Foot in the Door, Mouse in Hand: Low-Income Women, Short-Term Job Training Programs, and IT Careers

 “Foot in the Door, Mouse in Hand: Low-Income Women, Short-Term Job Training Programs, and IT Careers” by Karen Chapple highlights the dynamic of women working in the IT workplace. She starts the article by talking about between 1990 and 2000, 440,000 women entered the IT workforce, while only 100,000 computer science graduates with bachelor’s or master’s sere women. This sets off how there is an uneven number between IT workers and those who were actually college-graduated. Chapple goes on to describe that many positions in the IT workforce are entry level with low wages, and that the people filling these positions are coming from short-term training programs or vocational schools. Those who had computer science degrees were less likely to take these jobs due to the wages. She goes on to describe a survey that took place upon ninety-three entry-level IT workers who had come from six different training programs in the Washington DC, New York City, and San Francisco areas. In this article, success in IT is identified as wage progress, career progress, and ambition to progress. Chapple puts names to those with different levels of success. Those with high success were referred to as “rising stars” and “the second lives”; those with low success were named “the complacent” and “the creamers”; and those with no success were called “the discouraged” and “the unlucky”. Out of the women, 20% were at no success, 12% were at low success, and 12% were at high success. It was surprising to see that those with no success were at the lowest number. A term that Chapple refers to often throughout her article is “soft skills”, which when I looked up is defined as “personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people”. As Chapple points out that many of the IT positions that these program graduates achieve include a lot of customer support, it is easy to see why “soft skills” were an important factor for these workers. Many companies said that, in entry-level positions, soft skills were an important factor in hiring. Furthermore, technical skills factored in, although ironically, in speaking to most companies, they always came second to soft skills. Some women believed that technical skills were easy to achieve with low levels of schooling, while others believed that there was way more training required in order to receive adequate technical skills. When firms were interviewed, only one-third described a college degree as necessary. This further develops Chapple’s analysis that entry-level positions for IT required little previous education. However, although job placement for entry-level IT positions is high, there is a drawback: rising and progress. While many can receive these positions, the chances of making it up the ladder and progressing in the career is rare. This makes sense because in their training programs, they truly were only trained with basic skills to get their foot in the door with IT jobs. Reading this article left me with one question: What does this mean for women with actual bachelor’s (or higher) in computer science? I myself have entered university with hopes to pursue a degree in computer science (my main reason for being in this FIG, in fact). What does career placement look like for me, since it seems so easy now in the modern world?