Female Web Designers

 

I’ve been in the computer industry since 1969.

When I was first on my own as a programmer in the early 19070s, there were a lot of women working in the industry. I can remember women salesmen and a lot of marketing and support people.

I can remember going to a worldwide meeting about the project management software, I’d developed, Artemis, in perhaps 1980 and nearly half of the delegates were female. One of the reasons, was that many had come to work with Artemis, because they could type and a large number were ex-secretarial staff. A few years ago, I went to a similar meeting and the meeting was perhaps eighty to ninety percent male.

So what you are seeing in a lack of female designers is just a reflection of the computer industry in general, which is increasingly more and more male-oriented. I was at an exhibition last week and nearly all the women were there as decoration.

So what has gone wrong?

I’m married to a barrister. When she started practising in the late 1970s, there were few women lawyers. Now the proportion is probably fifty percent at least and rising, as older men retire to be replaced by younger women. Accountancy, medicine and other professions are going the same way, with increasing numbers of female entrants.

I will argue that men and women have different attitudes. Men are obsessive, as when everyone was living in caves, that man had to go and kill that buffalo otherwise everybody starved to death. The women, had to stay behind multi-tasking and trying to keep everything together. This obsession is better suited to the computer industry and the multi-tasking is much better for the law, accountancy and medicine.

As an example of this, my wife does a different case and sometimes two every day. She argues to a settlement, but rarely does she have to sort out some of the mind-bending bugs and glitches that I have to. She just can’t understand, why sometimes I’ll spend a whole month fighting one of Microsoft’s bugs. Why don’t I complain? She just comes to a compromise with the judge and the other lawyers.

This obsession also explains why there are very few female serial killers.