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Original poster

Women in IT

57 replies

EBearhug · 22/08/2014 22:21

I bet I'm not going to see male IT workers advertising underwear.

www.bustle.com/articles/36790-dear-kate-debuts-ada-collection-modeled-by-real-life-women-in-tech-jobs-for-the-coolest-lookbook

I might have sometimes have not been fully dressed when working from home (and definitely not when I've been on call at 3am), but it's not something I tend to share with my colleagues, and I definitely wouldn't be sharing photos of me like that.

I work in a techy area of IT, and I'm actively involved in promoting STEM to schools and so on, in the hope that one day, I won't be in such a minority, doing sys admin. I want women in IT to be normal, and not a nice adornment whom we can imagine in her knickers while making the diversity stats look nice.

I'm a bit torn (but not very) - there's part of me thinking, well, they've got women of all sizes, which should be good. And it's good they want to promote women in IT.

But I don't want the idea of women in IT to be women sitting round in their underwear. Jeans and t-shirt or a suit, like the normal work clothes for women working in IT, rather than the normal work clothes for strippers.

Yes, that's why I'm pissed off with it - couldn't quite put my finger on it when I started typing. It's because I know that there are still quite a lot of men who think women in IT are only really a good thing if they're there for their titillation, and they can imagine them sitting there in their knickers. Well, now they don't have to imagine. I bet they're not thinking about how good their java programming skills are or anything. I don't think this ad is really going to help, because the problem with women in IT is not women, it's men.

(And it's all my own fault for clicking links from other FWR threads - in this case, the one on the OK Cupid make up experiment.)

OP posts:
SevenZarkSeven · 23/08/2014 14:20

What does ada lovelace have to do with pants?
What do women in IT have to do with pants (well apart from the fact that they wear them sometimes just like everybody else)

I don't understand this at all.

ezinma · 23/08/2014 09:51

Not only are the products themselves great (everything looks so irresistibly comfortable), but the fact that they are modeled by women who are beautifully real, with bodies who look like yours and mine and careers that are successful and unique, is truly powerful. It makes you take a second look at the product and the women in them, and provides a bold, fun look into the female pioneers of the tech industry.

Oh barf. It's another marketing campaign that has women sitting around looking cheerful in their underwear.

DP is an IT consultant, and would second EBearhug's observations. The company she works for has, at the senior level, a real commitment to hiring and promoting women. Nevertheless there are no other women in the team she works for, and often in the customer teams she supports. The culture remains heavily blokeish: meetings are confrontational, days are long, and out of hours it's booze and spicy food and conversation about sport. There is a tiny niche in which a woman can be judged for her work rather than her appearance or her ability to 'play the quota system', and it requires letting a lot of the unconscious and low-level sexism pass.

Original poster
EBearhug · 23/08/2014 01:07

It can be dick swingy. Most of my problems at work are because of my male manages willy waving, and I was recently having to restrain myself from suggesting to our director that he take them out to the carpark, find a suitable bit of wall, and just see which of them actually could piss highest. But I agree it's not as bad as construction.

It also depends on the company - I had an interview with one company last year and I really didn't get the impression that it was a women-friendly culture - not that they had page 3 posters up or anything, but I didn't like the company brochure in reception with photos from various offices round the world, including "the wives of..."

Some companies are making a lot of effort, my own employers included - I'd definitely recommend people apply to my company - but not to my department... Also, while senior management and HR are very much on board, it hasn't filtered down to everyone lower down, and there are still lots of men in IT who don't recognise a problem, or see that they're part of it. There's not so much overt sexism these days - though there's definitely some - but I think there are a lot of issues with unconscious bias and stereotype threat and so on.

And we need to keep the pipeline open - there just aren't as many women studying computer science at university, and you can't promote people if they're not coming into the industry at all. If I were just starting out, I don't think this sort of advert would be encouraging.

OP posts:
Amethyst24 · 23/08/2014 00:50

EBear, although I'm not in IT, I agree with you that that campaign is a load of shit. But this is an area I'm interested in at the moment for other reasons (I'm researching start-up culture for another project). I chatted to a woman in a senior role in a tech company recently, and she said that there's a "gold rush" for talented women in the industry, which I took to be a really positive thing.

If women who are good at what they do are highly in demand, purely because they're bright, competent and female, and commanding big money as a result, that's surely going to get more women into the industry? It has to. I did also get the impression that the sort of environment we're talking about is less unpleasant and misogynistic than, say, construction, or even medicine - it's not aggressive and dick-swingy in the same way.

Original poster
EBearhug · 22/08/2014 22:50

Yes, I noticed that after posting. I was wondering about starting a conversation about it with the women's organisation at work next week, but the stick, the no bullshit zone poster and the semi-clad women suggest it's not actually safe for work.

Which is another reason it shouldn't be about women in IT, really.

(I am enough of a techy to have tried to work out what the code in the background images was doing...)

OP posts:
ElephantsNeverForgive · 22/08/2014 22:32

Very odd and given the Fuck it sticker on the lap top, not very nice.

Original poster
EBearhug · 22/08/2014 22:26

On the other hand, by making me annoyed enough to start threads about it, it's effective advertising.

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