Thank you for your comment.

I do not think that by saying that it’s longer to reach a decision with many women in the room is sexist. Based on my observations, women are less likely to take a decision that will hurt someone, whereas men think more heuristically. It doesn’t make women less apt to make decisions, they’ll just keep exploring possibilities until they find something that will not hurt anyone, which may take longer than I have the patience for.

Because I, unlike most women I met so far, think heuristically most of the time, it is easier for me to work with men, who mostly think in this manner as well. I remember once doing a project with a few men and a woman. The meeting took us 3 hours instead of 1, and we didn’t even finish discussing the first point on the list. Men remained silent most of the time, only the woman kept talking. I don’t want to generalize, but this is only one of many examples. It did happen with a man also, on a single occasion. I will not work with that man again. But maybe he’ll be a good teammate for that woman

As for giving orders, I do not say that women are more submissive. I say that as a woman, men seem to listen to me and do as I say more often than women. I noticed the “female-ordering-female” issue first when I was a teenager and could no longer take orders from my mother. I moved out at the age of 17 because of that. I think that this is normal gender relationship because I heard this from other women as well.

If I said some nonsense up there it’s probably because it’s past 1 am.

To be honest, in portions of your blog post, you have expressed a very sexist viewpoint about women. And, as is typical with sexism, it is also a common stereotype. This quote comes from your post, and it feels to me to be an unfair, broad characterization of all women:

I personally don’t like working with other women. Whenever there’s more than one woman in the room, decisions take ages. I also find it easier to give orders to a man, because a woman is naturally resistant when orders come from another woman. At least so I witnessed.

Those are sexist comments. The danger with statements like that is the chill factor it casts on all women. So, what that particular statement does is discourages women from expressing their opinions and viewpoints, and encourages them to follow orders in order to speed things up. To make matters worse, it also encourages others to agree, and then to raise this issue during a discussion that they think is taking too long, reminding people it’s not a valid discussion, but rather “just what it’s like working with women.”

Sexist statements end up adding to unwelcoming environments for women. It could be part of a complex set of reasons that discourage women to get involved. Surely, it’s not difficult to understand “not feeling welcome or accepted for who you are” is a disincentive to participate.

I have 25+ years as a woman in the Information Technology field. I have worked my way up from an entry level developer, to Director of Advanced Application Development at the University of Nebraska. I left my job at the University to freelance with open source solutions.

The open source community can be very sexist. There are times that remind me of when I started in the industry where we were more likely asked to “get some coffee” than we were to “lead the meeting.” The sexism does not only come from men. Women can sometimes be their own worst enemies, focusing on “keeping everyone equal”, instead of “celebrating the sucess of other women.”

Conversely, the open source community can be extremely welcoming of women. Thankfully, communities that are more welcoming of women are *also* more welcoming of diversity, in general. In the end, diverse communities help ensure software fitting for a diverse world. Since building great software is a goal of open source communities, focusing on ensuring a friendly, welcoming community is very important.

Don’t worry that I missed your overall point. We are each individually and completely responsible for our own success. Sexism does not hold individual women down. It holds everyone down.

Kind regards – and again – thank you for stating a different point of view!
Amy

The problem with taking time off to have a family is the dead space in your resume/CV. If you do it BEFORE your degree, it doesn’t leave a space, especially if it is just one year. Taking off multiple years in the middle can result in serious carrer damages.

My wife took a few years off from her accounting job to raise our sons. When she tried to go back it was nigh impossible to get anybody to take her seriously. She had to start from the bottom. She had to start at the bottom. Accounting isn’t nearly as fluid as IT is so you can only imagine how hard it would be in IT.

I imagine I would have had similar troubles had I decided to do the Mr. Mom thing. I have seen it happen to other guys so I am pretty sure that this is not a gender issue but rather a perception issue. Employeers should look past such gaps and view them as significant job training. I know I have had to babysit some fellow employees.

Judging by some of the above posts, it seems that things do happen. So you might be onto something when you talk about the “bad apple”. It seems that no matter how hard we work to prevent something, it still happens. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have emergency rooms in hospitals.

So we can’t prevent all of it (we should still try), we should have a real support system when unfortunate things do happen. We should advertise the support system, so that women would know where to turn to, and not be ashamed to do so even for little things.

Gender discrimination isn’t limited to hiring decisions. It’s the guys in the room who are paying more attention to your body than your ideas.

It’s the developer who asserts that decisions are harder to make if there’s more than one woman in the room.

It’s the manager who decides that he can’t hire a woman because his existing team would be too rough on her.

It’s a CouchDB evangelist using porn in a presentation, and dismissing women who object as “prudes” or “no fun”.

I’m a 40-year-old male who’s working in IT for 20 years. It’s been my privilege to work with and report to many capable and successful women in this field.

To imply that the playing field is anywhere close to level for men and women in IT does not strike me as an accurate representation of reality on the ground.

Regards,
–Duane Roelands

I like that you mention “if you can’t man up & take the heat, stay out of the kitchen”. Not all women are as thick-skinned as I am. And we shouldn’t require them to be. If some discrimination does occur, everybody should be supportive, and not let her handle it on her own.

Just because you haven’t been the recipient of the discrimination or seen it happen doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

And just because it exists and happens doesn’t mean it’s really that prevalent. The problem is the “bad apple” syndrome. If you have a perfectly beautiful bowl of apples, but one is rotten and molding .. are you going to remember the good apples or the moldy one?

Same thing with IT, discrimination for the most part really isn’t a problem… except for the the few nasty incidents (see the posts above for some examples)

But what are people going to remember? The bad of course. My issue is that in many cases NOTHING IS DONE and the recipients of the discrimination don’t realize that this IS an isolated incident.

As for personal experiences – here’s one for you. When I was first starting in the PHP world I was helping out on a PEAR package. I was writing some new features … at midnight… and the package lead simple had to push the new stuff into the release, even though I told him it wasn’t ready.

End result? Some very broken code. The next morning after some sleep I woke up and fixed the issues. Later that day I received a rather scathing email about how girls shouldn’t code because they don’t know what they’re doing and how I would never be a professional programmer etc.

Luckily I had people I could talk to who reassured me that this was just “a bad apple” and to ignore idiots. I was lucky, I had perspective and a support system. But as a newcomer to open source with no one to offer that perspective what would a woman see? Would she bother to stay involved with that kind of overreaction?

The issue isn’t “does it happen” because it does. It’s not even “does it happen often” – doesn’t matter – the problem is how do we as IT react to the problem.

I don’t know that most guys have had their asses groped, been told how sexy their undergarments are, been regaled with the way they are fantasized about, have had “scatgirls.com” be a part of their “initiation” (who knows about that part), or when being seen at technical conferences been asked what web cam website they represent.

However, I wear these experiences with pride knowing that I can be a trailblazer and hopefully inspire young women to come through and succeed. I know that the women that blazed the way so I can be in the workplace went through much worse.

The vast majority of men I have dealt with in this industry have been amazing, and kind, and gentlemanly. However, if I have dealt with it I’m not a anomaly.

Just saying we could be a little more sensitive to our sisters.