Comments on: Quick hit: the gender binary fractal in geekdom

By: Stoft

Stoft — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:17:51 +0000

It’s not clearcut but in my workplace and considering the people I went to uni with there is a tendency for women to head for project management and testing whereas men tend more towards development. This is just a guestimate and by no means an actual head count, it may be that I just happen to know a lot of women who ended up in testing/project management (and I know quite a few men who ended up there as well now that I think about it).

By: lsblakk

lsblakk — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:40:58 +0000

My first thought is how women in bands are more likely to play bass than be the drummer. which doesn’t mean there aren’t kick-ass female drummers, but it’s totally expected when they play bass. I certainly count this among the many reasons I love to play drums in Guitar Hero, as well as wanting to learn to play real drums someday.

In my work environment, I am in a more technical group where we have 2 women including me which is I think the highest saturation to be found in the teams of the engineering section in our company. We spend a lot of time working with all OSes on various real and virtual machines. I find that the deeper level of hardware set-up is more picked up on by the males – so knowing that particular chipset serial number, or obscure filesystem is being used in the nether reaches of a mobile phone. There’s not an obviously female counter to this, but I’m often called the “outreach” person who is a bridge between our group and the other teams – so maybe that makes communication itself more female? I don’t believe this to be true since many people can and do communicate well, but it’s probably an offshoot of the “women write documentation” phenomenon where I’m often trying to make sure that we leave a clear understanding of what we’ve done behind us for the next folks who will try to do our jobs.

By: koipond

koipond — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:10:54 +0000

Sticking with HonoriaG. In my geekdom I’ve come across far more women who like LARPing as opposed to Table Top RPGs. I haven’t had a lot of conversations as to why that is, it could be the fact that creepy smelly basements are usually involved, but there are a couple of groups in Toronto where women play a large part in the playing.

However, as also was mentioned they don’t spent a lot of time with the Plot team again for a lot of the reasons stated.

By: Bene

Bene — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:17:06 +0000

The film industry tends to fall along these lines too: men direct, women produce. A more balanced but still skewed line happens in television. I’m not sure why this is–some combination of more opportunities/less fiscal responsibility, maybe, or perhaps it’s more subtle.

By: Eivind

Eivind — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:10:34 +0000

True, gender-stereotypes aren’t static, but change gradually over time. They tend to drift rather than jump though, for natural reasons.

It wasn’t inevitable that biology should end up being “girly”, agreeed. But it’s also not random, nor close to it.

The path, for drifting from taking care of children, sick and elderly, and to become, for example, a veterinarian or a doctor, isn’t -that- convoluted.

By: Mary

Mary — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:32:35 +0000

You do need to consider feedback effects though. I don’t think, for example, that it was inevitable that biology was always going to be “girl science”, the rationalisations of it being feminine (say, “it’s to do with life! and so women who are caring, will care!”) are post hoc: explaining the presence/preponderance of women, not attempting to predict it before they arrived. Women weren’t supposed to be able to do science at all.

By: Eivind

Eivind — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:18:08 +0000

Not only is it fractal, but the patterns tend to be aligned with traditional gender-stereotypes.

For example, you could say that technology-companies have few women overall, and that’d be true. But if you look closer, you notice that the ones who -are- there, tend to cluster around the more traditional female roles. We’re a tech-company, and at first glance appear not-so-bad, with around 35% females.

But most of them are in design or human resources. Amonth the ~third of the employees who are programmers, there’s -1- female. (and around 10 males)

I’m thus thinking the gender-gap is worse than it may appear, because numbers like “only 35% female students in natural sciences”, disguise the fact that even those that are there, tend to gravitate towards the stuff that’s more traditionally female, say biology rather than physics, user-interface-design rather than device-drivers.

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:19:08 +0000

Yeah, HTML fail. Besides, I know you from LinuxChix, silly!

By: Mary

Mary — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:52:01 +0000

I can’t tell from your comment whether you appreciate this, so just to be clear, I’m describing what I see as the gender binary played out in computer science, I’m not endorsing it.

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:45:56 +0000

Librarianship skews heavily female. Within librarianship, administration and systems librarianship skew male.