Do women in multi nationals get a Fair crack of the whip r are they controlled by men

Specialun

Ive worked in multi nationals for years and i see women get plenty opportunities to rise up the ladder or interview for roles the same as men..on primetime now they reckon they need more women in IT..sure who is stopping them from going into IT..sales floors are tough places and it takes a strong motivated person to survive..Teckies work long hours and under pressure

Is it all boll.oxs are are men controlling IT or multi nationals

Stoned Since 2011

Have a beer op.

Buona Fortuna

They're probably put off by this

c_man

My own experience from software development is that of the few women who actually enter the field, most tend to move to QA/scrum-master/product manager etc. after a few years. Usually happens after getting married or having a baby. I expect to get slated for this but it's what I've observed. I totally understand it too.

As for them having difficulties entering the sector, that's absolute bollocks. If you're a woman, you've got a much better chance of getting hired than your male contemporaries. Trust me. I mean think of it from the companies point of view, it's a highly male dominated field and you've got corporate hoo-hah about having equal representation... Of course a woman is gonna get an edge. Before someone misquotes me I'm not saying that all women in tech are there purely for the numbers, absolutely not. I started out and had a female mentor, she was (and is!) a fantastic engineer. Learned so much. But that's just the way it is.

AtomicHorror

Specialun wrote: »

Ive worked in multi nationals for years and i see women get plenty opportunities to rise up the ladder or interview for roles the same as men..on primetime now they reckon they need more women in IT..sure who is stopping them from going into IT..sales floors are tough places and it takes a strong motivated person to survive..Teckies work long hours and under pressure

Is it all boll.oxs are are men controlling IT or multi nationals

What have sales floors got to do with IT?

Stoned Since 2011

AtomicHorror wrote: »

What have sales floors got to do with IT?

What is IT?

Specialun

AtomicHorror wrote: »

What have sales floors got to do with IT?

IT Sales

K-9

S&M parties at multi nationals?

smash

Specialun wrote: »

IT Sales

That's sales. Not IT.

Stheno

Specialun wrote: »

Ive worked in multi nationals for years and i see women get plenty opportunities to rise up the ladder or interview for roles the same as men..on primetime now they reckon they need more women in IT..sure who is stopping them from going into IT..sales floors are tough places and it takes a strong motivated person to survive..Teckies work long hours and under pressure

Is it all boll.oxs are are men controlling IT or multi nationals

IBMS CEO is a woman.
Oracles CEO is a woman.
A woman has previously been the CEO of HP.
Facebooks CEO is a woman
Yahoos CEO is a woman.

There are two issues here that you are talking about, one is the participation of women in IT, and the other is how far they can progress.

I work in IT as a consultant and am fairly senior and I'm female.

Of my current clients (five) one has a female CIO, and the other four have no women in the management team.

Doesn't make any difference in terms of how I am treated, I'm still just someone with specialist skills.

The culture can be different though.

Why don't women work in IT?

Imo there are multiple reasons:
1. The hours are long, so family unfriendly
2. You need to constantly upskill
3. For many jobs you need to do a lot of travel.

Merrion

At the lower levels they probably do, yes.
Higher up very many positions in Ireland are filled by reference to the old school tie.
The three schools concerned are single-sex schools.

riffmongous

Stoned Since 2011 wrote: »

What is IT?

I used to be with IT, but then they changed what IT was

c_man

This is the exact line of guff spouted in the likes of the Guardian's Opinion is Free sh!tehawking.

"Boo hoo, tech is racist!" - n.b. for purposes of the article all Asians are 'upgraded' to white. All white people no matter where in the world they're from, or background, are lumped into one group.

"The tech sector is sexist!" - n.b. the writer is just gonna throw accusations at the industry without any regard for the fact that the percentage of women in the field actually slightly exceeds that of the percentage who study comp sci/software eng etc. in college. That doesn't fit with a good jab at the highly monied people of Silicon Valley.

