[TriLUG] The biggest deterrent for women in tech

[Brandon Van Every]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 5:31 PM, John Vaughters <jvaughters04 at yahoo.com>wrote:

> So let's throw on gender tolerance differences. How many Women do you know
> that want to fight mosquitos while going in after a Hurricane to get the
> Electrical Grid back up?
>

What do the Girl Scouts have to say about that?  I don't think rural women
have any problem with that.  But rural areas usually have more conservative
cultural values, less education, and less exposure to different ways of
life, simply by virtue of not having as many people per square mile.

Chris Rock had a joke that men wouldn't do anything except to impress
women.  They'd live in a cardboard box if they could... but that doesn't
impress women.  There were some more parts to the joke but that's the jist
of it.


>
>  But on the aggressive talk, How many Women have the desire to conquer,
> which to me is critical in Technical tasks. The mind set that I am going to
> solve this issue or die trying.


That Women in FOSS report highlighted the problem of the tech community
being biased towards these conquest / self-discovery / self-proving
attitudes, as opposed to cooperative or collaborative attitudes where women
on average might do better.  It can't be a total dichotomy as obviously,
programmers have to cooperate on open source projects larger than a certain
size.  But still, I don't know how someone contributes effectively except
by rolling up one's sleeves and just doing it.  I think all we can ever do
is walk the walk and lead by example, because quite often people are not
getting paid and one doesn't have hire / fire authority over anybody.


>
> I will say this, It is not because Men don't want Women in the field, When
> I was in college the ratio of women to men in Engineering was a deterrent
> for Men.
>

Yep.  It's such an unpleasant geek-fest that I really only had one foot in
CS in college, instead of being fully committed to it.  It didn't change
until I saw some non-geeky role models.  It has somewhat affected my career.


>
>  It's a mystery, and I am confident that we will all be paying for more
> wonderful studies to figure it out and still not have the answers.
>

Is it so mysterious?  Or is it the reality that Life has a number of
choices, and any given society will only channel itself into a subset of
those choices at any given time.


Cheers,
Brandon