Men, Women, and Writing Better Code

The wsj.com piece on how men and women differ in terms of their programming style is both interesting and supports some of the less controversial gender stereotypes. Thus we ignore this at our peril. The heart of the message is that we need more females in the IT industry, if we want to raise the bar in terms of the IT industry’s service record. Unfortunately the IT industry is somewhat macho in that ‘cleverness’ is revered more so that ‘helpfulness’.

Attracting females into the IT industry is the challenge. The hierarchical and often dysfunctional
nature of IT teams make it difficult to ‘graft’ female staff to existing teams, unless they comply with the idiosyncrasies of the alpha techie. In most cases this means joining females need to act like a male and suppress their real characters, to the detriment of the team.

IT leaders need to address this for the sake of the industry, their teams and most importantly
their customers.