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Red Team, Blue Team: the Only Woman On the Team
ancientribe writes "Cyber security pro Kerstyn Clover in this Dark Reading post shares some rare insight into what it's like to be a woman in the field. She ultimately found her way to her current post as a member of the incident response and forensics team at SecureState, despite the common societal hurdles women face today in the STEM field: 'I taught myself some coding and computer repair in probably the most painstaking ways possible, but my experiences growing up put me at a disadvantage that I am still working to overcome,' she writes."
Who cares. Women can do anything men can do, so why is this a big deal.
Article Summary;
"I am a woman, therefore I deserve special treatment. All men have it easy because they are men. I have statistics to prove that I deserve special consideration because there are less women then men in certain fields."
Every geek who is interested in programming taught themselves.
From the article: "I taught myself some coding and computer repair in probably the most painstaking ways possible, but my experiences growing up put me at a disadvantage that I am still working to overcome. Throughout college, I was secretly fighting tooth and nail to understand concepts, references, and information that my classmates knew from young ages. From what I can tell, this is not uncommon."
I was a TA in college for intro CS classes, and I can tell you that not many kids understand this stuff right off the bat. Very few understood it by the end of the first semester. Most were just blindly typing and eventually, the monkeys typed Shakespeare. So, this woman not special. Nor is she special because she is a woman. In fact, I see nothing about her in this article that makes her any different from the thousands of others in the field.
The hurdles are real. If you are not doing what society approves of for your gender/race/age/etc then you will face more problems than if you are conforming to society's expectations.
And you will have less support.
Just because the hurdles will be intangible does not make the imaginary. Even the best of the best need a social structure in order to feed themselves and promote their work.
It's worth noting that a recent study found that only 16% of female characters in movies and TV are shown to hold a job in any STEM field.
And what percentage of men in movies and TV are shown to hold a job of that kind? I'd be surprised if it was more than 20. No need to invalidate your claims by dropping useless statistics.
In fact, I think movies and TV do a remarkable job of disproportionately representing women in fields dominated by men in reality.
No wonder you posted AC.
Women are often attracted to problem solving positions and intellectual pursuits. And hopefully more and more women will quit caring about stereotypes and historically approved gender roles and just get out and do the work and prove themselves. Your ridiculous analysis about what women want or look for in a career makes it a turn off to think about working with people like you who will assume the woman who wants the job must be somehow aberrant.
I've seen the reverse stereotype more often: the nerdy introverted sexually repressed male who can't string a sentence together when face to face with a customer, but still thinks he's superior because if you lock him in a dark room for 4 days he'll turn out a bit of software that is perfect in its execution except it wasn't what anyone wanted.
CS is like any other field, there are a lot of different personality types who can carve themselves out a role in which to be a solid contributor. Precious few real world problems get solved solely by the nerd in the basement.
So STEM means "I taught myself some coding and computer repair" now?
Duh no need no education...
FTFA:
After four years of school, a couple of internships, and at my present position, I can still count on my hands the number of women that have worked with me in cybersecurity and digital investigation combined.
And your credentials are...? Sounds pretty reasonable for a 21yo to me...
Also, why is it that usually intelligent, erudite men often* turn into troglodytes as soon as they find out the person they've been discussing technical topics with is female? Are we that threatening to your sense of self-worth? I can (kind of) understand being concerned about women in some more physical occupation, since without rigorous strength training the average woman generally can't bring the same sheer physical strength to the table as the average man (and I'm talking averages here, not ectomorphic men or mesomorphic women), but in STEM trades there are no such concerns. Women can do just as much mental heavy lifting as men...all it takes is a love for the field, and to kick out the 'show us yer titz' bullies.
* Often, but certainly not always. There just seems to be a higher proportion of perpetual juveniles in the STEM fields...although I suppose that perception could be due to sampling bias
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
"Women can do just as much mental heavy lifting as men."
Bullshit because if they could, they would. I think it's pretty naïve to think that while nature made fairly substantially different hardware for substantially different purposes that it loaded exactly the same control software because it got lazy all of a sudden. Now maybe women can perform mental heavy lifting of a different sort but honestly, when they talk about patriarchy, when they talk about barriers to entry that they (for lack of understanding) call "bias," what they really mean is "our brain processes don't fit into these fields created and run by male thought processes." The proof to the fallacy of your statement is your statement needing to be made in the first place. Women can't do as much (male type) mental heavy lifting as men because if they could they would and if they were, they wouldn't be complaining about the difficulty of competing in male intellectual endeavors. The "bias" they perceive is the bias of the square peg not fitting in the round hole.
Classic example of confirmation bias. It is *precisely* attitudes like these that present the 'bias' that you openly scorn. "If they could they would, but you simply can't darling, so try to find some nice steno work and leave us men to do all the thinking, mm'kay? Or better yet, go have some babies, because you know your biological clock is ticking away...here, let me help you with that, I have a couple of minutes before my next meeting..."
You can't tell me that a manager who carries your type of attitude is not going to be more critical of female employees than male ones, and more resistant to promoting them or acknowledging their achievements on par with their male counterparts. If acknowledgement does come, it's more in line with "oh wow, that's very good work for a girl! Good job!" Yeah, screw that. Perhaps your mental hole needs a dremel.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
1) Women generally are less willing than men to do things that result in them becoming social outcasts as a youth. This will lead to a lot fewer girls doing things that lead them to STEM jobs later in life.
2) Women are a lot less willing to take jobs with low satisfaction and high working hours in order to get high pay. CS-related jobs, of course, tend to be like this. This effect is made even bigger by the fact that it's still, even in these liberated days, a lot more acceptable for the man to be the primary breadwinner, allowing the woman more freedom to choose a lower-paying but more satisfying job.