But wait, there's more!
It just keeps coming up, and it's kind of freaking me out.
Because I just don't see this. Am I blind? Does this only happen to attractive young women? (I was young once, but... well, I was young once.)
I mean, I've certainly seen real sexual harrassment, and been the target of it, and been on the winning side in a lawsuit about it, but it never had anything to do with my technical ability. (Indeed, at my very first job I dealt with a middle manager who couldn't keep his hands off me, but at the same time he never had an issue with my technical ability, even though it *was* my first job out of college (and not with a finished degree, either). I was a better programmer than he was, and he was okay with that.)
I have never, not ever, run into a "you can't be good at X" or "you shouldn't do X" or stunned silence in a game or any such thing.
Maybe because it's because I'm so amazingly awesome that it was pointless to try to deny my awesomeness based merely on my gender, but that seems somehow unlikely. Maybe it's happened to me but I've just been oblivious, but given the egregious examples other people report, that seems unlikely too. Maybe my nerdiness simply transcends gender; that seems most plausible.
Personally...
Alias on 2007-10-16T07:11:24
... I prefer the "Men are more distributed than women" version.
It happily explains both why most of the best chefs and most of the prison population is male.
Re:Personally...
wirebird on 2007-10-16T16:50:53
Yeah, that makes sense to me, too. Because just for instance, adolescent girls seldom go through that obsessive "larval stage" that boys so often do, and things like that. (I did. I disassembled the Color Computer ROM, by hand. Wrote it out on paper, since I couldn't afford a printer (or even a disassembler). Transcendent nerdery, I'm telling ya.)
I think it's a waste of time to try to recruit an equal number of girls into IT. Just don't treat the ones that *are* nerds like they're aliens, and it'll be fine.
nerd
slanning on 2007-10-16T08:04:27
Maybe my nerdiness simply transcends gender; that seems most plausible.
I agree. :} I'd guess you don't say things like "hehe Jack Sparrow is hot" in online forums very often, either.
Re:nerd
wirebird on 2007-10-16T17:04:29
A fair cop.
Though I dunno, maybe if my formative online years hadn't been spent in the times when girls *didn't* exist on the Intenet (well, BBS) I might be more inclined to that sort of thing. ... Nah.
duh
rjbs on 2007-10-16T12:57:34
You'd be able to understand this if you weren't a GIRL.
Re:duh
wirebird on 2007-10-16T17:05:33
I first read this as "You'd be able to understand if you were really a GIRL," which actually works too...
