I recently came across the Student Affairs Women Talk Tech blog and was reminded of a recent post titled “Geek Girls Unite” by my colleague Jen Riehle at NC State. In general, there seem to be fewer females than males in the tech world, although females tend to have the numbers in the the student affairs profession (just observation, no data here). Nonetheless, here at NC State, half of our senior IT directors in the central IT unit are women. But I’m the only woman among the college/unit directors. It’s really a mixed bag. Still, the bottom line is that I’ve only sensed that being female was really a factor in one or two occasions in my IT career.
A completely different story in my previous higher ed position as the harassment prevention officer for our university. Much of that came with the territory and the very nature of the position and the backlash associated with it. Almost daily I encountered the gender factor in some form or fashion in my almost 8 years in that role.
It may be that being in student affairs mitigates any of the gender bias that might exist in the IT profession. Certainly among my student affairs colleagues I never feel gender come into play, but it does rear its head occassional in other venues on our campus.
No answers, just some observations. Would love feedback on this topic.
I can only offer my observation about my organization. I work for a central IT organization in the Division of Student Affairs at UC Santa Barbara. I haven’t seen any overt gender bias based on the fact that our former director was female (she’s now the CIO for a university on the east coast), 3 out of our 6 senior managers are females, 3 out of the 6 middle managers are females and almost half of our 20 developers are females.
Within student affairs, the majority of our unit directors are females.
Joe, thanks for your reply. Numbers are important…that’s the “diversity” part of the equation. Then comes “inclusion” which is how women (or insert under-represented and/or marginalized group here) are part of the conversation and decision making.
I would say on my campus that among the IT leaders, women fair well in both areas for the most part. Not sure that holds true among the IT staff throughout the organization.
It has been my experience, too, that women are well-represented in higher education IT groups. If this is indeed the case, I would guess that it has much to do with the culture of (non-profit?) higher education, particularly how it’s more supportive of family and other personal responsibilities than many other sectors and professions.
However, I wonder if there is a glass ceiling, though, like there was (is?) in student affairs for many years where women would stagnate at the manager/director level and men dominated the most senior positions. (I glanced at the publicly-available EDUCAUSE CDS data and didn’t see this in there. Any other good sources of data for this?) I’ve encountered women CIOs and it seems that many of those with national reputations in higher ed IT are women (Diane Oblinger, Theresa Rowe, Tracy Mitrano, etc.) so maybe things are ok on this front.
The broader literature of women in IT and STEM indicates that there is often a critical tipping point at which there are enough women in a given field to attract other women without intensive recruiting efforts; in other words, hire and retain enough women (I think some studies found it to be 30ish percent) and it becomes somewhat self-sustaining. Maybe we’re already in that fortunate position in many areas of higher ed IT. But I wonder how this plays out across the different specializations as most of my experience has been in user support which seems to be very friendly to women, perhaps because it matches the stereotype of women being more social.
I have a lot of questions and thoughts about gender in the broader student affairs profession but I’ll save those for a more appropriate time.
Kevin, I’ve heard about the “tipping point” phenomenon. I’ve been at the same institution for more than 20 years, so I don’t have a very broad perspective, but I have observed what you describe about the glass ceiling in student affairs. I hope you capture your other questions and thoughts about gender in a good blog post soon!
Hi Leslie – In my organization’s case, it’s also true that inclusion is not an issue. Project leadership and decision making processes are not based on gender.