sexist

Posted Sep 29, 2007 11:02 UTC (Sat) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]

Let's take a look at it. My personal interests are musically related in some emulation projects like UADE and sidplay2. Hey, music! Oh no, it's the beep-beep chips from 80s computers. I've heard a rumour that there's maybe one female person that listens to kohina.com feed.

Perl. Should be a no-brainer? Well, nothing prevents women to join ircnet #Perl and indeed there have been a couple who have actually been perl programmers. But they are usually beginner-intermediate level and don't stick around. Maybe because they try to strike up social chatter and it just drives all the introverted guys nuts, and there usually aren't other women to talk to, so it just doesn't work out, see? I realize I'm strongly simplifying this but clearly, #Perl isn't one of the hottest places of the universe to go find women.

At work. More Perl. We are something like 15 guys and there's one female project manager. When we are hiring, not a single woman even send us her resume. It's common for project managers and HR people to be women, but for technical positions, they don't even apply. I guess that pool is quite dry as well. In fact, historically we once got a female's resume but her perl skills were not very good based on the coding sample she sent, so we didn't end up hiring her. Maybe that was a bad decision. Had I known the rarity of women at that time, I perhaps ought to have even interviewed her.

So let's see: my interest fields happen to be quite noninteresting for women, and my work looks like the same, so clearly I don't meet many women. Bravo, sir, you somehow deduced all that.

When I talk about this to my girlfriend ("oh my god, he has got a girlfriend!!!"), she usually says something like this:

* it's "unfair" that technical positions require you to invest your whole life in tech. She doesn't personally care about tech in that way, and doesn't want to. Me, I am most definitely a techie to heart.

* she would want to be very competent from the outset, like learn the subject matter on school first. I say, there aren't schools for most of the stuff, you just have to pick it up as you go, but it is uncomfortable an idea to her.

Well, that isn't very helpful, but it does illuminate how different are the worlds that we live in.