human
Why are there so few women in information technology? So many software gurus are the same race, gender, and socioeconomic demographic. Why don't women succeed in IT?
assistant
I don’t have a very long and in-depth response for this question, but I’ll do my best to answer it. First of all, I agree that the demographics in software development in the US is extremely skewed towards white males. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is an implicit or explicit preference among hiring managers for white men. A person doesn’t have to consciously have a preference for white men, but if hiring managers are homogenous themselves, they might not consider the possibility of hiring women, which is problematic. I think this is a question that should be up to employers to answer. But another answer is that there is a lot of stereotyping of what software gurus are supposed to look like, and often those stereotypes are white men. This can have the effect of making it much easier for people to identify who is the software guru, and it discourages women from coming forward.