winscape 2214

Hey! A whole paragraph with which I completely agree!!

This sounds to me like an example of exactly the bad atbreastudes I thought you were saying aren't a factor -- men buttuming that women aren't technically competent, or can be asked to do stuff that men wouldn't be asked to do. Of course the person with the bad atbreastude here is a manager and not technical staff. Maybe that's it.

Which is exactly what seems to me to be happening in your story above -- though perhaps it's potential that's being undervalued rather than accomplishment.

Yes. This is a real problem with hiring to meet diversity goals, no question. The sad part is that, as you say, it makes it very difficult for people who *are* qualified, but who belong to the group perceived as getting special favors, to have any credibility. It's also not a pleasant thing to wonder, in moments of self-doubt, whether one was hired just to meet a quota goal.

What, you want me to do some *WORK* here?! Okay, not very funny. I just spent a fairly frustrating half hour trying to track down these half-remembered studies, and-or to find other references that might support what I've been saying, without much success. Clearly my literature-searching skills in this area need work. "Stay tuned", maybe. It would also be interesting to have some reasonably authoritative numbers on percentage of women, both in CS education programs and in jobs. I didn't find those either. I'll look more another time.

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Granted. We need numbers. I will try to look for some and report back.

I don't remember having problems like this with the few technical women I've known in computing jobs (both industry and academic). My experience goes back to about 1977, and the sample size in the first few years .... Not a lot of female decision-makers, if I remember right.

Women I know in academic computing seem .... Mostly they seem like the guys, except that when we get together there is a tendency to, hm, make loveist jokes? tell stories we might not tell the guys? Something like that. I'm not capturing this well, but maybe the idea is getting through -- I imagine it's pretty similar any time you have a situation in which one group is under-represented, and members of the under-represented group get together. "Hey, there are TWO of us here!"

The worst problem I've had with another woman in the workplace was an older secretary who seemed to resent the presence of a younger woman with a higher-status higher-paying job. But she had problems with some of the men too, so maybe it wasn't a gender thing.

What I'm talking about here is .... A mishmash of half-remembered articles on gender differences in communication, unsupported by any personal experience. Maybe it's not like that in technical discussions, since as you say, at some point there are objective criteria for judging the value of (at least some) ideas.

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And then they switch from experimental to theoretical physics? Half a :-), maybe.

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-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.