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Over the past half century, women have achieved success in traditionally male preserves, such as financial and legal services and boardrooms. They have not so far reached a half share of high earning jobs, but things are heading that way. And yet looking at one major and growing sector, the trend seems to be going the wrong way. One study six years ago showed that the number of females employed in the field of Computing had fallen from a promising 40% 24 years ago to below one third by 2000, and the trend has continued to be downwards. There may be several different causes for the situation, but it is possible that the growth of Internet business is generating the type of online jobs that might enable ladies to work from home, and this may be the solution to reversing this trend.

Many will put this down to being a straightforward gender contrast. It’s the same with chess. That is a conceptual game that needs no physical prowess only possessed by men, and yet there are hardly any ladies involved in the game. It’s an analytical variety of game, undertaken in a black-and-white, articificial world, that is not appealing to the female mind. Maybe Information Technology is in the same kind of area, a binary world of 0’s and 1’s, numerical concepts that are unappealing to the more imaginative and intuitive talents of women.

On the other hand, many may deem that these theories of inborn gender differences don’t hold water. Despite this, it’s a fact that Information Technology specialists have a reputation for being ‘geeks’, socially incompetent, withdrawn men more driven by assembling computer components in their backrooms than in football, socialising or the usual interests of their contemporaries. Such people are understandably unappealing to the fair sex.

However, things began with much promise for women in Information Technology, when a female American rear admiral named Grace Hopper worked on some of the first electronic computers in the mid twentieth century and helped to write one of the two first high level languages, COBOL, and this went on to be the major software writing tool for business applications right up to the start of Internet business in the 1990s.

This proves that females obviously possess the ability to pursue a successful career in IT. Maybe there is one major question that may discourage them. The speed of change in Information Technology continues to be fast, and with the appearance of Internet business and online jobs it shows no sign of abating. Ladies who need to stop working for a significant period to bring up kids, may find that when they start looking again for work, their computing skillset has become out of date, and they will need to get training in new skills. It is tough enough for men, or for ladies who continue working, to keep up to date with all the latest technologies.

That is where the openings created by online jobs could help with this problem. They allow women to work from home while combining an Internet business with bringing up kids. They enable people to decide on their own working hours, so that it’s still possible to take the children to school and pick them up again. And this chance to eliminate the break in a working life also allows women to maintain skills in the latest technologies.

Of course, online jobs are not only open to ladies; a lot of men have decided to work from home as well. And yet it is possible that, through Internet business opportunities in addition to fostering a more congenial culture for ladies in the computer industry generally, the number of lady computer people may soon attain the ideal of 50%.