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This is just the kind of message that helps to perpetuate this myth. I have always had a fascination for IT. I love computers. There are many women here in the university who think the same. Is this man perpetuating this myth. I have met many who are just as anti-tech as many women. Many of them use computers but can do no more than use the essential tools. Ask a women using the same machine and she is likely to know far more about what the software can do. Our secretaries know more about word, Powerpoint, Excel etc than most of the men. They just don't hold long conversations about it.
Jane Hemsley, UK

To a certain extent, it could be a man's world, but like James Brown said "It wouldn't be nothing without a woman or a girl." There are many things that man has created, but it takes a woman to perfect it. Like it has been said "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world."
Leilani Kelly, United States

To those who claim that women are just not logically minded- I am so, so tired of hearing this. I am female, I am not very good at getting along with people, I am very good at math and logic. In my three years of college, I have always been the quickest in my maths and science classes. Do you want to call me a freak of nature, to ignore my existence? To point to studies which show that women are at present less well educated in these areas than men, and to interpret this as meaning that women cannot learn them, is a horrifying misuse of information. Concerning the lack of women in IT- although we have every pretence of coeducation, a girl is likely to have had different experiences than a boy. Last year, working for a charity, I found out that I am capable of hammering nails and putting up drywall. Beforehand, I hadn't consciously thought that I was incapable of these things, it just hadn't occurred to me that they were possibilities. I think that similarly, it might not occur to many women that working with computers are something they can learn to do.
Erika, USA

All those males out there that would like to believe that being male makes them better at certain things are victims of social conditioning. I got my computer engineering degree from a developing nation and at least 50% of the class were female. Not to mention that most of them also got better grades.
Nina, USA

I have just read Asif Khan's comments that the only reason men create software or anything else is because they can't have babies - what absolute rubbish. If this is the case then why do women create so many things - they can have babies. What drivel.
Jason Drummond, UK

No IT is not a man's world. It's just a world currently dominated by men. It doesn't have to be like this forever and it may not be. In any case who cares? We're not women's rivals and they are not ours. We're supposed to be partners.
Amo, Kenya

It is NOT a man's world. It is place for proficiency and not for gender. It is easy to not discuss the educational system hiding its lack of opportunity for women around the world.
Lou, Brazil

While this British study may have some bearing on that country it is not borne out by the US market. Last year the number two best selling game software was "Barbie" here in the states, outselling Quake 2 by a margin 3 to 1. Perhaps these researchers think girls might use computers more often if they were painted pretty colors or the mouse was covered in pink fur? Patronizing nonsense. There is no problem, still no doubt the academic thought police will find some new way to patronize women and denigrate men.
Pat Morrison, USA

Games, the world's largest use of IT, is dominated by violent and macho role playing. Although office software is essentially neutral that doesn't help in industries such as Telecoms where women are such a rare commodity. Women are often suggested to have superior communication skills to men which implies that focussing on the internet might help redress the IT gender imbalance.
Iain Hart, Switzerland

My daughters and nieces and I all love computer games which have "pirates and battles" etc. We love war games and would be very turned off by games of "balloons and cute animals" unless one can hunt the animals and pop the balloons! I am not against such happy games and if it gets young women to enter the IT world, fine, but don't characterise us all by such limp material. Yuck.
Elaine Supkis, USA

I work in IT, and there are quite a few women that I work with.....it seems very pro-women.
Kathryn Richards, ENGLAND

I read that mans fascination with IT with 'creating' software (and anything else actually) at not being able to have babies. The male of the species compensates by building machines. It's quite feasible when you think about it, whatever men strive to build and fabricate can never have the subtlety and beauty of a new born baby. Asif Khan, UK

I think it is because a boy will try hard to understand how a thing works. You'll probably see more men doing DIY than women. Girls don't seem to find the need to dismantle something to find out how it works. Obviously there are exceptions with both genders.
Alan Nolan-Davies, United Kingdom

No, of course IT isn't a man's world, there are many excellent computer professionals who also happen to be y-chromasomally challenged. My own view on why women are under represented in the industry, is that the people who develop the necessary skills tend to be shy, socially unskilled people who get more satisfaction talking to a piece of silicon than they do their friends. More men fall into this category and hence they are more represented. On the same lines, girls are more socially integrated/constrained than boys. They are less likely to be the kind of adventure-seeking loners that thrive with computers. It is not the attitude of the teachers or the design of computer games. It is simply that girls would rather talk to each other than a computer. I believe also that even in these enlightened times, girls are less career orientated than boys. Boys are much more likely to start meaningfully planning for a career than girls and are more likely to abandon the 'dream jobs' (footballer, astronaut, vet, etc) and look for where the real opportunities lie.
Gordon Lewis, UK

