Slashdot Mirror
Girls Don't Want To Be Geeks
Silas writes "According to a new study by the American Association of University Women, highlighted in this AP article, 'Girls have the ability to learn and use computers, but they are turned off by technical careers that they view as full of geeky guys'. The study blames the general sentiment on a gender imbalance in access to computers, and on social pressures that steer girls away from technology. What say you, women of the Slashdot population?" Stand up and shout on this one, ladies. I think that it takes a special breed of person to be attracted to this line of work, not necessarily a specific gender. Tell us what you think.
it can't be social pressures steering girls away from technology, because frankly, social pressures steer GUYS away from technology too! I mean, really, football is a lot more popular than chess club, and the social pressure is always on in school to perform athletically. It's no different for girls than it is for us guys.
What's your damage, Heather?
Why is it that people always feel that everything has to fit according to statistics or all is not well. Gender imbalance reminds me a lot of the so called Digital Divide...lots of liberal middle class whites who feel that the poor underclass must be forced to be as technically inclined as they are. Frankly, I'm black and I have lived amongst and known black people all my life, and being computer savvy is not high on the average black person's to-do list. No amount of government intervention is going to turn the average poor black person into some cybersurfing, net junkie simply to balance some statistic chart.
Back to the topic at hand, why is it that people feel the need to try to push girls into technical careers? From my experience most females including the ones that are good at Math (both my last two girlfriends got A's in Calculus II but one's an English major while the other is studying criminal justice) do not like technical fields. Frankly the crap about gender imbalance to access computers is a load of bull, this isn't the fifties when women couldn't eat without a man supporting them...any woman worth her salt can get a job and buy a PC or go to the library. The last time I checked the neither CompUSA nor BestBuy was discriminating according to sex. Also, the article describes negative social pressure for women to get into technology, but fails to mention that until the Internet boom of a few short years ago there was negative social pressure for men to get into technology as well. I remember being teased and taunted for being a computer geek while in school and even when I grew older I was still looked upon by others with disdain, off course being uninterested in sports probably didn't help this.
PS: I am very tired of self righteous people who want to mold the world in their own image. Women don't like technical fields, so what? Men don't flock towards positions in elder care, nursing or child care yet I don't see articles bemoaning this.
A friend sent me an article once - I think it may have even been posted on /. - about why a lot of girls don't become programmers. It offered up the notion that most girls are reared not to obsess over how and why things work but, rather, over their social relationships.
In an era when it is cooler than ever before to be a dork-guy, when guys who run internet startups are sought after for their bank accounts and their geeky sensuality :), I'm afraid it is still not cool to be a geeky chick. I think this owes itself at least in part to the fact that there are currently so few (relatively speaking).
The geek-chick bandwagon does not yet exist, so it is hard for even those who desire to immerse themselves in all-things-geeky to jump on...
Girls, ladies, women, chicks, babes, broads, pieces-o'-ass or whatever you want to call them are taught to nurture relationships. Doing so inhibits their ability to sit in front of a computer all day and pore over code or read /. A lot of women don't see overclocking a 1 GHz Thunderbird in mineral oil or soddering or disassembling some piece of electronic equipment, rewiring it, and then reassembling it or sitting in front of a computer screen for hours and hours a day as valid, socially acceptable ways to spend their time. For many women, it is a better use of time to spend time with friends, talk, position themselves in a career where they can work with people, rear their children, or involve themselves in charity work. (Don't get me wrong; these are all noble things.)
Moreover, in an effort to support their social relationships, girls (and the eventual women they become) learn they are supposed to worry about grooming, going out, shopping for the latest trends, decorating their homes, hosting dinner parties, caring for their kids (even in a two-career family), and so on.
I know this is fairly incoherent, and I apologize... I wish I were expressing myself better... because I am very passionate about this issue. I am a chick, and I am a dork, and I am proud to be both.
