Iyow - in your own words

Annalee Newitz has been fighting the good fight on Slashdot this week.

Having myself worked in computer sys admin/programming for the last eight years, I can totally empathize with what she’s saying about wanting to stick it out and fight for a place in tech society, despite rude remarks about intelligence, looks, or belonging. For techie women such as myself in the workplace, it’s not so much that there are blatant comments, but the general feeling of “one of these things is not like the other,” and that thing is you. And the cultural/communications differences between genders ain’t no joke.

Having had both well-meaning bosses and coworkers and not-so-well-meaning (all almost always male), my strategy nowadays is to disregard whether I am irritating or intimidating someone when asking a question or demonstrating some bit of technical prowess. There’s no winning in general with people’s egos, especially guy people’s egos. Is this turning me into a robot? I’m not objective enough to say, but I’m curiously starting to view everything in the world as a binary choice….

Nevertheless, the empowerment of following one’s curiosity outweighs all of this.

On a more optimistic note, Guy Kawasaki’s blurb about women in the workforce and the accompanying Economist article give me hope. If there’s to be equality in the world at all, there must be equality in the home – and the marketplace.