| [ |
music |
| |
The Geek Comedy Tour 3000 |
] |
The Age recently printed an article about women and the relative lack thereof in IT; why they rarely get into the field into the first place, and a bunch of anecdotes about how they don't get respect. But they didn't get into why...
As usual, I have theories.
1. The promotional methods used to try and entice girls into IT.
Now, these aren't necessarily that much different from the methods used to entice boys, but the material tends to have a very girl-appeal specific slant to them. It's all "IT isn't all just ugly geeky boys, there are some hotties too OMG! And you get to wear a suit and carry a laptop over your shoulder and give PowerPoint presentations! Wow! Glamour, world travel, money money money! Go for it girl!". Or, it's about how there's more to IT than assembly code, packet switching and filesystems. Do you see how this might engender prejudice in boys who would be kindly described as ugly and geeky, who distrust people who wear suits, and write jokes in assembly? Or the gamers who think they're like that? It's as if the motivation is that there's too many techie boys - though, the last I checked, they pay just as much HECS - so let's try and sell the course as if the students we actually want are the opposite of them.
2. Girls drifting into the "soft sciences" fields of IT.
"Oh, I think she's doing a thesis on baseline security models"
"Who?"
"That chick that failed OO, the one that cried in the tute because she couldn't understand abstract base classes"
"Oh, that dumb bitch. Figures"
Again, when you value being able to write self-modifying assembly code that plays "Happy Birthday" on the PC speaker, it's easy to disrespect the soft areas of IT. Technical skill for its own sake - masturbatory IT, if you will - needs no interface to real people, which is what these soft sciences basically provide. And while a dose of the real world will help one gain appreciation for the people who provide insulation from managers, clients, and other impossible-to-deal-with types, there's a disrespect that often lingers. For while those working in the soft areas of IT will help provide real-world meaning to what technical people do, they aren't really required for the mere execution of any particular task. If sufficiently skilled, a technical person who decides to act against the will of their company/family/government/school can, more-or-less, do anything. Being able to translate techspeak to marketingspeak won't get you inside police files, or let you change grades for fun and profit, or give you a root shell on the machine of a hated rival. Since girls tend toward areas of IT that are considered to imply less potency, and therefore, aren't respected as much by technical people, girls in an IT lecture theatre will tend to be profiled accordingly. This is unfortunately much easier because there are few girls overall, and therefore there are even fewer that contradict the stereotype, which ends up influencing future enrolments and the situation self-perpetuates. While there are many males who also study in soft areas of IT, the large overall number of males means that there are relatively too few to form stereotypes about males in soft IT. They're in the minority anyway.
3. Pussy Power Programming
We've all seen it. The clueless chick who got a perfect score on her programming assignment because of a promise - whether explicit or implicit, fulfilled or unfulfilled - that the lonely male who did the work for her would be in like Flynn afterward. Now, granted, there are relatively very few of these - maybe 1-3 in each class of a few hundred - but they stick in the memory of those who either did their own work - especially females - or, were exploited. These women tend to be very well qualified for IT sales, especially if they managed to pass rudimentary "This is a bit, this is a byte" type subjects. In such roles, they are omnipresent at pre-sale consultations, post-sales, the eye candy is put back in the box, never to be seen again. Of course, there are men who cheat on assignments too. Tonnes of them. However, these tend to either be group efforts - everyone works together, then everyone hands in the same assignment - or, helping a friend out who thought it was due next week, or, charity for the lazy. In any case, they don't involve deceptive exploitation of the helper, and especially not the exploitation of a lonely geek's willingness to do anything for the shadow of a chance of sex, which, strangely enough, doesn't sit well with other lonely geeks.
|
