Skirts and Ladders 'Computing is too important to be left to men' — Karen Spärck Jones

“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” – Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, is one of those books that seems to be everywhere and yet barely anyone I know has read it. I've been doing a lot of walking lately (in preparation for the 20 mile London Night Hike, please donate if you can!), and decided to grab the audiobook of Outliers to entertain me.

One of the more prolific statements that he makes is around the 10,000 rule: the concept that the key to success is practicing for at least 10,000 hours. Gladwell claims that it's true for everyone, from the violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music, to chess players, to Bill Gates. If you believe his theory, then you also have to agree with corollary. It doesn't matter if you're naturally a genius in the area - the 10,000 hours is still required to be successful.

Unsurprisingly, this all made me think about gender demographics in technology. Remind me, why don't we have many women?

They got lost, when they didn't get their 10,000 hours of practice during the 10 years of schooling that their male counterparts did. They were too busy being told to take English instead of Maths and trying to fit in with their peers.

They got lost, when they went to university for 4 years and ended up being put in the role of organiser and presenter and report writer instead of doing technical work during projects.

They got lost, when they took that career break to raise children and missed thousands of hours of technical and management experience.

The first two are things to be remedied, things that have been identified time and time again, and have a million and one projects in the works in the hopes of addressing them.

The last issue is something we have to learn to deal with. Women bear children; this is way things have always been and will remain for a very, very long time. The choice of whether to stay at home with your children is a personal one, but the key word is choice. It should be a fair choice, where there is no undue bias because your job doesn't suffer and neither do your children. Technology is important, but so is the next generation.

But now we know that taking that break automatically puts you behind the competition, because it doesn't matter how good your company's maternity policies are and it doesn't matter how good you are. You will still lose the advantage because you have to make up that time somehow, and that can only be done by working harder and longer, which new mothers usually aren't in the market for. So it will take longer to make that time up. The determined ones will make it, as they should, and the ones that decide it's not that important to them, won't.

My gut instinct tells me that career breaks will continue to be taken by women. I don't think this is an issue that needs to be tackled on that front.

Instead, the shoe has moved to the other foot. As men campaign for better paternity rights and start taking longer breaks themselves, will we ever reach a point where the playing field evens out across the genders?