As a very long-time tech woman who's been in both machine design and electronics and IT, I can attest that much of the problem is male perception of women as women. Anyone can test that; drop into an irc channel using male and female sounding nicks; or use a neutral nick, and get a technical conversation going--then tell them you're female and watch the entire discussion completely fall apart.
It doesn't matter what gender you really are. It's the *idea* that screws you up. The same thing happens in real life. There is no right way for a woman to act--aggressive is ok for guys, not ok for women. The basic definition of female in male minds is inherently dysfunctional, so you're damned no matter what you do.
I saw an item the other day--female concert conductors get hired a LOT more often if the hiring board can only hear their performance but can't see them.
There simply is no way for women to win until the stereotypes taught to boys from birth on changes radically. My daughter tells me she much prefers to date guys that were raised by single mothers. They missed out on the patriarchal indoctrination, and it's a vast improvement.
Some of the homeschooling religious parents are just plain appalling, but even while thoroughly indoctrinated, they also generally come out with a good education in the functional aspects of readin' writin' and 'rithmetic. And there's always 'teenage rebellion.'
I have known several religiously homeschooled kids that became quite atheist adults after they got out and started looking around. People can change if they have the basic equipment to start with; something that isn't at all assured in most of our public schools.
And it occurs to me that educational failures on the scale of individual families is much less destructive to society than failures that involve thousands of students simultaneously.
The 'socialization' kids get in school is so skewed that it's quite harmful, actually. Between bullying and nowhere near enough contact with adults, you end up with people who really don't know how to be adults when they get into the real world.
Homeschooling my kids was the best thing I ever did for them, and they remind me of it regularly. They're independent, employed, have many good friends, and are a blast to hang out with now.
Actually, informative error messages that say things like "MP3 codecs are not installed by default, etc, but here's how/where you can get them"
Windows' error messages are also frequently cryptic, but you at least get something you can google with them. Linux' bad habit of simply going away is one of the more frustrating things about it.
And you can forget about ergonomic input devices. I've tried and failed to get wacom drivers working on 4 different distros...
I actually hate windows so much I'm willing to keep trying, and I've run my little server on Fedora core 5 for several years, but I frequently feel that Linux could at least meet me halfway. I don't mind working at it, don't even mind compiling stuff, but freakin' *tell me what's wrong*!
Ah yes, all those wonderful packages--that break X every time I turn around. Believe me, program installation problems are the *entire* problem with Linux.
Has it occurred to anyone yet that the opposition to nuclear power may have more to do with its threat to an established oil and coal industry than to 'green opposition'? Looking at the machinations already uncovered in the service of maintaining the worlds' dependence on oil, that actually makes a hell of a lot more sense. There are solutions to all the technical problems, and nuclear is actually, provably safer, cleaner and cheaper than oil. I'd be astounded if the petrocorps *weren't* finding ways to sabotage it.
I am a woman, and I AM JUST LIKE YOU. I'm interested in the same things and always have been. But getting into and making it in technical fields has been an uphill, and very unsatisfying experience. I love tinkering, figuring stuff out, all the things you love. Try doing those things for a company that *also* expects you to answer phones and file stuff and act like a receptionist at the same time, simply because you are not male. And of course they see no reason to pay you equally for your technical work because you are required to also do non-technical work.
That's the default assumption of male bosses toward female techs. And if you object--well, they can always find a male...
I have managed to subvert that tendency to some degree, by being really, really BAD at filing and answering phones, and being so good at the technical work that I've pretty much gathered up all of it. But the perception that I'm some sort of fallback secretary still persists, and the pay has never reached the levels it should because of it.
Do I sympathize with that! After I had my first child, I hunted high and low for someone willing to tie my tubes. No dice. Ended up raising five kids. Birth control? Uh huh...
Sorry, it wasn't universally available back in the 70's and it's even less available now in many places.
In my lifetime, I've been a machine designer, dog groomer, IT pro and electronics engineer--in spite of not being allowed to take "boys'" classes in high school, and my mother being told "She's a girl, she'll never need math!"