AtomicHorror

riffmongous wrote: »

I used to be with IT, but then they changed what IT was

Apparently IT is now sales. **** coding get shmoozing.

Stheno

Merrion wrote: »

At the lower levels they probably do, yes.
Higher up very many positions in Ireland are filled by reference to the old school tie.
The three schools concerned are single-sex schools.[/QUOTE

I'd have to disagree with this based on both my own personal experience and the amount of women I know in senior positions in IT in the country tbh.

From a small pool of overall people in IT (less than 1 in 5 in IT overall are women) women disproportionately advance to senior levels.

The organisation I referred to earlier where they have no women on the management team in IT, are actively looking to change that.

AtomicHorror

Stheno wrote: »

Why don't women work in IT?

Imo there are multiple reasons:
1. The hours are long, so family unfriendly
2. You need to constantly upskill
3. For many jobs you need to do a lot of travel.

Only reason those three things are problems are because working women are still expected to handle the larger portion of home and family life. In theory they affect men just as much, in practice they don't.

Pharma industry is similar and one thing I notice is that plenty of women progress to director level, but they tend to pay a price for it.

Specialun

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Apparently IT is now sales. **** coding get shmoozing.

thattequilagirl

I work at a multinational. About half of the senior management team are women, including the CEO. I've mostly worked in very male environments, so it's nice having female mentors and role models.

Stheno

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Only reason those three things are problems are because working women are still expected to handle the larger portion of home and family life. In theory they affect men just as much, in practice they don't.

Pharma industry is similar and one thing I notice is that plenty of women progress to director level, but they tend to pay a price for it.

A disproportionate number of the women I know who are senior in IT here are childless

I have no kids, so I have no pressures in relation to travel etc.

Off the top of my head I can think of 15 other women who are quite senior in IT roles with no kids.

9de5q7tsr8u2im

The reason why women get hired in favour of men is because shes mint and smart,

Stheno

LuckyDude12 wrote: »

The reason why women get hired in favour of men is because shes mint and smart,

Mint? Does that mean good looking?

Tombi!

Asked two mates of mine (one currently unemployed and one currently employed as one of four people in a tech department - she monitors the network or security or something like that. Think network admin)
First one said she had more issue with her boss who was a woman and in general she had more grief from women but she worked in small companies. Second one said that it's definitely an old boys club she's at currently but she's generally better than most of them and has to do more work to prove she's at least equal to the men.

Fratton Fred

Stheno wrote: »

A disproportionate number of the women I know who are senior in IT here are childless

I have no kids, so I have no pressures in relation to travel etc.

Off the top of my head I can think of 15 other women who are quite senior in IT roles with no kids.

We had a female director who announced she was pregnant. A comment was made at a senior level that is showed a lack of dedication to her career.

For some reason, the fact that comment was made by another woman made it all the more callous.

The company I work for has a positive discrimination policy and strives to support companies owned and managed by women and ethnic minorities. As long as they are American women and ethnic minorities though.

AtomicHorror

Stheno wrote: »

A disproportionate number of the women I know who are senior in IT here are childless

I have no kids, so I have no pressures in relation to travel etc.

Off the top of my head I can think of 15 other women who are quite senior in IT roles with no kids.

Yes. That very much matches my observations too. Lots of people I work with have had children in the last couple of years, but while I and my fellow fathers climb the ladder at the same pace as childfree men, our female colleagues who choose parenthood actually have to make a hard choice, and they do fall behind.

I'm not convinced the barriers in the workplace are that significant a factor anymore. They're in how we treat maternity/paternity and parental leave and how men in working partnerships view home and family.

Stheno

Tombi! wrote: »

Asked two mates of mine (one currently unemployed and one currently employed as one of four people in a tech department - she monitors the network or security or something like that. Think network admin)
First one said she had more issue with her boss who was a woman and in general she had more grief from women but she worked in small companies. Second one said that it's definitely an old boys club she's at currently but she's generally better than most of them and has to do more work to prove she's at least equal to the men.

