I was afraid I’d miss the opportunity to write about Krista Scott-Dixon’s book, Doing IT: Women Working in Information Technology in this space. Jack Kapica wrote about it in his blog last November in which he accurately summed up Ms. Scott-Dixon’s premise with the following quote.
“People who can work around the clock get ahead, especially in the IT industry,” she says. “If you’re a 21-year-old single guy, you can thrive in that kind of environment. The company appears to offer you everything you need, and often these are bizarrely perceived as perks — free coffee and junk food, fitness facilities, video games for your ‘downtime.’ But these live-work arrangements don’t work for women who have children at home.”
As an interactive site, globetechnology.com and all its writers welcome feedback, responses and discussions from our readers. These exchanges are beneficial to the entire community. That’s why I was delighted to see the following letter in response to Jack’s blog on this topic by reader Dave Yalden.
“The supposed unfairness to women in the workplace, seems to imply a huge conspiracy by men against the female sex. Men are by nature combative, work takes the place of physical combat. For anyone to think that a woman can support a husband’s career, raise a family, and have a full time career herself, etc., to me would seem a huge conceit on the part of those women who are always whining about it,” Mr. Yalden wrote.
“Wake up and smell the coffee, ladies,” he continued.
Well Dave, I’ve never been called conceited for my efforts to support my husband’s career (go, honey, go!), raise a family and have a career of my own. My critics prefer terms like arrogant, bitch and unfortunately brilliant. I tried calling my mother to ask her about whining and conceit, but she was at work.
That said, I can’t resist the opportunity to tell you what the coffee smells like. The simple truth of the brew is that any conspiracy against women in the workplace is also a conspiracy against men. If there was ever a time for a men’s movement in the technology industry it’s now.
The release of Krista’s book coincides with very public acknowledgements of the tales of the 80 to 100 hour workweeks that continue to haunt tech industries. Most famously, in November of 2004, “EA Spouse” posted a letter on a technology industry site that detailed the abuse she said her partner, and others like him, suffer at the game development company Electronic Arts. Within hours, the site was flooded with like responses and experiences from the wives and partners of video game developers and across the technology industries as a whole.
Not only is it impossible for a spouse of either sex to support a seven-day, 80 hour work week, but the situation brings with it a tremendous social cost in terms of health care, family breakdown and industrial maturation.
Longer work weeks result in poorer health. In tech industries, RSIs, spinal degeneration and depression are debilitating more and more workers. In the United States, health insurance companies are increasing employee premiums, “the co-pay” or user fees payable in case of illness and reducing the procedures and conditions that are covered at all. This means that even insured, working people are at risk of bankruptcy should a stress-induced illness or work-related injury occur.
In the U.S., the cost of workplace illnesses and injuries are passed directly along to consumers, which reduces the impetus of governments to act. In Canada, these costs are passed along to tax payers through the public health system, which should spur activists on.
In terms of family breakdown, extreme work hours seek to release men from their role as spouses and fathers and replace it with a mere set of financial obligations. While many conservatives claim this is a return to the idealised, and fictionalised, 1950s role of “father as provider,” the claim doesn’t ring true for the simple fact that the 1950s father was home by 6 o’clock to play with his kids and help put them to bed.
Aside from the obvious emotional toll the tech industry exacts from children of its employees, aside from the number of divorces it has and will continue to inspire, the fallout in the lives of male culture is only beginning to be felt. If the blogs of tech workers are any kind of social document, it is easy to predict that the current generation of working men will be as dependent on Prozac and other anti-depressants as the educated, middle-class housewives of two generations ago were on Valium. Let’s call it the emasculated mystique.
Industry maturation is a growing problem in all tech-related industries. Geek blogs are rife with tales of long hours that are brought about by managers who abandon development processes, who don’t provide adequate documentation and ignore testing requirements in all but final phases. In this way, tech industries are suffering from pushing women out of their ranks. When half the competition for mid-level and senior positions opts out to work more humane hours, mediocrity ceases to be a barrier to promotion and professional advancement. Which means that instead of improvements, tech workers can look forward to even more incompetent management.
The seriousness of these issues affects not only the personal lives and health of individual tech workers, but our health system and the sustainability of the industry itself. It’s also telling that it was “EA Spouse” sticking up for her husband’s well being. Only after she created a huge outpouring of public support were over-worked techies ready to start advancing their own cause. For all the insistence that “men are by nature combative,” they don’t seem to know how to fight their own battles at work.
Maybe it’s time for men in tech to start learning from the women’s movement. Reading Doing IT: Women Working in Information Technology would be an excellent place to start.
ByZENtine 