Comments on: Women in tech/women near tech

By: Gail Carmichael

Gail Carmichael — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:33:50 +0000

I totally experienced this recently at the Ottawa Girl Geek Dinner!

(Written up on my blog: http://compscigail.blogspot.com/2009/09/first-official-girl-geek-dinner-in.html)

The “coders” made up a really small minority, and I didn’t even know our apparently famous guest speaker. It was still a great night, but I did feel a bit lost.

By: OrganizeFISH » Blog Archive » Women and Their Involvement with Technology

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:34:43 +0000

[...] I was following my links through various blogs the other day, I ran across “Women in tech/women near tech” on the Geek Feminism Blog written by Skud. Since deciding to major in Computer Science [...]

By: On women in tech, in Benin and back home in the States | subjectverbobject

On women in tech, in Benin and back home in the States | subjectverbobject — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:25:24 +0000

[...] been a bit of talk lately about the lack of women at TechChruch50, at tech conferences, and in the technology sphere in general*. A great deal of the commentary is women responding, â€œYes, of course thereâ€™s a problem,â€ and [...]

By: spz

spz — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:13:29 +0000

Avendya:

heh, you’re a physics geek, and thus by definition as geeky as it gets and stays polite :-P

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:26:44 +0000

Leigh, I have been writing XML as strings. I am deeply ashamed of this, but it WORKS.

Avendya, yes, there are absolutely double-whammy (triple? quadruple?) fields, where coding is only one facet of the marginalization of women.

Librarianship is… weird about computers. Deeply weird. I won’t bore you with the whole weird saga; suffice to say that it’s an environment where often, one’s colleagues both male and female marginalize one for being technologically-inclined.

By: Deb

Deb — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:17:27 +0000

For some situations, I think it is advantageous to be broad about “women in tech” because there are lots of places where support is needed at the not-writing-code-from-scratch level; women who are doing partly technical work that is being discounted precisely because women are doing it, male administrative staff being given more opportunities to learn new technical skills than their female counterparts and of course, (sadly) the garden variety sexism in the workplace exacerbated by a whopping male majority.

That doesn’t mean that at other times there is a need to be clear who you are looking for and what’s expected. Groups like Systers, Linux Chix, PHP Women, etc. make it pretty clear who should be there and what will be talked about.

I was going to include a long anecdote about my noisy punk band getting put onto female folk rock nights (disastrous, btw) but instead let me just say I think sometimes the “big tent” support of your peers based primarily on gender is great and that other times you really need the support of a much more specific group of peers.

By: Avendya

Avendya — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:02:11 +0000

In my code-for-science field (physics), we’re not any closer to parity than sysadmins. Academics physics departments are doing well when the gender ratio is 10:1. I celebrated when my department was 3:1. That’s… not terribly close to gender parity, and respectfully, I am not sure that library science and physics are that similar in the way they treat women.

(At my university, the CS department is considered much less problematic for female students than the physics department.)

By: Leigh Honeywell

Leigh Honeywell — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:38:35 +0000

Code-gratia-codis as you put it is also very often very ugly :)

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:10:15 +0000

This may connect up with what Jenett was saying above (with which I identify, as I am also in the weird in-between library-tech space). Code as a means to an end rather than code as an end in itself… is sometimes devalued in software communities.

I suspect without proof that we might be a lot closer to gender parity in code-as-means-to-end than in code-gratia-codis. (Ugh. Sorry for the ugly neologism.) Folks like Jenett and me aren’t exactly common, but we’re not completely uncommon either. We may tend to be less visible, partly because code-as-means-to-end is often (I say self-deprecatingly) really ugly code, partly because it’s rarely public code, partly because we don’t think of ourselves as developers. (Me? I am a librarian. Sure, I sling Python and XSLT. Still a librarian.)

By: Pam

Pam — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:52:35 +0000

We have a problem in the UK with organisers and policy-makers not realising that events concerning “women in engineering” may attract very few actual women engineers. Holding something on a weekday means that people working in the industry have to decide whether this event is worth taking a day off work. They can’t do that very often. It is all too easy for event organisers to fail to pick up that the people who are sent from engineering firms are usually HR people and not engineers. There may be other people who work in office posts concerning policy, but who are not and usually never have been working engineers.

Yes, some HR people do really understand the issues, and some event organisers have a background in the sector, and some of the office types try to really understand people in their area, but we need the voices of real current women engineers to be heard. The Women’s Engineering Society tries to collect up information and send representatives who can speak about real experiences.