The only 'career' that paid well enough to raise and homeschool five kids was dog groomer. Men do not take women seriously no matter how well-educated, expert, efficient and competent they are. I have never made enough ever be able to retire, in spite of being more productive than any man I've ever worked with. The only people that have *ever* matched my productivity were other women.
The reality is that if you're a 'traditional woman'--the odds are very high that you will die in poverty. If you are NOT a traditional woman--the odds are not quite as high that you will die in poverty, but they're still much higher than mens. The entire system is still structured that the only women who are not likely to die in poverty are professionals--doctors and lawyers--and golddiggers.
Men set the system up; they work very hard to perpetuate it. All this idiotic ranting about "women have it better than ever" simply ignores that fact that what women have now still sucks. Economically, the US ranks *below* Lithuania and and Estonia for women's economic success. Damned impressive, guys.
And what's really interesting is that men cut their own throats with these attitudes. Societies that have high levels of sexual equality are more successful economically, and males are healthier. It's women that determine children's health--and women that have the resources do a much better job than women that are oppressed. Boys grow up bigger, stronger and healthier in societies where their moms are successful. There is also much less crime and greater economic stability in countries where women are equal to men in numbers and power in government.
Amazing--the fact is women in America are *not* getting equal pay for equal work--thereby proving your entire base assumption false, and blowing your entire argument out of the water.
Try exposing yourself to something besides Faux News and Rush Limpdick.
Cripes, talk about stereotyping. Man, I've been building stuff all my life, ran one of the first BBS's in my area, and jumped on computers the minute I could afford one (A VIC-20!)--and learned BASIC on it because that was about all you could do with it.
I switched over winter break a couple years ago..took less than a week after 20 years of typing qwerty. I did it because my wrists were falling apart. They're a lot better now, and my typing is more accurate most of the time. I didn't bother to change keycaps around, tho sometimes if something uses odd keys I'll mark them on the keys temporarily.
I'ts gotta be the easiest typing system to learn evar, tho. Since most of the keys you use the most are in the home row or the top row, you have them down almost instantly. Unlearning qwerty took longer than learning Dvorak.
It starts in first grade, when teachers discourage parents from teaching their children to read or add. Many schools still don't teach reading at all (See Spot Run is NOT reading.)
Then classes full of propaganda..I remember history as being disjointed, with nothing really relating to anything else. Later I realized that it was because they left out everything the current administration or religious types didn't approve of.
And on and on.
One of my sons is an electronics engineer now--and hasn't been in a school since 4th grade. He and I had a blast blowing stuff up when he was growing up, and he taught ME electronics.
School doesn't hold a candle to the internet and a pile of stuff to do stuff with.
Hey! I've been using the Dvorak layout for the last 4 years. It's done wonders for my wrists, and only took about 2 weeks to learn, after doing qwerty for 20 years.
People don't switch to it for the same reason people don't switch to linux. They think it's gonna be too hard. Dvorak was 10 times easier to learn than qwerty.
Remember Guantanamo? Our illustrious leaders might "choose" not to enforce unconstitutional requests...but they don't *have* to. That's what makes it obscenely scary. They're more likely to enforce it selectively, as power is *always* wont to do.
What bothers me here is the assumption that 'maturity' means giving up mental flexibility, energy, etc. The baseline assumption is wrong. You can do more with the data you acquire with experience, if you remain open to the data in the first place.
Misery is a choice. It's *all* a choice. I fail to see anything at all wrong with retaining the good stuff of youth, coupled with the experience of age. Old men I know are always moaning "if I had the energy they have with what I know now.."
I am old enough (barely) to remember when Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" came out. Environmental laws followed in profusion, almost in a panic. The Bald Eagle was nearly extinct, we were down to one small breeding group of Sandhill Cranes, Lake Erie was as dead as a cesspool, and when my mother discovered a clump of Trilliums in our woods, she showed them to us and warned us to "never, EVER pick them" because they were almost gone.
Now, our woods are carpeted with the things. I see Bald Eagles hovering over our highways, Sandhill Cranes stalking through farmer's fields, and Lake Erie has fish in it again. The recovery was far faster than predicted. Basically, the anti-pollution laws worked wonders, though businesses bitched like hell about 'em. We have cleaner cars, cleaner air, cleaner water in many places (except Houston, Texas, which appears to have the highest cancer rates on the planet.)