IT will only be "a man's world" if we let it. My 5 year old daughter has been using computers since she could reach a keyboard and mouse and has no problems at all. This question does not come up about reading or writing. All the books I've seen have been written for either boys or girls. It's about time that educational software takes the hint.
James E Fisher, UK

IT is everyone's world. There is no reason at all to have been owned by one group or another. It is by sharing the use, the development and management of it throughout that it serves us all. Men may be better at single-tasking and women multi-tasking, which may mean that long programs may be chosen to be written by men, but women are just as capable. We need the different styles to ensure that what is created and the working atmosphere is rich.
John Foxworthy-Bowers, Scotland

No, IT is not just for men, they need us, women, to explain to them how to answer the phone and to not put the paper in the fax machine upside down
Gerda de Haan, the Netherlands

It's more subtle. Boys are expected (by society at large) to know. It's technology. In fact they are no more likely to know than the girls. Because they are EXPECTED to know, the boys are more afraid to say that they don't understand than the girls. Result is some of the boys do worse because they won't ask or reveal their ignorance. I have observed this behaviour whilst teaching IT related aspects of Accountancy to undergraduates. It is, of course, only subjective observations.
Ian Landen, UK

Yes, a lot of software is written by men for men but I feel that women are just as competent as men in the workplace. My boss is a woman!
Eamonn Byrne, Ireland

Unfortunately the practical logical nature of this discipline tends to lead to male orientated dominance - go to any University IT school and you'll this is VERY clear! Michael Chapman, UK

I do think that the so called "IT" is a mans world, having worked in the industry for 4 years and having run a PC support department for a large communications company most of that time, I had to fight extremly hard to get any recognition from the chaps. Once I had achieved this they took me quite seriously, but I probably still had to work twice as hard to keep ahead. Its a on going struggle but I have to admit I loved the job and found the work increadably satisifying and would go through it again. For ladies everywhere you can do it just as well if not better than they can, but like all professional jobs you need to fight that bit harder than the men. But remember there's approx 30 guys to 1 girl so there loads of bottoms to watch.
Kathy Phillips, England

I have worked in IT for the past 2.5 years - I left university with a BA in French and Spanish, never having touched a PC, and joined an IT consultancy. I am now an Internet consultant and skilled in several disciplines. IT a man's world? I earn more than my IT manager husband...
Louise Tolman, England

I must reluctantly agree, but only because IT and related products are marketed this way. For instance when was the last time you saw a review for a playstation game in a woman's magazine? Yet all the mainstream men's magazines will have some IT-oriented content.
Jenny Sykes, UK

It is but shouldn't be. Education needs to begin at a very young age. If girls were allowed to play with aeroplanes and at pirates then all might be equal. As it stands boys don't want to play with 'Honeybears', just as girls don't want to play at pirates.
Ian Watson, England

I have plenty of female friends who are as computer-literate as me (I am a Computer Science student). However, I also know a lot of women who make up stupid excuses about "computers not liking them" and "I don't do computers" which doesn't really go very far in reinforcing this argument for women as a whole. I never hear such things from men.
Stuart Ford, Wales, UK

All women I know are intimidated by computers and only reluctantly use them when it is absolutely necessary. As for implying that all the programs are designed for men - are you telling me that MS Word is male orientated??? The fundamental problem is that women are not as good at grasping technology as men.
Andrew, UK

Most people use MS and Lotus applications on their computers. There are no kings or care bears. If some people find such packages easier than others, well, that's life.
Kevin, England

IT seems to me - based on my own and friends' work experience to be one of the areas in which women are already achieving a measure of equality. The study as described in the story was irrelevant to the question as it seems to have been more a test of what kind of key words work better with boys and girls than of how good the kids are with IT.
Andy Rooney, UK

The men would like to think that it is. I have now been in the IT industry for 19 years. During that time I have managed to become an executive within my company. However I believe I only achieved it by having to be better than my male counter-parts. I have never noticed any difference between male and females ability, it' only a male perception. The most chauvinistic area within the IT industry are those that work in telecommunications.
Gail Osborne, UK

It is no different to the situation that occurs in the traditional school curriculum. Boys out-perform girls in maths and science because of expectations. If there is an expectation that you can do well at something, you are more likely to be shown how to do it properly and you are thus more likely to be better at it. Girls do much better in single-sex schools, or in co-educational schools which introduce programs of positive encouragement.
Siobhan Williams, USA

I work in the heart of London's IT - the city and the men to women ratio is about 98% men. I have no real explanation for this other than computing has been looked upon as an engineering trade which as history show's mainly male! Once again men close rank to protect their own.
Marc Holman, UK