To sum up that which I have spent several paragraphs babbling about: It's still not cool to be a geek-chick. I hope one day it will be, as I am one of the few, the proud, the sexy :) who aspires to be one. :)
-heidiporn :)
heidi
Act One: Computergrrrl meets the patriarchy
Computergrrrl has been a geek of many stripes for most of her life. About 2 yrs ago, she decided to actually pursue computer programming at school. She went, saw and conquered, and with her freshly-minted diploma in hand, landed a job at an internet startup. Her job description was titled "junior programmer". The immediate reality, however, was different. This company made two hires in the same week, both fresh grads; one was computergrrrl, the other was a boy who we'll call Rob (well, that's his name). Rob was plopped down at a desk in the "back room" and set to work on ASP stuff immediately. Computergrrrl was plopped down at the reception desk and told to answer the phones and compile a list of office supplies. When computergrrrl pointed out to her new employers that she had no secreatrial training whatsoever, she was told that she should find "it came naturally" and that they "couldn't possible have one of the guys do reception"
Act Two: Geeks ride to the rescue
This company is divided into two layers. Business guys who have the money and call the shots, and coders who write the product (service?) and get free pop. After a few days, the "head coder" who we'll call Gord (well, that's his name) started to realize what was going on. At the end of a week, he confronted the owners and told them that they were denying him a valuable resource (computergrrrl) and that this "misallocation of talent"(his quote) was unacceptable. The owners hummed and hawed over transferring her, finally prompting gord to ask them why they had chosen to hire a woman in the first place, if they really felt her gender precluded her from doing her job. The answer: "We figgured she could do the reception work and help you out with little things in her spare time."
Act Three: making a loooong story short(er)
The ultimate compromise, was that computergrrrl was moved to web design (it's artsy! girls are good at artsy!) and, over time, into some backend coding (computergrrrl to owners "java is a new language. I have a talent for languages." language=artsy.)
The long-awaited moral of the story
Geeks tend to work on a merit-ocracy. You're judged on your chops, not your sex, race, religion (unless it's linux) etc. Sadly, a lot of the hire decisions are made by the money people. They can't tell good code from bad code (hmmm. I can't decipher it. It must be a good code...) and tend to have more "traditional" views of women in the work place. If you're a girl and you're a geek, find a boss who's into computers more than s/he's into money.
thank you for your patience.
2 1337 4 u!
The problem, then, is that we're the same guys that they didn't want to go out with in highschool and didn't want to sit next to at lunch.
Assuming the line of this statement, I am lead to understand that if the industry was full of handsome, athletic jock guys, they would have no problem?
Further, what does 'geeky guys' have to do with a career? Either you like the technical side of life or you don't. What next? "Gee, I don't want to work in the technical fields because of all those foreigners..."?
If anyone is so nearsighted that they'd give up something they're interested in because they don't like the class of people that are already in that field, then maybe they should stay far away in the first place and go find a job where they can gawk at men with firm white asses as they walk by the Sam Goody's in the mall.
I'm a bit geeky. I was also a very successful jock. I'm a young white male. I work with great people. I work with a lot of talented men and women of all ages, backgrounds, educations and ethnicities. If nothing else, the people in this industry are a reason to want to work in it, not shy away from it.
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seumas.com
I guess it depends on the geeks. If you've got to be around teenage guys, I think the geeks are certainly better than the alternatives.
Maybe what we really need is for the media to just portray geeks in a better light and feature them in afternoon specials or whatever kids are watching these days.
I dated a bunch of geeks in high school and they were all sweet, polite, intelligent, and a lot of fun. They also seemed likely to want to spend the evening talking or doing something fun and frivolous (contrasting, it seems, to many guys who were only interested in sex.)
And certainly when trying to date, a 5 to 1 ratio is not a bad thing: at least from the 1 side ;-) Even if there are a few that that aren't yet ready for that level of social interaction, you've probably got your pick (and the rest are usually pretty trainable). I don't think any of my fellow female geeks ever had trouble finding dates. And we used to just laugh at the various complaints of the others about insensitive guys who never called.
Ah, well, perceptions can be so important. Maybe we need to start a date-a-geek campaign.
Maybe if we lure the young ones into math clubs and computer teams with thoughts of dating they'll fnd that the subject matter is pretty interesting too. I can just see the posters in the halls:
Or maybe I'm just getting a little silly now. :-)
Chaosnymph - (who recommends geeks to all her friends)
One day in class she was lecturing on gender bias in the elementary school system and how girls/women are discouraged from careers in science and engineering because teachers have this preconception that boys are better (and subsequently devote more time to them).
At one point, she stopped and we listened to this girl in class describe how she, personally, had experienced this phenomenon in her gr. 5 class and that because of this, she was no longer capable of doing well in mathematics courses.