I do remember the debate when the book came out, it was very similar to the debate we are having now. "There's no conclusive evidence that pesticides are causing the eagles to die off." Heard that one repeatedly. Something was thinning their eggshells, obviously, but there was some evidence that low levels of DDT could do that, but so could other things. All of them man-made, however. Little in science is ever totally beyond question, but a little common sense can go a long way. The planet has never been carpeted with wall-to-wall people before, all busily releasing a million years worth of stored CO2 into the air in the blink of a geological eye. It can't *NOT* have unpredictable effects, because it's never happened before.
Laws reducing greenhouse gases will also have a number of other good effects, like breaking the oil-company monopoly on world energy supplies, further-reducing air pollution and the generation of new sources of income such as new farm industries, new technology industries and the creation of many decentralized (and therefore terror-proof) energy sources. The benefits of treating this as a reality far outweigh the difficulties a few extremely-rich corporations might have to face.
Of course, the benefits will be to everyone else, and that makes them entirely unimportant to this administration.
I didn't buy any music at all for close to 20 years, because it cost too much to buy an album with only one good song on it. If they lock it down so I can't dl an album first, I will simply stop buying music again. I've spent more on music in the last 3 years than I did my entire life before.
P2p is the reason. And I boycott the RIAA and MPAA now since they revealed their true colors.
Well, no, some channel doesn't. I did not buy a single cd in the 15 or so years prior to my discovery of p2p. Not one. Because the music I heard sucked and too many cd's were full of bad songs. 15 bucks for a single song is just too much.
Since p2p, I've been on a music buying spree. I'm finding music I love everywhere, download the entire cd, and then buy it direct from the artist. I like my audio uncompressed and in it's natural state, and most music lovers I know feel the same way. At first I bought from stores, until RIAA sued it's first kid. I immediately began boycotting RIAA affiliated stores and musicians.
The music industry is not losing money on piracy. They're making more than ever. What they *are* losing is the musicians they've been treating as slaves all this time. If they'd treated fans and musicians decently from the start, this would never have been an issue.
So that's the real-world result of 'piracy'. Musicians are actually getting my money for the first time since I was a teenager.
Cynthia McKinnon also voted against the "patriarch act"..repeatedly. And she's voted against many other assaults on freedom including bills to regulate the net.
I learned long ago not to allow Microsoft OS's to autoupdate. The updates invariably break more than they fix. I simply don't use any M$ apps anymore. And with the rumors (plans) for Vista's DRM spyware, I'll simply be taking all my M$ boxes off the net entirely. Linux runs web apps beautifully.
Slashdot Mirror
Might want to remember that the American Cancer Society had "abortion causes breast cancer" on it's site not too long ago.
Don't trust *anyone*. Research and make up your own mind.
As a very long-time tech woman who's been in both machine design and electronics and IT, I can attest that much of the problem is male perception of women as women. Anyone can test that; drop into an irc channel using male and female sounding nicks; or use a neutral nick, and get a technical conversation going--then tell them you're female and watch the entire discussion completely fall apart.
It doesn't matter what gender you really are. It's the *idea* that screws you up. The same thing happens in real life. There is no right way for a woman to act--aggressive is ok for guys, not ok for women. The basic definition of female in male minds is inherently dysfunctional, so you're damned no matter what you do.
I saw an item the other day--female concert conductors get hired a LOT more often if the hiring board can only hear their performance but can't see them.
There simply is no way for women to win until the stereotypes taught to boys from birth on changes radically. My daughter tells me she much prefers to date guys that were raised by single mothers. They missed out on the patriarchal indoctrination, and it's a vast improvement.
This is an obvious attack on the first amendment. Too many misdeeds by public servants have ended up on youtube...
Plopping the kids down in front of computers did wonders for my kids. My son taught himself electronics engineering with it.
Of course, they were homeschooled...
Some of the homeschooling religious parents are just plain appalling, but even while thoroughly indoctrinated, they also generally come out with a good education in the functional aspects of readin' writin' and 'rithmetic. And there's always 'teenage rebellion.'