There are lots of reasons why the IT industry is male dominated. Few if any of them are directly related to IT itself. Prior to about 1980, boys did more technical subjects at school (craft and sciences) whilst girls did more art and humanities. With the advent of new teaching methods, enlightened teachers and most recently the National Curriculum the balance has shifted, but even today, when given the option, boys still take a higher proportion of technical subjects at GCSE than girls. Although not explicitly stated, these studies give a better path into IT (or engineering, or any other technical career) than arts and humanities. Many if not all companies monitor their intake into different functions as a proportion of the applications by gender, race, age, etc., etc. If there were inconsistencies they would soon be highlighted. The fact is that from an early age girls are pre-conditioned away from technical interests. I don't know why, or how to fix it, it just is. In fact, careers traditionally (and still) dominated by females tend to be the heaviest users of IT facilities, so this proves female adaptability to the environment. SO WHY BLAME THE IT INDUSTRY?
Keith Lomax, UK

Perhaps on the level of the example you provide gender bias is significant but of the computer scientists I know as many if not more are women and the skills necessary to succeed at tasks such as HTML are not gender specific. In fact women's skill with design places them at an advantage in many cases.
Peter Clift, USA

Men are better equipped to deal with IT, due to the fact that men tend to be more logically inclined, and women more artistically inclined. Also, software tends to be targeted at young men, because they tend to be the greater users of PC's at that age.
Jason Thomas, England

It is quite a leap to conclude from children's preferences in games that computers are biased toward males. Most computer software used by adults is gender-neutral. A word processor, spreadsheet, statistics program, e-mail program, or database doesn't care about the user's gender. (Some of them, in fact, were originally designed by and for women. Word processors, for instance, were designed for office typists, who were predominantly female.)
James Castro, USA

The images on the software have very little to do with why men perform better than women. I think men are naturally more comfortable with a computer for longer periods of time than women. When you interact with a computer, it is totally submissive. The computer obeys your commands. I think the boys in the experiment performed better because they were fascinated with the idea that they pushed a button and it did what they expected.
Ryan, USA

Women have very good communication skills but when I observe them a surprisingly high proportion of those skills seem to be non-verbal. Women tend to issue imprecise or "fuzzy" orders to computers and then complain that the computer "didn't know what they meant". The problem seems to be that computers are very simple machines, totally devoid of intuition or personality, which require simple, precise orders. Men appear to be better suited to this situation. Even the Graphic Interface or "GUI" like Windows which was designed to help with this problem requires a degree of spatial modeling that women tend to find difficult. That's it. It's the way it is.
Steve Goodall, UK

Of course it isn't. It is one of the few ways where a woman can advance without academic qualifications... through practical experience. Also, women make excellent programmers as well... just think of Ada Lovelace. I am a grandmother now in her late fifties, I didn't use a computer until my late forties. I have just started doing a PhD looking at Religion and the Internet... after spending the last three years getting a degree here in Lampeter... IT is for ALL.. !!
Jen Cairns, UK

As a computer professional of over 30 years and I have worked for many years in the UK. I can categorically state that IT is skewed towards men. However, some of the best programmers I have had working for me have been women. More of a concern is the age discrimination issue in the IT world and the UK in particular.
Richard,Columbus, Ohio USA

If women had designed more of the computer interfaces, I suspect they would be easier to use. Men are more likely to create complex systems where simple ones would do. In my explorations, I have found that the personal web pages designed by women are more creative, and more likely to have been designed so that other people can use them. Men need to "prove" their mental superiority by showing off their IT knowledge. Women are less likely to let this interfere with the design of a system.
Chad Brown, USA

Maybe they approach computing just as most women approach driving. I have never heard a woman say they had fun driving around like I do or most men do.
Ranganath Ghanta, USA

It has been proved in a recent study, I forget where, that males think in a more object oriented way where as females think in a language orientated way. It has been proved that the male and female brainwork in different ways - the male brain is more suited to computing than the female brain.
Nick Donnelly, UK

Who would make the tea and coffee if there were no women in IT?
Chris Haxton, Australia

Well, IT is men's world in the same sense as this civilization is men's civilization. Fact that boys are better than girls in playing computer games is a proof only of the fact that boys are more interested in the content of the games (usually violence, killing and destroying). This has nothing to do with the possibility to use the media on which a game is programmed. In fact, nothing but presumptions of teachers, parents and surrounding should stop the girls to be as good as boys, and even better, in this field.
Olga Timcenko, Denmark

Why is it when boys are doing well in something it seems that they are put down for doing so, but when girls over achieve the boys they are glorified.
Jonathan Williams, UK

Does it ever occur that women simply aren't as interested in IT as much as men? As long as there is equality of opportunity, and I believe there is, then let men and women choose their own vocation. It is ridiculous to expect every profession to have a mix of men, women, whites, blacks, able-bodied, disabled which is exactly representative of the population at large. This seems to be what the PC Militia are striving for. Why?
Alex Roebuck, England

No way I love computers and I am not a man. It may be that it is unintentionally marketed at males.
Tracy Rice, Australia

