A Sick Industry

Respecting the whole person "There's a discussion going on about women and IT, starting with a post by Richard Jones: Why there's few women in IT. Phillip Eby responded in Is porn driving women away from the computer industry?, The Real Reasons There Are Few Women In IT -- And What YOU Can Do About It and Why (Most) Men Don't Get It -- and I personally find his analysis much more useful.

Richard's original post talks about a case where someone used porn in a presentation, and he's basically saying that is "why there's few women in IT". I don't buy it."

Links to HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux.

The real question is why people (men and women) aren't going into IT - it's not just women. The IT Workforce Conundrum "...college student enrollment in computer science programs is down substantially from the 1990s -- around 20 percent according to the Computing Research Association. In fact, the peak numbers reached in the last decade reflected the Internet boom and represented twice as many CS students as there were in the 1970s. Outsourcing is helping to meet the demand of some types of IT jobs, but many companies are still hard-pressed to find qualified tech workers.

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report predicts that competition for high-tech talent is going to become even more severe over the next few years as globalization absorbs the remaining technology workers around the world. The report says that while companies have been forced to look offshore in order to gain access to larger pools of talent, even this resource is not bottomless. European and Asian executives anticipate a severe shortage of tech talent within the next three years. And, according to the report, worker compensation is being equalized globally; even India and China are not considered low-cost anymore."

The PCW Report says, "In an era of scarcity, technology companies will need to focus more acutely on their talent management. But today, in many areas of human capital management, executives’ self-assessments show little or no confidence in their companies’ abilities."