How about “It’s a shitty job” as a reason, huh?

I get so sick of the “why women leave IT” arguments:

This conspicuous gender imbalance is caused by a long list of problems, according to advocates of women in IT, including a lack of female role models, a pervasive stereotype of IT professionals as unfashionable “nerdy men,” and workplace sexism.

(http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/3746501)

No one ever seems to make the “it’s a shitty job” argument. Why is that? Let’s break it down:

• Long hours sitting still in a room with poor environment controls (lighting, temperature, etc)
• You get to choose: you can get treated like dogshit by customers or coworkers, or maybe if you’re lucky, both
• Unless you’re in Silicon Valley, where failure is celebrated as innovation and the highest tier one can attain in life, you’re going to work really, really hard and probably only make a decent living.
• Hope you didn’t start late: anyone my age is a dinosaur and will have an increasingly hard time finding the “sexy” jobs.

If I sound bitter, it’s … well it’s because I am. But I also like to think that no one really will speak the uncomfortable truths about our industry. Women don’t enter into IT because it sucks. The “lack of female role models” thing is just another bullet-point of suckdom after you’ve already hit “why the fuck would I want to do that anyway”.

(The article gets better on page 2, best summarized as “stop lying to people that this job is ‘cool’ to obtain gender balance”, which I agree 100% with.)