I would have to say that some of the women I have worked with in IT have been a nightmare, possibly as a result of working in a male dominated environment.

One organisation I worked in literally had a female mafia, where all the female managers banded together and generally made their male colleagues life a nightmare.

There's a balance there.

dr.fuzzenstein

I can only speak from experience. I work in tech support, we have a team in APAC, EMEA and the US. Between those three teams (30 people or thereabouts) we have the grand total of one woman on the entire planet working in IT support. Development, not much better, all other departments, overrun by women.
Is it because our company has a deliberately sexist hiring policy, in line with policies issued by the secret cabal of men whose aim it is to keep women down? A global conspiracy to suppress women? Rubbish, women just don't fancy IT, the same as they don't fancy becoming car mechanics.
Oh, its not just us. I speak to dozens of IT people every day, setting up web servers, exchange, networks and so on. I speak to about three to five women in a year.

tritium

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Only reason those three things are problems are because working women are still expected to handle the larger portion of home and family life. In theory they affect men just as much, in practice they don't.

Pharma industry is similar and one thing I notice is that plenty of women progress to director level, but they tend to pay a price for it.

Strangely enough the men who progress also tend to pay a price in terms of spending quality time with family, increased stress and associated illness etc.

Strangely enough no one seems to mention that.....

(Not a dig at you atomic, but) fixing paternity leave etc. might just be a better solution than taking the Guardianesque view that its all the company's fault, with their sexist agenda..

jimgoose

I asked Mrs. Goose what she thought about this, reasoning, as good, nerdly engineers do, that being a woman she'd have some insight. She said that IT would bore the bollocks off a battalion. So there you have it - she may just have a point.

Specialun

jimgoose wrote: »

I asked Mrs. Goose what she thought about this, reasoning, as good, nerdly engineers do, that being a woman she'd have some insight. She said that IT would bore the bollocks off a battalion. So there you have it - she may just have a point.

Mrs goose for president

Stheno

c_man wrote: »

As for them having difficulties entering the sector, that's absolute bollocks. If you're a woman, you've got a much better chance of getting hired than your male contemporaries. Trust me. I mean think of it from the companies point of view, it's a highly male dominated field and you've got corporate hoo-hah about having equal representation... Of course a woman is gonna get an edge.

Hmm. Two examples for you here of how women can be discriminated in this sector.

Ten years ago in my early thirties, I was married and commute 100 miles round trip each day. I went for a fairly senior role with a company and the first question the male interviewer asked me was "You're married, live fifty miles away, and obviously have children" How can you partner that with a demanding role such as you are interviewing for?"

I subsequently was offered the job and declined it on the basis of his attitude.

I then moved to consulting in another organisation, and on a sales pitch with my practice lead, the customer asked if I was his PA.

There are still attitudes out there like that, that are offputting, for the most part women are welcome in IT, but few choose it.

Stheno

jimgoose wrote: »

I asked Mrs. Goose what she thought about this, reasoning, as good, nerdly engineers do, that being a woman she'd have some insight. She said that IT would bore the bollocks off a battalion. So there you have it - she may just have a point.

I have to say I absolutely love what I do.

I'm currently working with companies in the public sector, telecoms, the food industry and pharma, I get loads of exposure to the specifics of all those different industries and how they use IT.

I also get huge exposure to different technologies and use of technologies and how they are managed.

I literally find it fascinating

Letree

I'm looking forward to RTE Primetime doing a show about the lack of male primary teachers or even secondary teachers.

RDM_83 again

jimgoose wrote: »

I asked Mrs. Goose what she thought about this, reasoning, as good, nerdly engineers do, that being a woman she'd have some insight. She said that IT would bore the bollocks off a battalion. So there you have it - she may just have a point.

I do agree that the genders do trend towards different fields/subjects but AFAIK in the early days IT was a field with a lot more women in it. COBOL was invented by woman and so on.

