Saturday, October 11, 2014

Are Women Tracked to Certain IT Roles?

Are Women Tracked to Certain IT Roles?:

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Think of the stereotypical software architect or developer, and you might picture a guy in a hoodie, jittering from too many energy drinks. Like most clichés, it isn’t really true: Women have taken more roles in IT, from running startups to managing enterprise databases.

Despite that progress, people still associate certain jobs in IT with men, suggests Kira Makagon, vice president of innovation at RingCentral, a San Mateo, Calif.-based provider of cloud business phone systems. Women made up only 19.7 percent of all software developers in 2013; that year, they also represented 7.5 percent of computer network architects, 23 percent of computer programmers, and 17.3 percent of network and computer systems administrators, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The one outlier was database administration, a category where 37.4 percent of respondents were female.)



For example, Makagon said, men still hold the majority of engineering architect jobs: “There are women in engineering management, and when they are in these roles, they are very good, but there are just not too many.” In her experience, more women find their way to QA, product, and project management than development, network design, manufacturing, and low-level device programming positions.

Paul Millard, co-founder and managing partner at The Millard Group, a Middletown, Conn.-based IT recruiting firm, suggests you’re still more likely to see women working at software companies in channel sales, business development, marketing, and customer experience than in technical roles.

From Dice News





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