Womenomics

The world of womenomics can be quite confusing. Two reports one from the UK and one from the USA caught my eye.

In Britain it appears that the average earnings of black women are now 6% higher than that of their white counterparts. This is a reversal of last years figures when white women earned more than 7% more. The Equality and Human Rights Commission said that one explanation for these results was that 50% of black women live in central London where the average pay is higher and many black women work in health and social services where pay has been rising.

This report I juxtaposed with an article in the New York Times under the banner "What has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?" It seems that less than 10% of the recent computer science graduates are women compared with the mid 1980's when women made up 40% of the students who majored in computer systems. One professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin theorised that it has been the rise in the subculture of action gaming which is the cause. There was the sense that computers were "boys" toys and that true girls didn't play with computers. There is also of course the pejorative term of "nerd" or "geek."

I was recently taken to task for talking about the "ghettoisation" of some occupations; these two reports reminded me of that. Health and social services are "womanly" occupations and computer science is not.