The Darkening Mine

Computerworld - The feedback I received following my editorial last week was nothing if not predictable. I dared to assert that there is a certain inequity inherent in the fact that women in the IT profession on average are paid 12% less than their male counterparts, and I urged the IT sector to address that disparity as a means of stemming the loss of women from the profession.

My experience in having written about this issue in the past has made it clear to me that most men just don’t want to hear it. So I knew what was coming.

“Why aren’t there more women coal miners? Because coal mining is strenuous, dirty and dangerous,” one male reader wrote. “And because women collectively have fewer obligations to support others and more options to be supported. This has been true for at least 3 million years, but humans have a spectacular ability to ignore the obvious.

“Returning to the present,” he continued, “it should not be a surprise that the proportion of women in IT is falling, as IT is becoming more like coal mining every day, except that coal mining has more job security.”

Absent from this reader’s response, and from any other response I’ve received so far, was any expression of concern about the decline in the proportion of women in IT. That’s certainly consistent with my own observation that the issue isn’t particularly top of mind among IT professionals in general, and that’s troubling.

The decline is a precipitous one. The Information Technology Association of America found that the percentage of women in the IT workforce dropped from a high of 41% in 1996 to 32.4% in 2004. According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, the percentage this year stands at 29%, and it’s still falling. Unless something changes, it’s clear that the percentage of women in IT will be negligible before most of the current IT workforce retires.

All of this was on my mind last week during a meeting in Toronto of editors from Computerworld and our sister publications from around the world, where a panel of four CIOs spoke to us about technology trends, the IT problems they’re facing and how we in the media can better meet their information needs. It was a representative group in the sense that one of the four panelists was a woman — Helen Polatajko, senior vice president and CIO at CIBC Mellon Trust in Toronto.

The panel was articulate, knowledgeable and engaging, and I wouldn’t argue that it would necessarily have been less so if the CIO of CIBC Mellon happened to be a man. But I would argue that there was an intangible positive dimension to the discussion — a broader and more inclusive perspective — that wouldn’t have been there if the panel had been all male.