Women in IT
Rochester Institute of Technology has been supporting programs to encourage enrollment of women in their technical fields. The reason for this is painfully obvious if you happen to be studying computer science (like I am) - I think I had four women total in my nine or so CS classes this year, out of 150 or more men.
I always had assumptions of what it was like to be a woman in a technical field, but realistically, it is impossible to guess what it is like without actually experiencing it. So, being curious, I discussed it with one of the girls in the medical informatics program at RIT. She took the introductory CS sequence and has a large core of Information Technology courses, but I won’t name her so as to protect her identity. I expected some of her responses, but others caught me off guard. My questions are in bold, her responses in plain text. If you have any responses, leave a comment! I’m especially interested in hearing what other girls have to say about these items.
What is it like being a woman in a technical field?
It depends. Male professors really aren’t any different toward me, they are pretty even toward both genders. But in my experience, I’ve never had a good female professor or TA. For example, one of my TAs, a graduate student at RIT, liked a guy in a class I had with her. He liked me, and she knew it - the result was that she was horrible to me all quarter. In another class, I had a male lab partner, and we had a woman leading the lab. She was really nice and helpful toward my partner, but was cold (and frankly a complete bitch) toward me.
I also definitely have to try harder to prove myself as a capable individual. It is assumed automatically that we aren’t as skilled as our male peers, and it gets frustrating.
I thought there would be more cohesion between women in male-dominated fields.
I think girls think it is extra easy for other girls in these programs, so they are complete bitches toward each other. And there is this weird egoism, in computer science especially. Some of them have these little flocks of boys that help them, and they get pretty territorial over them. If you aren’t friends with the girl and you try to talk to the boys in their group, it is bad. I feel like that the culture among girls makes this almost a respected fact, you have to make friends with the girl who is in the group before you can make friends with the guys, otherwise it feels like you are encroaching on their “property”.
Really, I think girls hang out with girls they don’t feel intimidated by. Girls that are jealous of you aren’t going to be friendly, but that is true everywhere.
What do you like about it?
Guys give you help, they generally are less competitive with girls than they are with each other. You can also look like crap, and still get massive amounts of male attention.
Why do you think guys give more help to women?
All the wrong reasons. You know - they like you, they are trying to meet you, befriend you, and they like that you rely on them.
What do you dislike about it?
Team projects suck. All guys think that girls can’t code. It gets annoying when guys have no faith in your abilities. But to be fair, they may have had some legitimate experiences to support that opinion. Guys try really hard to help girls in these programs, and I think having stuff done for them all the time stunts their abilities. It usually shows which girls are doing this when tests and quizzes come about - or when you look at the quality of the code. But we don’t all do it! Guys should really give us a chance before typecasting us.
Would you like to see more women in technical programs?
It would be nice to be able to look up to women, you know, to have upper-classmen girls who know what they are doing. But honestly, trying to imagine more women is like trying to imagine seeing dinosaurs, it is just really hard because I can’t ever see it happening. It would be great in the sense that there would be more hope and encouragement for other girls seeing women getting jobs at big companies with their degrees. It would be more relatable than hearing about a guy doing it.
Do you think there will ever be gender equality in technical fields?
No. Most of this stuff is just not what girls are into. Look at engineering - it has been around much longer, but they are still having problems with female enrollment in engineering programs. I think if there were more female role models in these areas, there would be women to look up to, so other girls would see that it was possible for them to do too. It is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, we need a lot of women doing these things to attract more women, but we aren’t going to see a lot of women doing them until that happens.
What do you have to say to other women who disagree with you about that?
If they really think equality will happen, that is great! But they should really share it, because I don’t see it. I know a ton of guys that hang around building 70 [RIT's computing and information sciences building. -Robert], but I never see any girls. The girls that are involved with the association for women in computing are nice, but they really aren’t doing anything effective to make the programs more attractive to other women. I’ve seen them once, giving out cookies. I really think it did more for the guys than the girls *laughs*.
Thanks for answering my questions!
No problem.