Now I don't believe that we should really push towards diversity for its own sake (and if anything these days younger guys do worse in nearly every metric than woman), let those that are best at the job get the job but its worth asking why the demographic in these careers changes.

gctest50

RDM_83 again wrote: »

I do agree that the genders do trend towards different fields/subjects but AFAIK in the early days IT was a field with a lot more women in it. COBOL was invented by woman and so on.
.....

Really early on, Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first ever computer program

She was the daughter of Lord Byron, who went on to knock around with Mary Shelley

The Randy Riverbeast

In my experience you can have a class of 60 and at most 5 will be women. When you get to postgrad level you get about 2 in a group of 10. I think girls do better than boys at the leaving cert (would need to double check) so could get in if they wanted. A company can only hire people who are interested and qualified for the job. If the colleges aren't producing enough graduates then there isn't much you can do. Some companies like Intel have a scholarship for women in engineering.

ectoraige

If there's not many women at the bottom of the ladder, there won't be many at the top. There aren't traditional female role models in STEM, it's improving slowly, but it is not normalised for a teenage girl to have an interest in engineering or programming, instead teaching and nursing end up as more commonplace aspirations, careers that now have a dearth of males. When there are good peer supports, female participation in IT increases. I am certain there are many women working in other industries who could have excelled in IT but never took the initial steps to get there.

M Anonymous

Does anyone know the numbers on the percentages of women computer science/studies/engineering graduates over the last couple of decades.
I think that fewer are women (the percentage, not the overall number)

Maybe those women are going disproportionately into a small group of companies. Let's say women are 20% of grads but Intel recruit 50/50 men to women then the remaining companies will have fewer women on the first rung in a position to progress at all.

M Anonymous

I can't link but I've just googled and apparently the percentage of computer science graduates that are female has halved since 1985. Nearly 40% in 1985, 18% last year.

I graduated end of the 80's and would have said 40-50% of the comp. Sci were women.

Nearly every boss in the European bank offices I worked in in Galway was a woman. Only one guy had a team leader position.

Graces7

I have a feeling that while men may think they are in charge, we really are. By stealth.. same as in the Church. It is a well known fact that if there were no priests left in the Vatican it would still run perfectly.. We rule! Always have done always will do....

suicide_circus

From my years of experience in sales and retail management, the majority of my staff were women. However, had I been involved in recruitment, that ratio would have been adjusted. Women were far more likely to call in sick, go long term sick, be involved in bullying, get injured and suit the company, stand around chatting, take the piss with breaks, use tears as a weapon etc. This is on top of their likelihood of maternity leave etc.
When you moved up to management however, the productity levels matched and surpassed their male colleagues but their likelihood of having complaints of bullying made against them (usually by women) was ten times that of male managers.

pickarooney

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Only reason those three things are problems are because working women are still expected to handle the larger portion of home and family life. In theory they affect men just as much, in practice they don't.

Pharma industry is similar and one thing I notice is that plenty of women progress to director level, but they tend to pay a price for it.

I think this line about expectations wrt family is a but dishonest, to be frank. I don't know many people who, if the need for money were not the primary driving force would choose to spend their time at work amongst people they don't particularly like doing work that's not necessarily that interesting over spending time with their own children.

I know which I'd pick if I had a real choice.

BigJackC

The Randy Riverbeast wrote: »

I think girls do better than boys at the leaving cert (would need to double check) so could get in if they wanted.

Girls outscored boys in 50 out of 58 leaving cert papers.

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/why-do-girls-outperform-boys-in-the-leaving-cert-1.2317485

Problem isn't getting the points to get into these courses. Maybe IT just doesn't just interest a lot of girls? I'm all for programs encouraging more of a balance, but not everything has to be an equal split.

