A recent report on the gender gap in IT, Gartner Advises IT Leaders to Recognise Complementary Gender Strengths states that women with their superior communication and listening skills -- are "innately better suited than men" to navigate the new global economy. The unfortunate reality is that women are either not choosing to enter the field or are leaving. Gartner predicts that by 2012, 40 percent of women in the IT workforce will leave traditional IT career paths.
The dwindling interest in the software industry is pervasive and not isolated to one gender. According to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles (see College Students Continue to Shun Computer Science), the percentage of incoming students interested in majoring in computer science has plummeted over the last four years. Between the fall of 2000 and the fall of 2004, the percentage dropped by 60% and now is 70% lower than its peak in the early 1980s.
One bright spot on the horizon is the increasing interest in agile software development practices. The attendance at Agile 2006 was 1159, a 60% increase over the number for Agile 2005, 701. Since no one tracks gender representation, it’s difficult to show that the number of women attendees is also growing. Linda Rising, who’s attended many of the recent Agile conferences, as well as a variety of other IT conferences, offers an anecdotal observation gender patterns in conference registrations:
In my opinion there are more women attendees at agile events. This is encouraging to me. Not only because it shows that agile approaches involve the diversity that women bring to an organization, but that teams are becoming more effective by building on broader strengths, that may have been lacking or not appreciated in teams in the past.
If you’re not a Gartner client, here are some pointers to commentary on related Gartner reports: CIOs Need Mix of Male and Female Staffers for New Business Environment; Gartner: Firms at Risk of Losing Women Technologists.
