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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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