Attracting Women to the Tech Industry
“I’m trying to decide on the best approach for a proposal to bring more girls into tech,” a man recently said to me. He then asked my opinion on the matter.
I’ve dabbled in programming and worked in technical support. I spent most of my time on a computer for various reasons and both my husband and stepfather are in the tech industry. I shared the things I’d observed and what I saw as the main problems he faced.
The Essence of the Problem
For most women, men are a complete mystery. They don’t understand how they think. This leaves most women feeling left out and unwanted because they don’t know how to enter the conversation and make themselves understood. The things they value are not valued by the men in the industry.
The Differences Between How Men and Women Think
Men are DOS, women are Windows 98.
DOS is simple. Straightforward. You must know, and give it, the exact right command in order to get anything from it. It is not user friendly. It’s not going to try and interpret your meaning. It cannot handle multiple commands at the same time. It does not multitask. It isn’t built that way. However, that straightforward nature means it focuses extremely well on the task you want and executes it flawlessly, quickly, and with great efficiency.
Windows 98 was designed to be user friendly and to accommodate as many different programs as possible. It was supposed to be easier to use, and to be able to do multiple things at the same time — and it did this. However, its ability to accommodate the user came at a price. It would expend all of its memory allocation trying to handle all these demands until it had nothing left to give. That’s when you would get the blue screen of death and you would have to reboot the system to let it regroup.
Women are built to keep track of many different things at the same time. If we were not, children would perish. After all, you can’t put a toddler on hold to tend to the needs of a baby or a kindergartener. You have to keep an eye on, and take care of the needs of, all of them simultaneously.
You must be attentive to their body language and microexpressions as the children aren’t capable of communicating every need they have to you. So you must become adept at reading the needs of people around you and to seek to solve their problems even before they have become aware of the problems themselves.
A Woman’s Approach
Women prioritize relationships above all things. The way we speak is diplomatic — with attention given to how our words might make the other person feel — and so it’s not usually as straightforward as a man’s.
Women also tend to struggle to set boundaries. Saying no is hard because we fear hurting the feelings of the other person. This orientation toward attention to felings is NOT something that is valued in the tech industry or encouraged. Repeatedly women are told that showing feelings is unprofessional and unwelcome.
Women tend to value cooperation over competition, because cooperation is what makes their survival more likely. In fact, while men tend to deploy a fight-or-flight response to stress, a woman’s response is to circle the wagons and gather her friends around her. If women are alone in an environment, she has no one to go to who can help her process her feelings or her thoughts. This can lead to feeling vulnerable and defenseless.
The Corporate, Masculine Approach
Corporations tend to value competition over cooperation. Most of the corporate language is around sports and hunting and war.
That’s not surprising. Men are built for the battlefield. You can’t afford to think about your feelings when you’re on the battlefield. You have to learn to compartmentalize those feelings and deal with them when you have time.
You need to be able to divide the battlefield into allies and adversaries. You need to focus on the tasks in front of you with single-minded devotion. Language needs to be straightforward and unambiguous. There can be no concerns about wasting time trying to figure out what someone means or what a command means.
Creating an Integrated Workforce
To integrate women into the tech industry is going to require a complete shift in the thinking of both men and women. Women need to understand and value the way men think and why their thinking is that way rather than trying to change them to conform to their own thinking.
Men need to understand why women behave the way they do and to realize that there is a valuable logic in the way women think that is DIFFERENT but not less logical than their own. It is simply motivated by different priorities.
There needs to be room given for acknowledgment of feelings and acceptance of those same things. To ask women to abandon their feelings at the door of the corporation is to ask women to lose a very valuable part of what they have to offer.
Why Women Don’t Enter the Tech Industry
The root problem — and the reason most girls do not choose to enter the tech industry — is that they do not see it being relevant to the things that appeal to them at their core. I wouldn’t have begun to study programming at all if it weren’t for my desire to create a game that helped others learn the fundamentals of writing, and to see in a virtual environment how their writing could impact people’s lives and the world around them because of it.
My love of reading and storytelling led me to be interested in programming. The games I love to play most are The Sims 4, Howrse, and Wurm — things that allow me to play out the stories in my head using the game as a tool.
I can relate this to a situation I encountered during college. I didn’t care about geology class. I didn’t see how knowing what rocks could be found where and what the different types of rocks were was relevant to my life. Then, a few years later, I regretted dropping the class and not paying it more attention. I became involved in jewelry making and now that information was relevant to what I wanted to create.
It’s the same thing with anyone. If you want to attract people to something, find out what it is that they desire and make sure that they can see how what you are presenting to them will help them more effectively and efficiently get them what they want.
