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ICT professionals: generation and gender - their ethical attitudes.

Richard Lucas, Information Age

04/01/2008 20:27:25

This article reports on the findings of two of these areas; namely generation and gender.

The article considers generations and gender as groups and describes the cumulative answers of these groups. However, there are many different and differing replies within these groups; every person who replied to our survey had their own distinct set of answers. Therefore, the question that all ICT professionals should ask themselves is: how much do these common collective responses reflect my views?

Generation The idea of our population being divided into generations has become common recently, so Table 1 shows the comparison between the commonly used generation categories for the survey responses and for the general population. As we shall see later, the survey shows some important differences between Gen Y and the other groups. Here we see that Gen Y is as representative in our survey of the ICT industry as it is in the general population.

Population Representation Generation ICT General Population Depression and WW II Babies 4.3% 7.6% (3.5% still working) Baby Boomers (1946 - 1954) 13.3% 20.1% Generation Jones (1955 - 1964) 28.0% 23.0% Generation X (1965 - 1980) 43.5% 34.6% Generation Y (1981 - 1999) 11.0% 10.6%

Summary of generation differences

Awareness: The survey showed that all generations were equally aware of how often unethical behaviour occurs. However, three differences were apparent:

1. Gen Y differed slightly in their selection of the important ethical problems; 2. Gen Y thought that ethical regulations ought to be less important; and 3. job security made a difference to their reaction to requests to behave unethically.

There was no significant difference across the generations on their perception of how often unethical behaviour occurs. Every generation thought that unethical behaviour occurred too often.

However, when we asked the respondents to identify the most important ethical issues, the generations had an interesting difference. While all the generations agreed on the number one problem -- compromising quality to meet deadlines -- only Gen Y differed on the rest of the top five problems. They included copyright and malware in their list, and excluded conflict of interest and false promises.

Regulation of ethics: Three questions were asked on whether the generations differed in their views of the regulation of ethics in the ICT industry, eg. via a code of ethics. 1. the importance of regulation; 2. whether the industry ought to self-regulate; and 3. whether the industry ought to be regulated by an external body.

Did age make any difference to these questions? While all the other generations agreed generally on how important ethical regulation ought to be, Gen Y thought that ethical regulation ought to be less important. Also all generations agreed that they ought to be able to self-regulate. However, only Gen Y thought that the industry ought not to be externally regulated.

Taking action: Four questions were asked about how people took action in ethical situations: 1. did ICT professionals say that they would speak up over an unethical act; 2. did job security make a difference to their reaction to requests to behave unethically; 3. were they ever asked to behave unethically; and 4. if they were asked, did they do what they were asked.

On question 1, there was no significant difference between generations when asked if they had ever spoken up over an unethical act: all generations chose yes over no. It was only with Gen Y that the difference was at all close; they were less likely to say yes, but still the majority did so. The other generations had a wide difference between yes and no.

Question 2 focused on the importance of job security in determining the way people responded, and the replies showed that there was a significant difference across the generations when asked if job security made a difference to their reaction to requests to behave unethically. Only Gen Y chose yes over no. Even then, with Gen Y the difference was close: the yes responses just outnumbered the no. The other generations had a wide difference between yes and no.

Given that Gen Y has been in the workforce least, and presumably has less work experience, it seems reasonable to surmise that this lesser amount of work experience implies less job security, and would make them less confident about knowing of, and standing up for, their beliefs.

Questions 3 and 4 were combined as one two-part question: had they ever been asked to behave unethically; and if so, did they do what was asked? There was no significant difference between generations when asked if they did what they were asked: all generations chose yes over no; only with Gen Y was the difference close. The other generations had a wide difference between yes and no. While all generations recognised that they were being asked to do something unethical, most people did what they were asked to do, and clearly they were acting against their values. So, why should Gen Y be less likely to do what they were asked?

Ethics education One question was about how much formal ethics education the respondents had received. We speculated that Gen Y would report having more ethics education, our reasons being: 1. more and more of the workforce have some form of formal qualification; 2. three-quarters of ICT professionals say that they have ICT specific qualifications; and 3. the overwhelming majority of Australian universities teaching ICT are accredited by the ACS, which has ethics education as a compulsory part of this accreditation.

Therefore, we expected that the latest generation of ICT professionals (Gen Y) would have received more ethics education than the other groups, but the opposite occurred; more of the Depression - WWII babies had received ethics education.

There were significant differences between the generations. Three generations (Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y) responded with fewer yes than no answers. Depression - WWII Babies and Gen Jones had a greater number of yes than no replies. Gen Y did not report having the most ethics education. They did have more than the previous generation, Gen X, but were in the middle (3rd of 5) of all the generations. This is both a very surprising and worrying result. More of the latest generation ought to be getting more ethical education, but they are not.

Gender There is a great disparity in the balance between males and females in the ICT industry, compared with other occupations and with society at large. The ABS figures show there are 84% males and 16% females in the ICT industry. The survey figures reflected this, with respondents being 83.5% males and 15.7% females. We wondered whether gender made any difference to the way our survey was answered, and could any conclusions be drawn from any differences.

Summary of gender differences: According to the survey there are five important differences between males and females: 1. when the ethical problems were grouped according to moral notions, males were more balanced preferring duty and rights equally, and females preferred rights; 2. males believe ethical regulations in their workplace are significantly less important than females do; 3. males believe ethical regulations in their workplace ought to be significantly less important than females do; 4. females more strongly think that the industry ought to be externally regulated; and 5. significantly more females than males reported more ethics education.

A space limitation precludes all feedback on gender, but a summary of findings on ethics education is worth inclusion.

Ethics education While there was a statistically significant difference between the genders when it came to their education/training about ethics, females reported more ethics education (53.6%) compared to males (43.6%), neither was nearly as high as it ought to be.

This is an especially poor result considering that three-quarters of the respondents claim to have ICT specific qualifications, and since all but one of the 37 Australian universities is ACS accredited, and this accreditation includes a compulsory ethics module. There needs to be a much more detailed investigation into the structure, content, and delivery of ethics education to the ICT-professional-in-training.

Concluding comments This survey was part of a joint project between the ACS and CAPPE to investigate integrity systems and regulation in the ICT industry, and we thought it important to make ACS members aware of some of these results. The final report is being prepared, and more detailed analysis and findings should be available when it is finished.

Many of the results are a cause for concern, and all ICT professionals ought to be concerned that the prevalence of ethical problems is so widely known, and yet these same problems seem to go unaddressed. Please reflect on these findings and see if you are typical of these results; or if you are at odds with the most common answers supplied by your generation or gender. Then take these results and consider why they should be so; and, more importantly, what can be done about them - by you, the profession, and the industry.

Dr. Richard Lucas MACS, Mike Bowern MACS, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE)