This chapter provides bookends for the previous chapter, that is, looking at the more distant past and then looking at recommendations for the future. First, however, the chapter must delve into one more subject involving information technology, young women, and education beyond K1–12: the tendency to switch majors and transfer out of IT subjects at the university level. The problems associated with a lack of women in academic IT studies do not end once the women arrive on campuses and choose IT subjects and majors; they spill over into the first years of college study, as young women enter and then leave the field.
As a university major, English, for example, has one of the lower transfer rates at 15 percent. By contrast, the switching rates in engineering range from 38 percent to 40.5 percent. And the highest rates of all are for mathematics and computer science, up to 63 percent.1 The problem’s magnitude, too, is larger than that. Losses “come from a pool of disproportionately able undergraduates (45.3% with A or A- high school grade averages as compared to 26.3% in other [college] majors).”2
Then there is a second confounding factor relevant here. “Switching was the highest among women who have chosen [STEM] majors (52.4 % overall). . . . The majors in which women switchers exceeded women entrants by more then 55% included mathematics/statistics (72.3%) . . . [and] computer science (62.9%).”3
Several causes of the switching-out phenomenon are easily identified. First, “weed out classes have the unintended effect of driving away some highly talented students.” The previous chapter has already discussed that subject. Second, “slaughtering people in the first exam or two” has a similar negative effect.4 Third, academic experts have spoken of the “counterproductive effects of grade curving.”5 All three negative practices—weed-out classes, slaughter-type assessment practices, and grading on the curve—are found frequently in computer science. Moreover, these deleterious practices affect young women more than young men.
In addition to the three practices just mentioned, “losses from [STEM] majors were thought to reflect a poor balance between faculty research and teaching, large classes, [and] inadequate academic and emotional support for students.” Women in particular feel the latter. “Studies of female [STEM] students reported psychological alienation and lowered self-esteem as factors in their decisions to leave.”6
A key finding is that, in academic STEM settings, the most marked difference between men and women “lay in their levels of self-confidence.”7 The biggest factors women cite in recounting their decisions to leave are “loneliness, intimidation, and discouragement”:
No one seems to suggest that a cause of women’s reactions is faculty sexism. “Dissatisfaction with faculty was high” but was not markedly dissimilar from that of males’ (80.3 percent for women, 66.2 percent for men).9
No one suggests either that coddling or hand-holding of women is the answer to curbing high transfer rates. Instead, efforts at elimination of the three pedagogical practices outlined above would be a start, one that undoubtedly some university teachers have undertaken. In addition, the curriculum should allow for, and indeed encourage, more experimentation in the first place. “In the humanities, faculty commonly encourage students to experience different disciplines before making a final choice. By contrast, [STEM] faculty demand an early [often total] commitment from students.”10
On at least three occasions, women’s employment numbers seemed to suggest a profound cultural change in the offing and a significant increase in women’s role in business. The second and third decades of the twentieth century saw a geometric increase in administrative and other front office functions in American business. Labor shortages in World War II resulted in an increase in women’s employment (the Rosie the Riveter phenomenon). And the 1950s and 1960s, the early years of the computer revolution, saw the rise to prominence of women in data entry and machine operation, as discussed in chapter 4.
On each occasion, however, the reality failed to live up to expectations, and women’s efforts at parity in the workplace evoked images of Albert Camus’s myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus’s punishment in hell, you will recall, was to push a large boulder up a hill. As he neared the top, the boulder escaped his grasp, rolling back to the base. He was destined to push the large rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down the slope, for eternity.11
In the years preceding World War I, as American manufacturing and retail operations expanded greatly, companies were “faced with a shortage of clerks, willing to be paid low wages . . . [and] turned to women to be operatives in the office workplace.” “The office . . . was increasingly full of females, . . . ideal candidates for clerical jobs.”12 Women then began to agitate for and receive new, expanded roles in business at the same time that suffrage activists were achieving some successes in obtaining for women the right to vote. Wyoming became the first U.S. state to grant that right, which it did in 1890, while still a territory.13
For example, in the midst of all this, as Jeanette Eaton and Bertha Stevens described it, “Women [in 1915] are thinking of themselves as professional workers, and men are thinking of them with a new seriousness. . . . This new professional awareness of women comes fortunately at a time when . . . the [business] professions themselves are acquiring an unprecedented public importance and new flexibility of mind.”14