Well, during this whole sob story, one of my best friends was sitting right next to me, snickering. She later recounted to me her own experience in high school: her gr. 13 physics teacher had laughed in her face when she told him her post-secondary plans. Electrical Engineering. He told her then rather dubiously to come and visit when she got her degree.
She's planning a visit in six weeks.
WHY DOES THERE HAVE TO BE A 50/50 SPLIT IN EVERYTHING? Is it not possible that some women just aren't as interested in some things as some men are? And vice versa? Why do we need to engineer our society to be perfectly symmetrical?
Somebody please give me a good answer to this. Explain to me why.
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I realise this is massive gender stereotyping, but perhaps the majority of girls aren't interested in socially-deprived isolated activities like staring at code for hours?
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
And the salary ceiling that women hit in technical fields if they don't move into project management or sales isn't much of a positive incentive either.
It's unfortunate because when your whole company is made of 25-35 year old straight white males (like mine), you are naturally going to have a limited number of approaches to a given problem. Divesity is a real benefit. Too bad we don't get more of it.
This really does depend on which girls you talk to. If it's teeny-boppers who love Britteny Spears and who care lots about what other people think, then yes, they will be concerned about working with 'geeky guys.'
If, however, you talk to a more independently minded young woman, she is more likely to give real reasons besides cooties for not wanting to persue a tech-related field.
The study blames the general sentiment on a gender imbalance in access to computers, and on social pressures that steer girls away from technology.
Now, this I buy. Generally speaking, schools do not do a good job of encouraging our girls to get into science and technology. This has improved in recent times, but there is still a long way to go. Parents also don't always do a good job of encouraging girls to try out computers. In fact, some unwittingly discourage them. (I continually thank my mother for giving me legos instead of an easy bake oven when I was a kid.)
And never underestimate the social pressures women face in the workplace. Not every person can deal with sexist attitudes that many women encounter in tech-related jobs, and so some women choose not to deal with it and persue other careers. While I think this is sad, I personally know two women who left the computer science field because of sexism and other social pressures they continually faced from their peers. It does happen.
Nevertheless, there are many women such as myself who love computers, technology and science, and who thrive on working with geeky people. In fact, for me it's a requirement...
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brave little toaster
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brave little toaster
"Remember, don't try this at home until the statute of limitations has expired."
[to the tune of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want To Have Fun"]
she won't stare at the monitor's light
society says "don't you wanna hack all night?"
we just don't care about zeros and ones
and grrls, don't wanna be geeks
no, grrls don't wanna be geeks.
lasted three days in a programming class
those "for loops" and "call stacks" really kicked my teen ass
just can't log into those x-terminals
and grrls don't wanna be geeks
no, grrls don't wanna be geeks.
not what they want, not a geek,
let the boys balance red-black trees,
cuz grrls don't wanna be geeks.
no, grrls, don't wanna be geeks.
they don't wanna, they don't wanna,
they don't wanna, they don't wanna,
grrls, oh, grrls, don't wanna be geeks.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
When I was younger geek seemed to be a word that was used to describe people with an extreme interest in anything (ex. soccer geek)...
but now it seems that definition has been applied to guys who like computers.. emphasis on _guys_..
It seems that if a girl has an interest in computers, she's singled out as a _geek girl_
girls don't seem to be included in the new definition of geek...
For a while I had a problem with this.. being a member of the female population with a major interest in computer engineering I felt a little put off...
The last thing I wanted was feel excluded from my feild of interest because of my gender... I didn't want to be singled out either..
So I decided to forget about the whole thing until I realized that there was no good reason for it...
Now that I've gotten passed the initial batch of "girls can't be geeks" guys and I've met some really cool people, male and female, who don't have these prejudices and now I get to work on some neat stuff.
The people trolling this story are the same ones that cause females to turn away from technical careers. Even if a female is inclined to technical pursuits, she has a powerful reason not to, when the technical field is filled with sexist, insecure, and socially incoherent people.
A male has to deal with social pressure from outside the geek community, but within the community, there is support and like minded people. I'm generalising here, but a female has to deal with harrassment from both inside the community and without, and for most of them, it just isn't worth it. I have a tremendous respect for females in technical fields, because they have to deal with social difficulties on two fronts.
In other words, don't treat female geeks as aberrations, prospective geek wives, or otherworldly creatures... treat them as fellow geeks.