Devoxx – Why we shouldn’t target women
27 November 2011 in events by Linda van der Pal
I went to Devoxx again this year, and made lots of notes of all the sessions I visited. At first I was planning to write one big summary of the event, like I usually do. But then there were some sessions that I nearly transcribed, so naturally those are pretty long. Also, I haven’t had time to make proper blog posts out of all my notes, but I didn’t want to wait until I was done with all of them. Here is the post of one of the sessions I visited that I have turned into a blog post.
Devoxx day 2, 14.00 Room 3
Why we shouldn’t target women
Martijn Verburg, Kim Ross, Régina ten Bruggencate, Trisha Gee, Antonio Goncalves and Claude Falguiére
With five minutes to go before the presentation the room is filling up quickly.
The panel introduces themselves and Martijn, the host, explains how they will run the panel. People in the audience can ask questions through Twitter by using the hashtag #devoxxwomen. Below is my transcription of the questions and summaries of the answers the panel gave. I didn’t attribute the answers to anyone, as they are too much my own interpretation of what was being said. (Seeing how I didn’t use a recorder to make the transcription. I merely wrote stuff down as fast as I could.)
“Why aren’t there more women in IT.”
– We’re the wrong persons to ask, as we’re already in IT. But our guess is that it differs from person to person.
“Is Duchess targeting universities to attract more women into IT?”
– We want to go looking for teachers, but we really need to target even younger girls, as there aren’t very many doing IT studies either. We really need to convince even younger girls and their parents that IT is an interesting carreer for women. But this will take a long-term investment that not many companies are willing to make (yet).
“Why the obsession with more women in IT?”
– What we really need is of course more diversity, not just more women. But the starting point of this panel is that this is already a given. It’s already been proven that diversity is a good thing for teams and companies. So we’ve chosen to make this a discussion about getting more diversity by trying to get more women. But we really should also try to get more black people and Asian people and all other minorities.
“Some industries are male-driven, some are women-driven. Would this be a cultural thing?”
– Yes it is. Countries like India, Brazil and Egypt already have more women in IT.
– The Paris JUG has a meeting every month with about 200 people. Afterwards, they go out to dinner. At first, there were only very few women showing up at these meetings. And none of these women joined the group for dinner. Then some girls who were active in the group, decided to have a women-only meeting before the official JUG-meeting. They’d get together and then went to the official meeting together. This has led to the number of female members in the Paris JUG to grow from 8 to 20 members, some of whom even join the group for dinner.
– But maybe we should do such a thing for all new members, and not just for the women. Because joining an existing group can be daunting for everyone, not just for women.
“How can we change the image of programmers sitting in a basement with lots of pizza boxes and coke cans around them?”
– It all starts in college where the nerdy guys scare of the girls.
– We’ve probably all fulfilled that image at some point (since most of us are geeks after all). But the industry itself isn’t like that at all.
– This image hurts us all (men as well as women), because as a man you’re expected to grow up and do something other than coding. While most of us are passionate about what we do, and don’t want to do anything else.
“What can conference organisers do to attract more women speakers?”
– Please, no positive discrimination. Positive discrimination hurts women, because it makes people doubt our credibility. ‘Are you in that position because you are actually good? Or are you just the token woman?’
– Speakers are usually chosen from a pool of known speakers, so if there aren’t any women in there, you won’t get any female speakers.
– Most selection committees are all men too, so it would probably be a good idea to get more diversity there too.
– Women put the barrier too high for themselves. They think they have to be really great before they can even submit a paper to speak at a conference. Don’t forget that there are a lot of crappy male speakers, and all you need is more practice.
– Mentoring is really important to build confidence. So look around you if you see anyone you think might be capable to speak at a conference and then try and guide them into it.
– The XPdays pair speakers. For new speakers they usually try to pair them with an experienced speaker.
“The language we use in job advertisements is rather aggressive. Is that a barrier?”
– Yes!
– We should push companies towards more mentoring and such things.
– Women should also learn to just try despite this barrier. Getting a rejection doesn’t mean you’re no good. Usually it just means you’re not the best match for that specific function.
– It’s also a fact that companies actually ARE looking for great people.
– It might also be the interview process that scares people off. Men tend to judge women differently, even if that is mostly not a conscious decision. Because they really are only human after all. In France, 40% of all couples meet at work.
– Give your daughter Lego to play with! And later on, maybe try to learn them to program.
“The rumor is that Facebook pays a 20% bonus to female developers.”
– This isn’t a solution either.
* Note of the editor: Although it might set of an inbalance I’ve heard of from a female HR manager. Women tend to ask for pay raises less often. Meaning they also get them less often, as HR managers only have so much money to satisfy their employees. People who ask for a raise more often tend to get them more often too,
“Lots of women fall into the role of mother/sister of the team. Is that something they do because they want to?”
– For some women this comes naturally
– Others hate it
– A man could fill this role just as well
– It should be more of a mentoring role
– And isn’t this actually a sign that the team lead isn’t doing a very good job of it?
“Men are often discriminated against when it comes to being a father.”
– Women won’t get equality at work, until men get equality at home. Until it becomes normal for men to share in all the responsibilities at home, women will keep being rejected for jobs as they might want to have kids.
– We really should separate the parents’ rights issue from the womens’ rights issue. It should become just as normal for a man to take time off to take care of sick kids.
– Maybe we should even have laws enforcing this.
– It is already happening. In lots of countries it’s becoming more and more normal for men to take time off to take care of the kids.
“Some companies are actually looking for senior women who are a mother, as they would have management skills.”
– Isn’t it strange how a mother is supposed to have these skills, but a father isn’t?
“Isn’t it true that women are overly sensitive to male banter and such?”
– If there had been more women in the industry, they would give as good as they got. But because there is such a huge inbalance, they can’t.
– Joking in the workplace is something entirely different from jokes in a public forum such as a presentation at a large conference. In the workplace you can joke back, in a public conference you can’t.
– Maybe we should do mentoring in bantering as well.
“Should we ban booth babes?”
– No, we really should have cute boy booth babes as well!
– We really would prefer technical people, as having booth babes really hurts the credibility of female techs who are trying to sell their product. And besides, the booths that have booth babes usually hamper their own success as well, as nobody is coming to hear about the product anymore, but merely come to ogle the eye candy.
“Can you give any advice for men with a younger female boss?”
– Just treat them as if they were an older male boss.
“Do you know that it’s different in Brazil?”
– Brazil is a new country, IT is also new and considered as a cool thing to do besides (and not a geeky/nerdy thing).
“Last year at Devoxx there was a 1% female attendance.”
– Free tickets wouldn’t help, as only 10-15% of all programmers in the UK are female, so there simply isn’t a very large pool to draw from.
– Duchess is trying to address this by organizing themselves around conferences and by announcing what conferences we’re attending, in order to lure more people over there.
“How many people know about the Java Champions program?”
* editors note: Not many people raise their hands at this question
– It’s a program to make the role models of the Java world more visible. They are a self-selecting group, who nominate people who have been very active in the Java community.
– As a closing note, targetting women specifically is narrowing the field and we really should aim at diversity in general. Not all women are the same, and assuming that they are will not work to attract them.
Duchess is a global network for connecting women in Java technology. Its mission is to promote women in this sector and to provide a platform through which women can connect with each other and get involved in the greater Java community.