Males—or certain of them—worked to cap the level to which women could rise. At that time, “a growing [counter-]trend was toward requiring . . . standards for professional status, including college degrees, certifying examinations, licensure . . . and, frequently, postgraduate training as well. While some of these changes were aimed at improving training, they were also designed to limit access” for women.15 These, too, were the times of advocacy for “scientific management.” In 1911 Frederick Taylor published his manifesto, The Principles of Scientific Management, which quickly became the bible for Taylor’s admirers and followers (“Taylorites”).16
The purported ability of the male business professional to employ the “scientific method” was a critical aspect of males’ power. “The Taylorites acquired the mantle of science . . . partly by the simple fact of changing the term systematic management to scientific management.”17 At times, the backlash from males and schools of scientific management became ridiculous: “employing subjective ideas about women’s biology, commentators tried to argue that women were simply unsuited to the rigors of scientific thought.”18 Some male business professionals made these ideas explicit, excluding women. “At the General Electric Company . . . male managers and executives were sent to summer camp, beginning in 1922, to encourage company loyalty and solidarity. They performed forest rituals and dressed up like lumberjacks or Roman soldiers. No women were ever invited.”19 The dominant males circled the wagons tighter. One advocate of scientific management, an engineer, illustrated what he termed “principles of efficiency”: “Women make tepees, but men build skyscrapers.”20 A prominent mining engineer publicly announced that “women would be as welcome in engineering as would be snakes in Ireland.” A Pittsburgh engineer named John Needles Chester did “not approve of women entering any field [that would] subtract from their womanliness.” He went on to apply his principle to his profession: “Next to military leadership, the profession of engineering is the most masculine. . . . Engineering incorporates . . . the roughest and most hazardous. . . . It will be years before women could place themselves . . . in this field.”21
Economic events intervened. The Great Depression pushed unemployment rates to 25 percent. Widespread unemployment crowded many women out of the workplace, arresting and then reversing the movement of women into middle management and then even into clerical roles. The boulder Sisyphus had pushed rolled back to the base of the hill.
A second foray of women into occupations previously monopolized by males occurred in World War II. Replacing males who had gone off to fight, Rosie built airplanes and ships. WASP and WAVE members flew airplanes to places where they were needed. Of necessity, women occupied a myriad of positions and professions, as the Army and the Navy sent males overseas to prosecute war on not one but two disparate fronts.
Almost as quickly, as men returned from the war, they resumed their prewar callings, professions, and occupations. From the mid-1940s to 1950, women’s presence in the workplace and the front office dwindled once more. Women continued to have an increasing presence in a few fields, such as bookkeeping, a calling in which women occupied more than 63 percent of an estimated 721,000 to 738,000 positions.22 There was even a backlash against female bookkeepers. Some industries and firms, such as insurance companies and investment firms, kept women confined to “women’s departments.” “Banks in particular remained bastions of male privilege.”23 Overall, though, the trend was downward once more.
A third expansion of women’s foray into businesses and offices occurred in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the fields of data entry, machine operation, and some lower levels of programming, in part an outgrowth of the earlier female presence in bookkeeping and similar fields. Males, though, intervened once again, to dominate the upper ranks of IT—namely, programming, systems analysis, and hardware and software development. From the 1980s onward, women’s presence even in IT’s lower ranks has dwindled at an increasing rate.
In many ways, these three epochs of women’s entry into business and information technology resemble one another, bringing to mind not only the myth of Sisyphus but the shopworn statement “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Some policy prescriptions for the future may help things change:
The “how-to” literature for women is full of assertions about the absolute need for mentoring.24 Recommendations are that mentors are like stocks: women should have not merely one or two but a diversified portfolio of them. An aspiring woman should have not only one or two mentors in her own company, but also mentors in other companies in the same or similar industries, a couple in her field (finance, marketing, manufacturing, information technology, and so on), and perhaps a few mentors in her city or region.25
The voluminous discussion in the literature, discussed at length in chapter 12, seems to be devoid of any thought about mentoring in educational and pre-employment contexts. Historically, much of science and mathematics are approached and taught as if they existed in a vacuum. There are lab sessions and clubs, but they only go part of the way in answering students’, particularly women students’, question, “What’s the point?”
Computer classes and clubs, as well as math, chemistry, and physics offerings, would benefit greatly if representatives of companies and industries demonstrated to high school and university groups not only the relationship of academic studies to the real world but the actuality of it. “I work for so and so, it is a large company, this is what I currently work on, this is how I use what I learned in the classroom, these are some of the things I have worked on in the past, these are some of the matters we possibly will encounter in the future.” A mentor from government or industry could appear, in the flesh, not on one but several occasions. An intrepid mentor could pass out her business card, saying, “Call me if you have comments or questions.”