Boskowski

I work for a multinational and its probably the most balanced workplace I've seen in that regard. We have a lot of women and they're are in all sorts of positions and they're not there on the merit of being a woman, but because they're good at what they're doing. There seem to be more in QA BSA, PM and admin/managerial roles than actual development, but thats more down to individual preferences I think. I work in development with 2 women and they're both very smart, fine engineers. Not that all the above actually needs pointing out, only saying cos its the subject. In my place man/woman truly doesn't matter and therefore it doesn't really ever come up bar for the obvious differences e.g. maternity breaks. I never think about it and like that very much.

Boskowski

Graces7 wrote: »

I have a feeling that while men may think they are in charge, we really are. By stealth.. same as in the Church. It is a well known fact that if there were no priests left in the Vatican it would still run perfectly.. We rule! Always have done always will do....

I'd prefer if no one actually would put themselves into a group and would want to be 'in charge' based on that. I'd prefer if individuals just do what they like and what they're good at and if that means they get to be in charge then that's it.

gramar

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Pharma industry is similar and one thing I notice is that plenty of women progress to director level, but they tend to pay a price for it.

Well if that's not sexism I don't know what is. Men getting paid to be directors and women having to pay to be directors!

jimgoose

Stheno wrote: »

I have to say I absolutely love what I do...

Oh yes, so do I. I'm in ICT R&D, roughly at Principal Master-Geek level, and have been in computing/IT for nigh on 25 years. It's the only game for me. In our particular facility very nearly half the staff are women of all ages. Outside of that sort of environment though, I have noticed that nerdy, highly-technical stuff tends to bore women more so than men. It's not the maths either - Mrs. Goose is, among other things, a tax consultant - but some of the more tedious "nitty-gritty" of machinery and data that seems to turn them off, I think.

Stheno

Stheno wrote: »

IBMS CEO is a woman.
Oracles CEO is a woman.
A woman has previously been the CEO of HP.
Facebooks CEO is a woman
Yahoos CEO is a woman.

There are two issues here that you are talking about, one is the participation of women in IT, and the other is how far they can progress.

I work in IT as a consultant and am fairly senior and I'm female.

Of my current clients (five) one has a female CIO, and the other four have no women in the management team.

Doesn't make any difference in terms of how I am treated, I'm still just someone with specialist skills.

The culture can be different though.

Why don't women work in IT?

Imo there are multiple reasons:
1. The hours are long, so family unfriendly
2. You need to constantly upskill
3. For many jobs you need to do a lot of travel.

Its clear as day to me why there aren't as many women in IT. I did computer science in college. Around 10% of my class was female, around 10% of applicants of my currents role are female and predictably around 10% of my co-workers are female.

Why are only 10% of my college class female? That runs far deeper. My theory is that its because I was given a tonka truck as a child and my sister was given a barbie doll.

I work in a IT multinational. There are more men than women alright. Not huge proportion of men compared to women, however. When I started in the company 8 of us started together and were in the same training group. I was the only woman. I have noticed that there tends to be a lot more women that are project managers. These women usually have degrees in computer science, engineering etc but end up working as project managers after a few years.

jimgoose

Deleted User wrote: »

Its clear as day to me why there aren't as many women in IT. I did computer science in college. Around 10% of my class was female, around 10% of applicants of my currents role are female and predictably around 10% of my co-workers are female.

Why are only 10% of my college class female? That runs far deeper. My theory is that its because I was given a tonka truck as a child and my sister was given a barbie doll.

Hmm. When I was at it back around 1990, around one-third of the class were female. While the attrition rate was horrific (that's another problem) it was about the same across the genders. Could it be that, despite a quarter century of progress, young women are being more aggressively targeted by, and/or are more susceptible to, the Cult of Dumb that seems to be slowly taking over, where in-depth knowledge and finely-honed geekery on any subject or field is perceived as "uncool"??

c_man

Deleted User wrote: »

Why are only 10% of my college class female? That runs far deeper. My theory is that its because I was given a tonka truck as a child and my sister was given a barbie doll.

I don't fully buy that line tbh. I mean don't women outnumber men studying sciences in college? And they perform better than lads at Maths etc in the Leaving. What is it about engineering in general that doesn't have them applying?