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Paul Rudnick, who wrote the screenplay for The Stepford Wives, noted that "men only evolve with a gun at their head." The implication is that men are more stubborn and less prone to evolutionary advances than women.
On the TV series NCIS, medical examiner Donald "Ducky" Mallard notes that poison has been the "weapon of choice of women for centuries." The implication is that women don't like to get their hands dirty when "disposing of a problem," so to speak.
Wherever we cast our attention, the assumptions surrounding gender are part of the data flow that runs perniciously under the radar screen of how we perceive the world. Like it or not, gender is an easily observable and frequently behavior-influencing phenomenon. On various levels in the contemporary IT shop, your sex does matter.
This month's CIO Habitat delves into the issue of gender and the role gender plays in the IT workplace, particularly the extent to which sex correlates with generating high-value IT outcomes for business. Through the eyes of practitioners, we examine the state of gender consciousness in the IT industry. We contacted 140 companies (65 large and 75 midsized firms) in 17 vertical markets. Among our large-company respondents, 57% are women; among midmarket respondents, 35% are women.
More than any other Habitat topic we've researched, gender issues in IT forced us to really look at the empirical data. All respondents expressed the sentiment that sex shouldn't matter, but the numbers reveal a different story. Indeed, we all wish we lived in a world no longer driven by biology and instead ruled by rationality and results. But the data indicates we don't -- at least not yet.
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