Women's struggle for success in software development industry

¶ … women in the software development industry have to work harder as compared to men to achieve success. It has one source.

Laura Martin's (2002) article "Software Development Opens Doors for Women" advocates the software development industry as "absolutely loaded" with wonderful opportunities for women. She supports her arguments through interviews of twelve successful women working in the software development and related industries. However, where there are success stories, there are also conditions of limited opportunities for women in the industry as compared to men. In other words the door to opportunity does not open for women; it has to be pushed open by women as those that Martin interviewed in her article.

Objective Summary

Martin begins her article by identifying the changing roles of women in the information technology domain. She suggests that women have an increasingly larger role in the technological industry compared to the past when men were the driving force behind the industry. However, the road to women's participation in the technology world has not been smooth every step taken forward is a tribute to the strength and persevering quality of the women's character. Martin [2002] shows how each woman software developer interviewed put in hard work, ambition, dedication, training, and often sacrificed her personal life to achieve the success in her professional life. The author ends with a summary of all the right career moves women need to make such as hard work, getting good grades and getting valuable experience in the field, in order to attain success in the software industry.

Analysis

The article not only advocates the idealistic title of the article, but also identifies the characteristics of women that have led them to success in the software industry. The women interviewed by the author speak of success often at a cost of their personal lives. Furthermore the author also provides grounds for arguments that successes in the industry comes with much bias attitudes and discriminations and only if women can put aside their personal and emotional problems can they move forward in the industry. This fact is shown by the small number of women who have made it to the managerial level. Yet, consider the words of an application developer Lisa Dahilig, in CNA, who says "I can see that it's hard to get to the management level as a woman... But many do make it."

Hence, it can be said that although women are not furnished with the same variety of opportunities as men through hard work and aggressive moves, eventually female programmers attain success equivalent to if not more, than their male counterparts.

Conclusion

It can therefore be concluded that women programmers from Martin's [2002] interviews have achieved success in the software development domain with hard work, ambition, dedication, training and sacrifice of personal life. Furthermore, the opportunities they mention are still limited as compared to men despite their claims that the software development industry have "loads" of opportunities. How failure occurs has not yet been studied and if the actual thesis of the article is to be supported a continuation of the study should be made on a more pervasive basis.