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“How about women?” my correspondent asked.

Her question was in response to last week’s re-run, in which I said, “While discrimination based on race and ethnicity still happens (and is inexcusable) far more comes from distrusting people with different thought patterns than skin color.”

My response was an eloquent “Uh …”

Google “gender gap in IT” (or, self-referentially, “gender gap at Google”) and you’ll find plenty to chew on. This is current events, not a historical debate. If you work in IT, look around you. I suspect you’ll find fewer than 50% of your professional colleagues are women.

We can debate causes. As is true of so many effects, I suspect this one stems from multivariate causation.

Here’s one cause I’ve never seen discussed. I have no studies to back it up, just my own experience watching male colleagues and hearing them talking in unguarded moments, some mediated by one conversational lubricant or another.

What it is: For one reason or another, many males who landed in technical professions experienced high school as the place other guys got dates. Perhaps they chose a technical career path out of self-defense. Possibly social awkwardness is correlated with an engineering mindset. One way or another I think it’s fair to say that many male technical professionals aren’t entirely comfortable interacting with women on any level, not just a professional one.

I don’t mean this as a stereotype. Stereotypes are worse than wrong. They’re misleading.

What I’m talking about is a correlation. Statistical tendencies have statistical effects, which is what we’re dealing with here.

And as long as I’m digging myself a hole, I might as well make it deeper. Again, based on my unscientific information gathering there are two separate issues in play, not one: (1) The male technical folks I’m talking about are intimidated by interactions with attractive women, in particular when they feel an attraction and have absolutely no idea what to do about it; and (2) being egalitarian by instinct they feel guilty about not being attracted to female colleagues who they find less than pretty; that being the case they find these interactions intimidating as well.

Which leaves a very narrow range of female attractiveness these technical professionals don’t find intimidating.

Attractive women working in environments populated to significant extents by engineers who fit the above description will experience male colleagues who avoid them. Unattractive women working in environments populated by these self-same engineers will also experience male colleagues who avoid them.

Which makes for what appears to be a workplace that’s hostile to women. And sometimes it actually is hostile. Men don’t like to feel intimidated any more than women do; for many men introspection isn’t a popular pastime; as a result, when they feel intimidated they blame the person they’re intimidated by.

Leading to feelings of hostility.

What to do about this?

If you’re a manager there’s a limit to what you can do. You can coach any employee whose behavior crosses the line separating creation of discomfort from outright hostility. You must involve HR if anyone’s behavior crosses the next line. You personally should treat female and male colleagues as if they are all genderless, on the grounds that their gender has no bearing on their abilities.

If you’re a female technical professional, you have no professional obligation to put up with any of this. And yet, dealing with it effectively is, in most circumstances, a better career move than challenging it.

The secret is to convert yourself from a personal appearance to a person. You do this by approaching various male colleagues who seem to be avoiding you, starting a conversation about a professional topic — ideally one in which your colleague can offer you some help. As the source of the problem is that the colleague in question doesn’t know how to talk to you, you solve the problem for him by providing a topic.

And if you’re one of the offending males? First (please forgive me for being direct about this) pay attention to where your eyeballs are pointing. Look your female colleagues in the eye — about 40% of the time when you’re talking; 80% when you’re listening; off to the side the rest of the time.

Second, accept this as a fact: None of your female colleagues are having romantic thoughts about you. The odds are long they never will; longer if you avoid contact.

There remains that small coterie who “think” women have less aptitude for technical fields than men, often based on clap-trappy evolutionary pseudo-theories. If you’re one of them: I studied evolution at the graduate level for several years. Your theory?

It’s wrong.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Once upon a time there was a queen bee.

She enjoyed talking to her beekeeper, who, fortunately enough, enjoyed listening to her. She was fortunate, that is, because the beekeeper considered himself a poor conversationalist, and so was happy not to have to share the burden of finding interesting topics to talk about.

Queen Bee

And besides, there are lots of talking beekeepers around, but not so many talking bees, so he figured he’d take advantage of the opportunity while it lasted.

The beekeeper was in this way wise, but he wasn’t very bright. The evidence: The queen’s favorite topic was the land of milk and honey, and how she was going to lead the beekeeper there.

Finally the day came when the beekeeper couldn’t stand it anymore. “Let’s go!” he said to the queen, flushed with the enthusiasm that comes from a vision of a better tomorrow. “I don’t want to wait another day!”

So off they went to find the land of milk and honey.

Leaving behind a hive full of honey. And full of the worker bees who made the honey. Also all of the ingredients needed to make a new queen for the hive.

The moral of the story is, don’t be a queen bee CIO.

I ran across one of these characters not all that long ago. I had four one-hour conversations with him over the span of a couple of months. He was a visionary, talking in glowing terms about how the brilliant information technology he’d recently brought in and the new and even more brilliant information technology he was going to bring in soon that would transform the company.

Remarkably, in all of the time we spent together he never once mentioned anything about the department he “led,” what his plans for it were, where it needed to improve, or where it already excelled.

Unremarkably, nobody in the entire IT department could make a decision of any kind, with the possible exception of where to have lunch.

What causes an IT manager to become a queen bee? That’s for psychologists to diagnose, not workaday IT commentators. Or perhaps for budding ethologists. We could, I suppose, get them together to resurrect the pointless nature vs nurture debate, even though it was long ago resolved.

Bee it nature, nurture, or a combination of the two really doesn’t matter. A queen bee sits at the top of your IT hive, and you have to cope with her. Or him; unlike honey bee queens, both male and female CIOs can wear an apian crown.

So what you do if you report up to a queen bee CIO?

You could feed her/him royal jelly (pushing the metaphor to its limits, this of course means mastering the fine art of sucking up). This can work in the short term … queen bees do love hearing how brilliant they are … but it’s a bad habit to develop. Once this becomes your normal you’ll lose the habit of initiative and decisiveness that help you succeed in healthier environments.

And so you’ll find yourself seeking out queen bees to work for.

No thanks.

Then there’s the obvious solution: Leave. It’s the best general-purpose advice there is no matter which sort of bad manager you report to, because bad managers aren’t going to change — the attitudes and behavior that make them a bad manager are what, in their eyes, got them to where they are today.

So by all means, explore the world of opportunities that surrounds you.

But as you do, consider a different sort of departure.

As has been pointed out in this space from time to time, wise CIOs are starting to encourage what’s commonly called shadow IT — information technology that happens outside IT’s organizational boundaries.

Unwise CIOs still try to stomp it out, but fail.

Therein lies an opening you can exploit.

If there’s one thing you can be certain of, it’s that your corporate beekeepers will soon tire of the queen bee CIO’s tales of milk and honey. They want their milk and honey right now.

And if IT can’t deliver it, well, maybe shadow IT can.

With your help.

You will, of course, need to tread cautiously. But there’s a good chance your company has a director or three who have the budget and don’t care about obeying the IT governance process that’s been stymying them as they try to turn their own visions into business reality.

You know IT. You know the business (you do, don’t you?).

With finesse, you can be the person who actually does make IT happen.

Not a bad place to be when the CEO kicks the queen bee CIO out of the hive.

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