ong hours and a macho culture are driving women out of IT companies, according to a UK study on the issue.

The ?Women in IT? study, conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and industry trade body Intellect, was launched to discover why there was a six per cent decline in the number of women employed in IT between 1997 and 2005.

About half of the 43 women surveyed had left the IT industry and another 13 said they were thinking of leaving.

Most of the women were 45 or older and had held senior positions such as software developers, programmers and analysts for IT consultants, managers and directors.

The women all identified the work-life balance, a male-dominated networked environment and industry culture as the main reasons why the sector is unattractive to women.

The research also found that there are very few opportunities for part-time work in the IT industry, especially at a senior level.

Many of the women surveyed said they would also be more inclined to stay if there was less pressure to work long hours in a full-time role.

?The UK IT industry is world-leading software developers, programmers and analysts for IT consultants, managers and directors but it won?t stay that way for long if we continue to haemorrhage valuable, skilled women professionals from the sector,? said Intellect?s director general John Higgins.

I surmise, based on some close hand experience, that the same culture could occur in some companies? IT departments and that the same kind of warning about loss of talent, losing your best people, would also apply.

Guys you may think it?s funny, always being the wit with your slightly risqu? off colour jokes around the lone girl programmer, but it must get tiring after awhile.

If you have any thoughts on the subject let me know.

Of course I won?t use any names.

Official Office of National Statistics (ONS) figures show that there has been a decline in the number of women employed in the IT industry to 21 per cent in2005 from 27 per cent in 1997.

Media master Marshall McLuhan statement that the content of a new medium of communication is always imagined to be another older medium has a lot of validity for the way in which we read on the Internet. Cinema was thought to be a way of showing plays.

Before that writing was seen as a means of capturing an oral tradition.

What then is the content of the Internet?

This is one of the questions posed in James O?Donnell?s book ?Avatars of the Word?, which I?m just reading and which sparked off these thoughts.

An avatar is defined as a manifestation in which some abstract and powerful force takes palpable shape for human perception.

A major chunk of the world is currently going online every day to read vast amounts of news stories, press releases, blogs, e-mails, and watch or listen to clips.

Quite a lot of content is being transposed from ?hardcopy? form, for which it was designed, to digital form.

But how many people are willing to read an entire book online, or download it to their hard drive for future reference?

Not a lot I would bet. I can barely stand getting through a three page feature.

The dream of a virtual library is still valid however, if only for the confidence in knowing that anytime I need to check some fact, some quote, I can go online and ensure that my memory didn?t fail me (it usually has).

The Internet will supplement not supplant libraries and books and reading, O?Donnell argues. Is there a format now developing for the Web, just as cinema evolved, along with television and radio?

I guess we are still in the development stage, as the news media and others make the adjustments.

The short quick forms of e-mails and blogs are the signal of what?s developing.

Perhaps we are reverting to the imagined age of discourse and debate as outlined in Plato?s renditions of Socrates? dialogues, he suggests.

Although the book is now about seven years old it still has a lot of resonance.

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