This subject has been touched on previously and will be explored in depth in chapter 15. The IT industry seems disingenuous in its relentless push for H-1B visa program expansion compared with its neglect of half our society’s brainpower, that is, females. Leavening the mix so that it does not consist solely of programmers and engineers (mostly male) from India and other foreign nations such as Armenia seems to be a no-brainer but has made little headway in information technology.
With the expansion of office functions and the resulting need for clerical workers, companies established “vestibule or corporation schools to train workers” for newly created and vacant positions.26 On corporate premises themselves, company representatives taught young women about filing systems, composition of business letters, billing and collection procedures, and other subjects. Complete training for programming or software development roles would not be possible, for the simple reason that such on-site training could not go nearly as deep as the positions required. Some form of vestibule training could, however, compensate for the overwhelming head start males have had in information technology roles.
I attended a boys’ high school and a men’s college, followed by several years as an officer in the Navy and then law school, predominantly but not exclusively male back then. My ex-wife blamed many of my myriad deficiencies on my same-sex educational and military backgrounds. Nonetheless, I am a great believer in same-sex education, particularly for young women. I have two daughters, now in their thirties, who share my beliefs, or say they do. The importance of same-sex education, or at least same-sex extracurricular activities, in information technology seems amply supported by surveys of young women about their opinions and experiences. Chapter 6 discussed the subject in greater depth.
In her book about women’s employment at Facebook, Katherine Losse relates how the company’s hires were almost exclusively those with Stanford or Harvard degrees.27 Having graduated from Wesleyan, she considered herself lucky to be hired, albeit at a much lower salary than that of the males. She was, after all, coming from a university few on the West Coast may have heard of, even though Wesleyan is a “little Ivy.” Ms. Losse had a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins, presumably a university that would be known in Silicon Valley, though her graduate degree was in English literature.
Google and Microsoft, other giants in information technology, exhibit the same or an even greater level of credential consciousness. They screen job applicants’ credentials with extreme vigilance. Prevalent throughout the IT industry is this overreliance or overemphasis on credential screening and collecting. Today especially, excellent quality people come from everywhere. Even conservative college counselors consider there to be 150 or more elite colleges and universities. Many university-level students cannot afford the travel, room, and board that would be required to attend a more distant university. They may be “place-bound,” by marriage, by children, by a job needed to defray the costs of education, or a need to care for a dependent parent or sibling.
In addition to place-bound students, other college-bound students and their families cannot afford the $35,000 or $40,000 in yearly tuition that private colleges and universities charge. Even tuition and fees at state-supported institutions of higher learning have ratcheted upward dramatically in the last fifteen years. Some or all of these considerations bear down harder on young women than young men. Some parents with anachronistic attitudes may be more willing to pay money for sons’ as opposed to daughters’ educations.
In recruiting and hiring, the information technology industry has to cast a much wider net. The industry’s elitist attitudes are unwarranted and, in particular, discriminate against women.
In addition to the above measure, the information technology industry has to face the issue of women’s roles in their industry, get more deeply involved in attempting to solve the problems thought to exist, and to the degree possible mount coordinated, comprehensive plans to ameliorate them.
In San Francisco, the AltSchool bases itself on the premise that while “a three year old today isn’t different, . . . largely because of technology a thirteen-year old [girl] is really different [from a boy].”28 The school has 150 professionals, evenly split among educators and technologists, bent on ameliorating such differences. Venture capitalists have invested $110 million in equity and a further $20 million in loans in the school.
The Founders’ Fund, which includes as members Silicon Valley legends Marc Andreessen (The New, New Thing), John Doerr (partner at Kleiner Perkins, the leading venture capitalist firm), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder) have been extremely generous in financing the venture. The philanthropic Silicon Valley Foundation invested $15 million in the AltSchool.
None of these backers want to own part of a chain of boutique micro-schools. Rather, they hope that AltSchool will help “reinvent” American education: first, by innovating in its micro-schools; next, by providing software to educators who want to start up their own schools; and, finally, by offering its software for use in public schools across the nation, a goal that the company hopes to achieve in three to five years.29
Although not always directly responsive to the lack of female involvement and leadership in technology, the AltSchool goes a long way toward addressing certain of the problems.
There are other, similar efforts. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Emerson Collective (funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow) have invested tens of millions, and more, in similar educational efforts. Mark Zuckerberg made a highly publicized $100 million investment in the Newark, New Jersey, public schools. These and other attempts at educational advancement aim at overcoming deficits in much of traditional education. To a great degree, the perception has been that educators have forgotten the need to think about how children learn and what they need to be successful in life, in a world that has undergone vast change in the last decades.
What is needed is similar industry commitment to the subset of problems unique to women’s involvement in information technology. Those problems have led to the most dismal record in hiring and promoting women, with IT topping the list of offenders.