Maggie++

Gayle Force blogged about Women and the IT community when she was asked what to do to get more women involved in her local  Columbus Ruby Brigade. In reading her response I got to thinking about other experiences I'd had and the fact that a small percentage of attendees to user groups and communities events are women.

There do seem to be less women currently in IT jobs.  This has not always been the case.  I worked as a software engineer at three large corporations in the 80s after I graduated from college. There were actually more female than male programmers at the first and at the other two it seemed 50/50.  However there were no females in the senior/principal technical staff roles, who typically had greater than 10 years experience.

So what happened. Families. Women have children.  Some stay working full-time, some go part-time and some choose to stay home.  The ones that stayed full-time took the management track and became less involved in technical aspects.

The women who went part time were relegated to peripheral roles such as configuration management, source control, bug tracking and QA - these tasks were easier to share on a part time basis.

All of the women I knew who went part time, stayed home full-time after the birth of a second or third child.  None of these women that I know have returned to engineering.  Some have returned to full-time work in other fields.

In 1990 I left software to be a full-time SAH mom.  I loved my job and working on exciting projects, but the job also involved long hours, late nights in the lab and unplanned travel.  I was very dedicated to work and knew that I would have struggled to do both well.  I also knew I really wanted to be home full-time and to just concentrate on being a mom.

I loved being a stay-at-home mom.  During that time I met many extremely talented and creative women who had also left careers to be home.  There seemed to be a consensus that it was ok to take a year off from work, but any more than that would make it impossible to return to the work-force.

It does not need to be this way, a women does not lose her intelligence during this time and she also gathers valuable experience in the activities of being a mom such as organizing , leading, volunteering, coaching, advocating, researching etc.

Companies have noticed the effect of this female brain drain as noted recently in the Wall Street Journal in the article, Female Brain Drain in Science: “Much Has Yet to Happen”, where they discuss the study "The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology"   Sylvia Ann Hewlett discusses this in her book "Off-ramps and On-ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success".  She states that "corporations have done a dismal job of retaining female talent.  Indeed, they make it very easy for women to depart. When women take a temporary leave of absence to have children or deal with other personal matters, they find it difficult to return to work and contribute as they had previously. In essence, corporations provide women with many career off-ramps, but provide them with few on-ramps. This problem bodes badly for CEOs and top managers who view human resources as a critical asset."  Some steps companies can take are laid out in Flexibility Key to Retaining Women

I created my own on-ramp and returned to full-time software development in 2005.  It was not easy and I still have a lot to learn.  In a future post I will detail the steps I took to re-enter the work force.

maggie++