John Linton ......at the risk of sounding 'sexist' I would have thought it was obvious.
I read this earlier this morning:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/27/addressing-the-lack-of-women-leading-emerging-tech/?mod=rss_WSJBlog&mod=
and, yet again, wondered what sort of politically correct background such writers and the people they use as sources come from. I have very little knowledge of genetics but the little I have read has always portrayed the male of the human species as the more aggressive and 'adventurous' of the two genders throughout human history and that 'genetic' inheritance was then emphasised by the various societal arrangements that ensued and ensue up to the current day. This is obvious to the 'naked eye' in that males are usually taller with more muscle bulk and ar generally much stronger - as anyone can see by observing the next 50 people walking past them on any vantage point in the world.
Although two of Exetel's first five 'employees' were females (and indeed one was a founder) Exetel overwhelmingly employed males for the first five years of its existence (what could be considered the whole of its start up phase as a sort of technology company). Why was this? Pretty much because we were an engineering based company and engineers are predominantly male. Along the way we have had two brilliant female engineers but they didn't stay with us very long both leaving for the 'comfort' and much higher salaries of huge organisations. So, before we started to grow our corporate sales operations the only females Exetel employed were in accounts (just as engineering faculties have overwhelming levels of male students, accounting and finance faculties are overwhelmingly female.This is likely to be the case in any tech start up and therefore answers the spurious question of why are there relatively few female founders in start up tech companies - duh - because tech is not a female's primary choice of career direction.
Nowadays Exetel has around 30% female personnel in Australia and around 33% of the Sri Lankan personnel are female with both those ratios growing each six months. This 'sudden' change has been largely caused by our hirings for both corporate and residential sales operations over the past eighteen months but it is not very likely that our engineering and network operations will hire female engineers in any number in the future - simply based on the 'supply'. There aren't many female senior managers that I come across in our day to day business dealings with the odd exception every year or so so the 'established' tech start ups seem even less to provide senior/top management career paths for females than companies just starting up. If I was to look into the future I wouldn't be surprised if Exetel had more female managers than male managers in the future and its just as likely that a female will hold the top position in Exetel as it is for a male - depending on what choices the current females make about children and related issues - and how wealthy the people they choose to marry/partner with are. That is, for most of our female employees far enough in the future to be largely immaterial, generally speaking,
If I was to look further into the future, assuming that Exetel has a future in these uncertain times, I would think that we would have close to a greater number of female managers as male managers as time goes by - and almost certainly more female employees than male employees. This would be partly due to the fact that we predominantly hire females at the moment and that we hire them in to sales positions where they will progress more quickly to develop people management and risk taking skills than a person hired in to an engineering position would usually be expected to do. I would think there was an even better chance that the future very top management of Exetel would be more likely to be female as it would be male based on intellectual ability and people management skills. However, I would think the same circumstances would mitigate against that being the case for Exetel as it does for every other organisation around the world - the fact that all females have a career option of motherhood which, even the very brightest and career driven seem to most often prefer.
I am only surprised that any one is surprised that 500,000 years of genetic and societal conditioning could change in less than a century by some PC maunderings of dilettantes.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
ABN 350 979 865 46