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Girls Like Linux Too
BootHead sent us the article at ZD-Net that appears most designed to draw a link from Slashdot in quite some time. Its about Women and Linux. Course they call them "LinuxChix" (cough) but its just sorta the standard tirade on "Girls can be Geeks Too" (which no geek argues with in theory, we just never be able to find girl geeks of our own ;)Update: 09/16 09:29 by H :Check out the additional linkage about the debate of whether "Women need an OS of their own."
As far as I can tell, there are as many women in IT as really want to be in IT. I wish it were otherwise, but the aspiring techie women that I have worked with have typically lacked the "fire in the belly" that drives guy techies to be really successful in the business.
I don't think this is because women are stupid, or that IT is intrinsically hard. Women are just socialized with different values and priorities, and geeking out is not usually one of them.
That said, women who bitch and moan about the glass ceiling bug me. In my experience my advancement has been pretty much based on how hard I worked and how smart I am. If you are good enough, your gender becomes irrelevant. Sure, every now and then a poorly socialized male makes a stupid comment, but that's what a sense of humor is for!
She's three, and right now her favorite computer activities are painting with Gimp or Paint (she prefers adding strokes to Teletubby images), searching the web for cat pictures, or posing for my parallel port camera.
The other day I captivated her by playing a wav of her crying at 2 months, she couldn't get enough of it.
Once she can read, I think I'll teach her to rebuild the kernel.
George
....about how few women there are in I.T., but with the word "Linux" thrown in to make it sound trendy and up-to-date.
There's a simple reason why there are few women in I.T. A lot of the "alpha geeks" of today (to rip that awful phrase from the article) tend to be in their late twenties and thirties - which means they were first using computers, on average, back in the late Seventies or early Eighties when home computers started coming into the mainstream - and at a time when education was still so backward that even those schools which had any kind of I.T. curriculum certainly wouldn't dream of having girls on their course.
Geeks have to be caught at an early age. You want more women in I.T.? Get your four-year-old niece/daughter interested in how to code, and sit back and wait twenty years.
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"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
Look everyone, if you are a geek, then don't look for a geekette. That's a no-no. Oh sure, you'd have plenty of things to talk about first, but then... Two friends of mine are living together and they are both (good) sysops. When I discuss with them on monday, it's like:
/usr/src/linux/foo/bar.c? Let me explain, blah blah blah blah blah blah... :)
:)
- [Me] So what have you been doing this week-end?
- [Him] Oh. That was cool! We spent the whole saturday night debugging our new kernel driver! By the way, did you know that there was a bug in the file
- [Her] That's not perfectly accurate, in fact, it turned out that we found the bug by analyzing network traffic using the tool we developped last month and that the module was sending a bad IP header when blah blah blah blah
- [Him] Well yeah, it was lot of fun! [to her:] talking about networking, have you solved the network problem in our company, you told me that a box was loosing a very high number of packets.
- [Her] Well, no I spent the whole day yesterday to change cables but nothing, the problem must be coming from somewhere else. Any idea?
- [Him] mhhh
- [Her to me] how about you?
- [Me] err. I went to see a movie on saturday
Geeks are stereotypedly (what a cool word) supposed not to have a social life. I thing the stereotype would apply even more to geek couples
Well, well. You wonder why there's so few female geeks? Hmm, just look at this /. post for example - it is rather typical of the system:
"it's just sorta the standard tirade..." means to me "stop whining, girls, it's not an issue anyway". You men want us to stop "whining"?
Well then start by taking an unfortunately still valid issue *serious*. btw: why is it that when women complain it's always viewed as "whining" while when men complain ist "protest" or "justified anger"? Could it be that that is because you just don't *want* to take us seriously? Because that would mean thinking about whether you have to feel guilty yourselves and maybe (gasp) having to change your attitude a little? Ohmigawd, that would be WORK - can't have that, right?
"which no geek argues in theory but..." means to me "they don't really exist anyway because _I_ (read: cmdrTaco) never had one let me have sex with her" Tell me: why's it that all the techies who surround me, even those who have far superior knowledge are scared shitless of me because I know my stuff pretty well ? They all LOVE to TALK with me about computers/EE/technology and stuff but when it comes to dating who do they pick up?
Some "barbie" to whom they can feel superior to because she'll come to him with the "please do this and that for me you big strong man I'm too weak/dumb for it" routine for each and every crap.
You want a geek-girlfriend? Here's the 3 step easy solution:
1. open your eyes. Chances are there is one around you already but everyone is playing her achievements down or she just doesn't boast about herself which makes her invisible between all the loud shouters
2. respect her for what she is. She's probably no "barbie" so don't expect her to spend 5 hours in front of a mirror every morning - that's not what you said you wanted anyway, right? And she's not in the world "to get laid by _you_" - she's not a target but rather wants to choose her mate among *equals*.
3. don't be frigthened yourself. As I said - most men I know are *terrified* to "loose their face in front of a woman" and therefore are damn tough to the geek women they meet. Result: many geeky women are very tough in return as self protection.
Just 2 cents from a geek woman.