I work in the IT industry and within our regional sales office, here in Manchester, all 3 positions of authority here are by women, and this is very similar through out our whole company. Our account management with various suppliers, such as IBM and HP are positions held by women too.
Nick Weston, England

What politically correct nonsense! Anybody can use a computer, be they a man or a woman, so long as they have the strength of will to do so. There are lots of women here at Cambridge University Engineering Tripos course who have a good time computing.
Peter Mash, UK

As a women computer programmer and Maths graduate, I would say that the lack of female presence in the workplace indicates more of a cultural bias in education and society than any lack in ability.
Wisp, US

This is utter rubbish. There are surely just as many product female product designers as male, and in any case, at some point in the production of a new product, a female will be involved. Also, over recent years I have noticed an increasing number of females looking at various computer games. If they were not able to use them effectively and with ease, then surely this would not be the case. Of course the girls are going to respond better to a game that they are enjoying, in the same way that the boys would have.
Kris, UK

If anyone can show me which aspects of Word or Excel are not 'Gender Neutral', I'd be very interested. Finding that primary school girls are bored by typical video games has no bearing on whether women can succeed in IT. It does explain why so few women enter IT in the first place though, because many may have been turned off at an early age.
Andrew Moore, UK

What a load of patronising twaddle! I hope the women are feeling suitably insulted at the insinuation that they can't cope with 'nasty' mechanical objects and need nice fluffy-wuffy animals to identify with a problem. Please tell me how mechanical means of transport (the example of male biased game characters) are not gender neutral?
The fact is that IT, or any other occupation, is gender neutral - only people's pre-conceived attitudes (their own and other people's) make them otherwise. The characters in both versions of the test game were also gender neutral (although abstract characters would have given a better comparison).
The real problem is that parents and society impose gender conditioning on everyone from birth. There is no way that a completely neutral environment could be produced because the psychology of a person will always produce some form of bias based on conditioned or learnt preferences. It may manifest itself by gender in this example but it could just as easily be by race or another aspect of the children's background.
This study was obviously carried out by people who wouldn't stand a chance in the IT industry as they wouldn't know a logical analysis of a problem if it walked up and slapped them in the face!!
Joe B, UK

It is, but it does not have to be. I am doing a computing degree course, and our first year was 200 students strong, with just 6 of them being girls. After this 2 of the girls dropped out because a computing course was not what they expected.
Julian Fort, England

The area of computer hacking, getting over excited about processor speeds, operating systems etc is a man's world, there aren't many female geeks. In the professional world, corporate programming, consulting the male to female ratio is more even.
Brian O'Keefe, UK

The only reason that women are causing a stir is because they want to poke their beaks in everything. Reality proves that men are more technical and scientific than females, and since IT is generally a technical area most girls DO feel intimidated by something they can't comprehend.
Richard Williams, England

I don't think IT is a man's world (any more)... it's just that until recently, I feel that women were dissuaded from the technical side of the computer industry and pushed more into sales and admin because of their natural organisational abilities.
Girls showing technical ability are now being allowed to develop their skills, and we are finally finding women in higher positions within the computer industry. And about time too!
Stephanie J Lewis, United Kingdom

Computing comes naturally to a surprisingly few people. Many older people find computers alien and intimidating. Since most software is written by men, it is hardly surprising that males relate to it better. If this is a problem for females, then I would suggest that females need to start writing software in greater numbers. But people are adaptable. Anyone who is willing to stick with computing can master it. If anyone, male or female, allows a few setbacks to turn them off on computers, they are doing THEMSELVES a great disservice and shouldn't blame anyone else for their failures.
Thomas Threlkeld, USA

At the 'games' end of the IT business males are the main customers. The games that are available simply do not seem to attract females which I have never really understood. I don't think females pop out of the womb genetically attracted to 'honey bears' any more than males are automatically destined to like football.
It may be that in those early years when computer familiarisation is down to computer games, there is simply less to attract females. Rather than going crazy with political correctness, I think software manufacturers should start filling this gap in the market rather than re-write everything so it turns off both males and females.
Roy Matthews, England

I often get surprised reactions to me knowing anything at all about computers, and some people don't even believe me. I think that the teaching methods, tradition and women/girls themselves thinking they know less are the most important reasons why less women/girls than men/boys know anything about and use computers. What I have learned about the subject I have learned myself with almost no help whatsoever except from my own family, and most teaching methods I have seen are mostly worthless and even I who already know a little couldn't learn from them.
Victoria, Sweden

But only because most computer programs are written by men for men. Men do have a tendency to want to see how things work (normally by taking something apart and then not being able to put it back together) but that's probably nurture not nature. Women now have the perfect opportunity to help with the "humanisation" of IT and lift it out of its supergeek reputation.
Andrew

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