[TriLUG] The biggest deterrent for women in tech

[Brandon Van Every]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 4:43 PM, Reginald Reed <reginald.reed at gmail.com>wrote:

> I can confidently say as a manager for
> many year in corporate high tech companies that there are MANY
> individuals doing the exact same jobs that have vastly different pay.


I have wondered if women, as a group, have a tendency to be less tough,
pushy, or a blowhard when negotiating or otherwise securing their own
interests.  That so many have been culturally conditioned to be "nice,"
even though the American business world clearly doesn't value that.  So
they get stepped on, taken advantage of, and I'm not sure it's a first
order effect of being women.  Rather, a second order effect of being taught
to be nice, because they were girls.  You shouldn't be nice to people about
your pay, you should negotiate what you can get.  A lot of these
"discrimination" issues could be that some people are much better at being
pushy than others, and so they climb those alpha male / female resource
pyramids better than other people do.  Why is the world unjust?  Well,
because some people will step all over you to get what they want, and
evolution has rewarded that strategy to some extent.  Cooperation is good
too, but in practice it tends to be cooperation amongst a group of equals,
domimated by some leader.  I find it unfortunate that so much economic
value is tied up in such persons, but I guess the physical world is telling
us it does have inherent value.  Who are we to argue with the patterns of
history, all those kings and queens?

I've certainly met browbeating women, so I know that individuals of that
stripe do exist.  I'm just hazarding a guess that there are statistically
fewer of them.

Are more karate and knife fighting classes for girls the answer?  More
handgun training?  Idle speculation.  Maybe more sports is enough.
 Although, when I look at how the neighborhood kids play nowadays, I don't
see any gender problem.  They're all doing the same things and at their
present age (10 and below) they're not physically differentiated yet.


Cheers,
Brandon