about their husbands' sexual problems? Or telling stories about the first time they got their period? There are some things that really should stay gender segregated.

Posted by Megan McArdle | May 19, 2008 6:46 PM

I *hate* the kind of people who think talking about their open source project is fun.

And I despise that kind of condescending, know-nothing attitude.

I personally think IT should be done by monkeys, not humans.

Yes, it would have been much easier to just wait around for monkeys to invent the Internet for us. Virtually every cool new thing of recent decades is stuffed with software. The Internet, iPods, cell-phones, hybrid cars, GPS, TIVO, digital cameras.

...I couldn't stand the idiotic male geek culture in startups: the constant foosball, the stupid beanbags...

You do realize you've described the corporate culture of Google, don't you?

...for me, software was just a tool. I was much more interested in the problem I was solving using a tool than in thinking that "look how cool I am for making another tool."

Well aren't you just so far above those lowly, simian toolmakers?

For my purposes, a 747 is 'just a tool' for getting across the ocean in a few hours, and not being an aerospace engineer, I'm much more interested in getting to London than thinking about airfoils. But I have the highest respect for jet-wing designers nonetheless.

I left because raising children was so much more fun than going to work.

Well that worked out for everybody then -- since I doubt I'm alone in preferring, for example, not to have an MRI in a machine equipped with software written by somebody who wasn't that into it and thinks the job should be left to monkeys.

Posted by Slocum | May 19, 2008 7:01 PM

Kathryn --

The part about the finances is key. A lot of the time, people end up with safe jobs that aren't QUITE right (but not horribly wrong either) when something else might be both more satisfying and more lucrative. The question is how to make the change when you have adult responsibilities. The only way I can think of is the progression from hobbyist to volunteer to occasional free-lancer to a real second career. Formal training gets mashed in there somewhere as well. It can take a while, but that's fine if the safe job is okay.

You can do this over time with a 40-hour job, but not with a 60-hour job. If the options are 60 hours a week or nothing, people are stuck. Besides, I don't know about you, but I can get a great deal done in 40 hours a week. After that I don't get much more done UNLESS I switch to a different activity. Actually I would prefer a 30-30 split, but 40-20 may be as good as I can get for now.

Are there people who truly prefer to stick to the same thing for all that time? I find this psychologically inexplicable. Changing is where the energy comes from.

Posted by M.C. | May 19, 2008 9:18 PM

"Oh good! A recipe for a dysfunctional society of monomaniacs."

I tried other things in my career (management consulting, etc.) but concluded that my fascination since childhood with most things biomedical, including basic research, especially oncology, wins out. Commenter Brooksfoe, you are likely a woman who longs to be one of the women from Sex and the City. I can look just as pretty as Charlotte, but let me tell you, if you were afflicted with cancer you would be glad to be treated by a "monomaniac" like me. I even take the time to read about bullshit like homeopathy so I can give my patients the complete scoop and so they'll feel even more comfortable being completely open with me. Being in my late 20s now, if only I could find that brilliant husband; we'd be working together even some weekend evenings, yet taking exquisite breaks together! Go ahead and criticize people who strive for excellence and are thirsty for knowledge and understanding, but you'll value us when the time comes. Perhaps you will help your children be valuble to society one day even if it's too late for yourself!

Posted by PK | May 19, 2008 10:05 PM

I was a better programmer before I had children, when I did have enough free time to be able to spend some of it on professional development, and still have other interests.

Posted by Emma B

Nail. Head. Hammer. I used to be a techie, back in the day. The guys who were considered to be 'going places' were the guys who were on 24/7. Now, that's not a bad thing to be, but the fact is, even if we're talking about men, only a small proportion can manage this. And one of the big factors that determines whether you can manage it or not is . . . age. Hence, in our company (DataStorm), there was always this low-intensity guerrilla head-butting going on to see who was the bull-goose looney. Older people such as myself may have been technically more talented, but they simply couldn't commit to the total immersion the profession or the stance demanded (yeah, a lot of the guys were into cyberpunk, including wearing those silly silly shades and a duster.) I've noticed that the older guys who are still in the game are either low-maintenance loaners, or they have very understanding and non-demanding partners.

Posted by ScentOfViolets | May 19, 2008 10:15 PM

If you don't understand that IT != software development, then you aren't a software developer. IT should be done by monkeys or machines. It can be, too. "coding" is a typing exercise. It's the thinking that matters--and doing the design is in one's head, and one whiteboards and in words and pictures.

Yes, I'm QUITE aware I described Google's culture. They're rich; great for them. I couldn't stand to work there no matter how much money there was in it for me. But the truth is, other people came in so they'd grow up--Eric Schmidt was from Siebel. Not exactly a startup guy. Not exactly just a guy with a hobby. He figured out how to get passed the idiotic parts of the culture and create something that kept working. He's the one that decided they should index the entire web. He's the one that saw the ad revenue model.

Yes, MouseForAllSeasons, I do agree that that passion is necessary to get a startup off the ground. But for every Google with a foosball culture, there are 100 or 1000 pets.coms and webvans where the same geeks played foosball and lo, FAILED utterly and completely.

Passion doesn't have to take on adolescent locker rooms. Rambunctious monomania isn't really the same thing as "we wanna play WoW or foosball all day." Most startups don't go ANYWHERE because the people at them at best have passion about an idea, but that's the end, not the beginning for them.

Ideas are easy. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that makes or breaks a business. And lots of people in startup culture love the odd hours, the beanbags, the camaraderie, and the ideas, but really have no passion for GROWING A BUSINESS, for giving clients what they want (instead, often, they are sure the clients are stupid for not seeing how great their idea is), for doing what it would take to create a stable organization.

And I do agree that women are unlikely to feel at home in startup culture, even if the adolescence is muted. Because generally speaking, women are more risk averse than men.

Posted by Mouse | May 19, 2008 10:23 PM

sigh..Eric Schmidt was Not from Siebel. He was at Novell. He was on Siebel's board. And Sun before Novell.

Posted by Mouse | May 19, 2008 10:26 PM

But for every Google with a foosball culture, there are 100 or 1000 pets.coms and webvans where the same geeks played foosball and lo, FAILED utterly and completely.

The geeks didn't go to pets.com or webvan. Why would they? There were never any technological challenges there. The business 'visionaries' went there, for the challenge of making business models work that made no damn sense. They got what they deserved.

I understand your basic point, and sympathize. That said, creation of discontinuous business value using software seems to require asocial testosterone-laden geeks. Once you get that, instituting family-friendly hours and making sure your developers have showered somewhat recently are a good ways of moving to a culture of creating incremental value (although it should be noted that a lot of those companies go belly-up as well). If you're not interested in discontinuous business value, there's plenty of places to work, and they're glad to have you.

Ideas are easy. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that makes or breaks a business.

Continuous execution makes or breaks a continuous business. Bursts of creativity and excellence make or break a discontinuous business (one that, to use the perjorative phrase, is built-to-flip). Both are entirely necessary at this stage of technological evolution. Devaluing either is to misunderstand the current landscape.

Posted by Dave | May 19, 2008 10:55 PM

A nuclear engineer can't build a plant at home

Years ago I came upon an ad for a "nuclear weapons engineer" in a Philly paper.
I remember musing about the idea of "hobby experience a plus".

Posted by Neo | May 19, 2008 11:55 PM

As a counter example to the idea that all good software people are monomaniacs:

I'm a Software Engineer. Where I work it's 40 hours a week with full benefits and we have several female Software Engineering employees (still majority male, however). If anyone says a woman can't do the work, they're wrong. Most of our people *aren't* the type to program at home in their spare time. Most actually have spouses and families and work is the last thing on their mind once they leave the company gates in the evening. I suppose the difference is our plant is manufacturing and Engineering oriented... software is only one part of the whole system.

Posted by Nelson | May 20, 2008 12:47 AM

If you don't understand that IT != software development, then you aren't a software developer.

IT can be used to mean either the software industry generally or to refer more specifically to the segment of the industry that consists of writing in-house business software. But since you were bitching about startups and 'geek culture' you weren't talking about IT in the second sense. And, in fact, those big-company 'professional' environments (where more women tend to work) are the IT, in-house, business software kinds of environments that you seemed to prefer.

Yes, I'm QUITE aware I described Google's culture. They're rich; great for them. I couldn't stand to work there no matter how much money there was in it for me.

It's not that they're rich that's interesting -- it's that they've created some of the most useful technology the world has ever seen. And if you want to say, "That kind of environment isn't for me" -- fine. It's really not what I'm looking for either. But I know a lot of great stuff can come out of those environments nonetheless.

But for every Google with a foosball culture, there are 100 or 1000 pets.coms and webvans where the same geeks played foosball and lo, FAILED utterly and completely.

But the fact that most startups fail is in the nature of the game -- it's not because of 'foosball culture'. (BTW, I happen to know a couple of guys who are now retired on the money they made from Webvan). And Webvan didn't ultimately fail because the employees spent too much time throwing beanbags and weren't capable of 'professional execution', but because the business model ultimately didn't work (it's not as if anybody else made a big business out of Internet grocery delivery).

Posted by Slocum | May 20, 2008 7:49 AM

blah, blah, IT is not equal to yacketty schmaketty... by the by on S390 we always used |= rather than != but there it is... do you realize how disgustingly arrogant you sound? Got a Phd, do you?

There are lotsa ways to slice any pie, why is it so difficult to say that some people are good at some things, and others at others? The main difference that Her Worshipfullness has pointed out is that women have an additional career possibility that men don't get. They can get off the carousel and have children. There are ramifications to this choice, but it is a choice. After that, there are some women that choose not to re-enter the workforce for years, or never. There are also aa really small group of men that can take that grace.

The important thing tho think of then is How are the metrics on this gathered? The move to family is a rock in a river, forcing the career path to bend around it. The metrics everyone gets upset over are ones that look at that movement as getting OUT of the industry. But how many of us stay in the same career set forever? Some people are always programmers. [software developer? is that like sanitation engineer? are you a programmer or what?] No matter what language or platform, that's what they do. They suck at management, so they prolly stay away from that, and they hate documentation. "code is self documenting..." Or the Nuclear Physicist, who will never take up gardening as a living.

But, out here in the fields is a grey area where people have 5 or more careers over their lives, and they are actually different from one another. The skillsets are like threads, where you can see that knowledge of some things is applicable to others. Sometimes it's just an aptitude.

But these cases are where the metrics are bogus. Everyone is acting like women get out of tech fields because there is something wrong, when it is much more likely that this is simply a normal careerpath of their lives. If a woman goes into engineering right out of college, works for 8 years as that, goes on to have a family for 8 more years, and then decides to open a bed and breakfast... are we saying that her career choices were because engineering is to "blame"? Or is this a natural progression? How are the metrics gathered on her? How are the metrics gathered on her husband, boring old mister normal who went in to engineering at the same time, and stuck with it?

Would anyone care if their roles were reversed? Where she was the single focussed anti social one, and he was the nurturing one who decided to stay home with the kids?

Looking at statistics to decide why individuals made choices is mental hopscotch... it's only worth so much. It seems like yet again the purpose of wondering aloud why there aren't more women in Engineering or IT/Computer Sciences, is to presuppose that there SHOULD BE more women interested in those fields. What if they don' wanna?

Posted by SwissArmyD | May 20, 2008 9:52 AM

Commenter Brooksfoe, you are likely a woman who longs to be one of the women from Sex and the City.

This is the best laugh I've had all week.

On the broader subject, I left physics before my PhD was complete because I realized that real success came either to monomaniacs or high-order geniuses; I'm neither.

Posted by Rob Lyman | May 20, 2008 12:23 PM

I'm with Nelson. I'm a woman; I work in IT and have done so successfully for 15 years. My department is filled with men and women who do other things outside of work. Mountain biking, some kind of weird martial arts / dancing thing, family stuff, pet stuff.

People seem to be conflating generalized IT with specific kinds of software development. Yes, if you work on shipped product or on the core of a tech business, you are probably more hard core than a person who codes customizations to the HR system. Both of these people, however, are in IT. Only one needs to be monomaniacal.

My sense from my staff is that women generally think IT is boring when they're young, and so they don't go into it. Later on they realize the stuff they thought was exciting (often something 'creative') actually sucks when done in a corporate environment. If you catch them at that moment and work with them, you can bring them into IT and get them excited about it. This has been my experience over the years.

Posted by jen | May 20, 2008 1:51 PM

"Is it possible that women aren't throwing themselves into civil war reenactment, beer brewing, and open source programming the way men are because they don't have the time left for that after you account for the day job, the child-raising, and the housework"

Wah wah wah. It turns out that having kids takes a huge amount of time. Who knew?
Cry me a freaking river. If you don't want kids, don't have them. Once you've had them, don't whine to the rest of us about how hard your life now is.

And if your complaint is that your husband doesn't pull his weight in taking care of the kids, why is it our problem that you married that sort of person? Once again, it's not like the nature of family life is some sort of unimaginable mystery you couldn't reasonably have foreseen.

Posted by Maynard Handley | May 21, 2008 11:57 PM