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From: julie%thrive@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Julie Rohwein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Preponderance of women as tech-support people
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Date: 13 Sep 88 17:40:18 GMT
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In article <5697@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> roy@phri (Roy Smith) writes:
>
>	I've noticed that when I call a computer company for tech support,
>I tend to get to talk to a woman more often than I get to talk to a man.
>I'm not talking about the first N levels of people you get to talk to (who
>are also mostly women) but when you finally get to talk to somebody who
>really knows what is going on.  Why is that?  I've got several theories:


I ran across a researcher last year whose work is pertinent to this 
observation.

His name is Phillip Kraft, and he teaches at one of the SUNY campuses. 
(Specific information is in my thesis box, which I have yet to unbox.
maybe next week :-)).  Over the last ten years or so, he has been looking into
the status of women in computing, specifically in software.  When I heard him
speak, he presented a number of interesting results. (If anyone is interested,
specific citations will be available when the aforementioned box is unboxed.

	1.  Survey of a number of persons with "software-type" job 
		classifications -- I don't remember  the number off hand

		Participants were asked to estimate the amount of time 
		spent on the  job in various activities.  These activities
		included technical things like coding, debugging and designing,
		organizational type things like meetings and memo writing,
		service activities and sales related activites.

		A cluster analysis (which plots variables based on the
		frequency with which they  occur together), revealed 
		an interesting organizational chart.  It showed a technical
		track and a sales track, both of which merged into a 
		managerial track.  These areas were overwelming populated
		by males.  Females, on the other hand, by and large, inhabited
		an area characterized by "soft and fuzzy" descriptors:
		dealing with customer complaints, "hand holding", 
		troubleshooting.  The female cluster was quite isolated 
		from the other data.  Also, the female cluster contained
		a wide variety of job titles, ie it was not just that most
		women had service-type, but that in whatever job category
		they fell into, women found themselves in these roles.  

	2.  Analysis of the types of software jobs held by men and women, along
		with salaries received revealed a "woman's track" in computer
		related work. Women tended to hold jobs with little or no
		possibility of advancement within the place of employment.
		Analysis of salaries revealed  a "woman's salary" as well.
		When examined versus time spent in the profession, women's 
		salary levels plateaued after a few years, while men's salaries
		continued to climb.  

The talk included some intersting anecdotal information as well.  Kraft noted
that computer programming began as an entirely female profession. As an earlier
poster noted, the first programmers were drawn from "computation" departments
which prior to electronic computers consisted of women with pencils and paper
and BA's in mathematics.  Men did not enter the profession in any numbers 
until the early fifties when the rise of NORAD brought an large influx of money
and interest to software development.  

julie rohwein
julie@media-lab.media.mit.edu
...!mit-eddie!media-lab!julie