Hey, I’ve been in the field of technology for just over thirty years and I still ask myself “where are all the women? Or I hope this time the project I’m assigned to will have more women involved! And, oh, there’s one, where’s the rest of them?  Well, let me tell you that I keep asking, but nothing’s changed.  I even ask my fellow peers and we all agree, it’s pretty rare to work on a team with several women participants!

So where in the heck are they?  Women in my field of technology I mean; specifically Information Technology.  Don’t get me wrong, they are here, just a little sparse for my, let’s say daily dose of happiness!  Just tired of sharing ideas and seeking technical solutions with a bunch of guys; sometimes it would be nice to have the technical opinion of a woman.  They say men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
To me, that’s a good thing.  I would like to see how someone who thinks maybe a little differently than me and provide a different solution that is effective and hopefully better than the one we guys dreamt up.  So, I’ve started this blog to see if I can find some answers.
But before I’m done, let me provide some statistics that I found after doing a little research.  Additionally, I will provide a summary of my findings after interviewing women currently employed in the field of information technology.

Ok, first the statistics:

According to one website:

• In the next decade the national demand for scientist and engineers is expected to increase four times that of other occupations

From the Montreal Gazette:

• Figures from the Information and Communications Technology Council show that last year, only about 25% of people working in the IT field were women
• And women are even more rare in the most technical fields, making up just 12% of electrical, computer and software engineers, and 19% of
  programmers

And another source:

• There are 25% women in computing occupations as of 2009
• 18% of 2009 Computer and Information Sciences undergraduate degreerecipients were women

 From Catalyst http://www.catalyst.org/publication/205/women-in-high-tech:

Employment in High Tech

SOURCES

¹ U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, “Women In High-Tech Jobs” (July 2002). 

² Current Population Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table 11: Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, 2010,” Annual Averages 2010 (2011). 

³ National Center for Education Statistics, “Bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by sex of student and field of study:2007-2008,” Digest of Education Statistics 2009 (2010). 

UPDATED March 3, 2011

Finally, I decided to do my own little investigation to see if I could understand why so few women are still under represented in technical
fields.  I figured I could propose my own theory, of course prove it to be true and win the Nobel Prize – so I asked two women just what brought them into the field of technology.  Here is my summary of what they said:  They ended up in the field of technology as a result of a sequence of events.
What?  That’s it?  Yep, I did say summary, didn’t I?  Please, if you are a women provide your story as to how you ended up as a women in the field of technology.  If you are a man, then ask a woman yourself.  Opinions are also welcome.

BTW, I am KK, from Skylon Technologies and I want to see more women in the field of Information Technology.
Literally!