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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.
When "generally speaking" everyone you speak to guides you towards other fields and scoffs at the notion that you might enjoy and prosper in STEM fields it isn't all that surprising that fewer women have traditionally done it. Things are changing a little bit, but only because of stories like these making people aware of how their attitudes towards women (and men sometimes) can have lasting effects. It happens to men too, when they try to break traditional gender roles and be nurses or elementary school teachers etc.
With the US falling behind in science and technology, it's time to encourage anyone who shows any interest at all in these fields to at least take a course or two and see if they like it.
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
An anecdote: My wife works in an accounting department that was, until recently, all women.
When they hired their first male accountant (a new college grad with absolutely no experience), he was given an office all to himself, despite the fact that my wife (a controller, no less) has been sharing an office with a temp worker for the past several years.
Why did he get his own office, when she has more education, experience, and seniority? Because, as she put it, "all the other women here are scared of his dick."
So yea, women being treated differently is an issue in the workplace, but don't try and bullshit me by saying men are the only ones engaging in discrimination.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I apologize that this sounds like a sexist rant, but it is my personal experience and opinion. I'm sorry if it's offensive.
Have to agree here, by all my accounts girls receive the privilege in high school more than guys do. I've seen it time and time again where a boy asked for help and was told to do the homework and a girl asked for help and was given the answers. Whether they want to acknowledge that or not.
When I was in Chem 11 I had my older sister as my lab partner. We did the same work, but she received better grades on labs. Apparently nice handwriting with hearts over your 'i's makes you smarter, and no I didn't have messy hand writing. I still ended up with a higher grade because when she wasn't copying my work on test our strengths and weaknesses were much more apparent.
I also remember in one particular English class having a hard time with lexical categories. The internet was in it's infancy and all I had at home was an Atari 130XE, otherwise I would have just looked it up myself when the provided material was proven inadequate. I almost failed that class in grade nine despite asking for help on multiple occasions. My sister on the other hand received extra after class tutoring as part of a special group from the teacher who turned me down. I wasn't allowed to join the group because it was a female only study group and there was no male equivalent because it was discriminatory for boys to have their own exclusive study group, which also included a teacher as an aid. I did get together with a couple of other guys that were having trouble, but weren't allowed to join the group and we fumbled our way through it together, but it would have been a lot easier if we had the additional help of someone who actually knew what they were doing.
There are many occasions growing up that boys are told they're on their own and are excluded from certain activities or out right ban from forming male only groups, where as it's perfectly acceptable for girls to form exclusive female only groups that receive special treatments. Maybe this is why there are more male "nerds". We were always outcast, something that seems to be much more rare for girls.
"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.
I taught myself some coding and computer repair in probably the most painstaking ways possible
And you found yourself in the IRT. Frankly, that you got there is a miracle and has nothing to do with gender, but with the fact that if someone with half a clue put it together, he was looking for experts who know their stuff even when you wake them with an emergency at 4 am.
I've been working in IT for almost 20 years. Yes, women are few. But I'll punch the next one who whines about widespread discrimination straight in the face, because it's a lie. Most nerds are too afraid to give them any shit, most managers are happy to find a woman in the field, and most of the rest frankly don't give a fuck if you're man, woman, transvestite or an alien from Betelgeuse, as long as you know what you're doing.
If you want to complain about discrimination, there's dozens of jobs out there where even an outsider can see it still exists. IT isn't one of them.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You should search for "feminist mathematics" and you'll get some interesting reading.
I don't know how mainstream it is, but there is a feminist movement that accepts that male and female brains work differently, and that therefore different approaches are needed to include women in science and mathematics. For example, check out this preview of a paper which discusses a need for a new philosophy, pedagogy, and epistemology for mathematics. I don't have access to the full text, but for me it's previewing page 1 (just an intro) and page 276 which is dealing with pedagogy. This is one of the critiques for why current mathematical teaching is unsuitable for women:
Mathematics tends to be taught with a heavy reliance upon written texts which removes its conjectural nature, presenting it as inert information which should not be questioned. Predominant patterns of teaching focus on the individual learner and induce competition between learners. Language is pre-digested in the text, assuming that meaning is communicated and is non-negotiable. [...]
Like science, therefore, mathematics is perceived by many students and some teachers as "a body of established knowledge accessible only to a few extraordinary individuals" (Rosser, op.cit. p. 89). Indeed, the supposed 'objectivity' of the discipline, a cause for questioning and concern by some of those within it, is often perceived by non-mathematician curriculum theorists as inevitable....
I mean what do you think of that? Boys do pretty well, apparently, with this type of teaching and the view that mathematical theory is objective and that by writing things down we can communicate knowledge. But there are "feminist mathematician curriculum theorists" who think that's BS and that it's a social construct resulting from the influence of male thinking in mathematics. There's a better way to teach it to girls.
True? Or do you think these feminists are as crazy as the guy you responded to in thinking that just maybe men and women think differently? They are taking two different approaches (one criticizes the female brain for not understanding it as presented when the male brain has no problem doing so, the other criticizes the material and its presentation as unsuitable for the female brain) but the underlying message is the same. I'm curious what you think about this.
For any women, or me, interested in cyber-security, the Texas A&M system has some free, online, college credit courses at http://teex.com/
I may not be the most objective viewpoint, since the maths and sciences were easily my top courses, and the ones I enjoyed the most. I, personally, had no problem understanding curriculum materials as written (except social studies, I don't know how anyone ever gets that...), so I never experienced this 'problem'.
Perhaps the bigger issue is: why do we figure that all men are the same, and all women are the same? I don't agree with the "feminist mathematician curriculum theorists", since I have not experienced such difficulties, but then one has to look at the statistics. What I question is: are the statistics the way they are because of inherent physical differences in learning, or learned behaviours towards learning?
I was lucky in that I was encouraged all my life to learn and told that I could do anything I wanted, but not everyone had such a supportive framework. For example, I took Industrial Arts because it was much more interesting to me than Home Economics, and while I got teased for my choice at school, I had learned enough self-confidence by then to not let that affect my choice or performance. Every child is different, and what you learn in the earliest years doesn't usually come out of a book.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
WRONG.
A woman cannot pee around a corner without using special equipment. Men for the win!
Look, I know it's not much, but we have to work with what God gave us, you know? Men, be proud of your uniquely male corner-around-peeing ability, and the ease with which you can write your name in the snow. To the drum circle, boys!