I have known several religiously homeschooled kids that became quite atheist adults after they got out and started looking around. People can change if they have the basic equipment to start with; something that isn't at all assured in most of our public schools.
And it occurs to me that educational failures on the scale of individual families is much less destructive to society than failures that involve thousands of students simultaneously.
The 'socialization' kids get in school is so skewed that it's quite harmful, actually.
Between bullying and nowhere near enough contact with adults, you end up with people who really don't know how to be adults when they get into the real world.
Homeschooling my kids was the best thing I ever did for them, and they remind me of it regularly. They're independent, employed, have many good friends, and are a blast to hang out with now.
Actually, informative error messages that say things like "MP3 codecs are not installed by default, etc, but here's how/where you can get them"
Windows' error messages are also frequently cryptic, but you at least get something you can google with them. Linux' bad habit of simply going away is one of the more frustrating things about it.
And you can forget about ergonomic input devices. I've tried and failed to get wacom drivers working on 4 different distros...
I actually hate windows so much I'm willing to keep trying, and I've run my little server on Fedora core 5 for several years, but I frequently feel that Linux could at least meet me halfway. I don't mind working at it, don't even mind compiling stuff, but freakin' *tell me what's wrong*!
Ah yes, all those wonderful packages--that break X every time I turn around.
Believe me, program installation problems are the *entire* problem with Linux.
Fix that, and you've got us.
Has it occurred to anyone yet that the opposition to nuclear power may have more to do with its threat to an established oil and coal industry than to 'green opposition'? Looking at the machinations already uncovered in the service of maintaining the worlds' dependence on oil, that actually makes a hell of a lot more sense. There are solutions to all the technical problems, and nuclear is actually, provably safer, cleaner and cheaper than oil. I'd be astounded if the petrocorps *weren't* finding ways to sabotage it.
I am a woman, and I AM JUST LIKE YOU. I'm interested in the same things and always have been. But getting into and making it in technical fields has been an uphill, and very unsatisfying experience. I love tinkering, figuring stuff out, all the things you love. Try doing those things for a company that *also* expects you to answer phones and file stuff and act like a receptionist at the same time, simply because you are not male. And of course they see no reason to pay you equally for your technical work because you are required to also do non-technical work.
That's the default assumption of male bosses toward female techs. And if you object--well, they can always find a male...
I have managed to subvert that tendency to some degree, by being really, really BAD at filing and answering phones, and being so good at the technical work that I've pretty much gathered up all of it. But the perception that I'm some sort of fallback secretary still persists, and the pay has never reached the levels it should because of it.
Do I sympathize with that! After I had my first child, I hunted high and low for someone willing to tie my tubes. No dice. Ended up raising five kids. Birth control? Uh huh...
Sorry, it wasn't universally available back in the 70's and it's even less available now in many places.
In my lifetime, I've been a machine designer, dog groomer, IT pro and electronics engineer--in spite of not being allowed to take "boys'" classes in high school, and my mother being told "She's a girl, she'll never need math!"
2 006/07/13/BAGIDJU67A1.DTL
The only 'career' that paid well enough to raise and homeschool five kids was dog groomer. Men do not take women seriously no matter how well-educated, expert, efficient and competent they are. I have never made enough ever be able to retire, in spite of being more productive than any man I've ever worked with. The only people that have *ever* matched my productivity were other women.
The reality is that if you're a 'traditional woman'--the odds are very high that you will die in poverty. If you are NOT a traditional woman--the odds are not quite as high that you will die in poverty, but they're still much higher than mens. The entire system is still structured that the only women who are not likely to die in poverty are professionals--doctors and lawyers--and golddiggers.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/50528/
Men set the system up; they work very hard to perpetuate it. All this idiotic ranting about "women have it better than ever" simply ignores that fact that what women have now still sucks. Economically, the US ranks *below* Lithuania and and Estonia for women's economic success. Damned impressive, guys.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/50528/
And what's really interesting is that men cut their own throats with these attitudes. Societies that have high levels of sexual equality are more successful economically, and males are healthier. It's women that determine children's health--and women that have the resources do a much better job than women that are oppressed. Boys grow up bigger, stronger and healthier in societies where their moms are successful. There is also much less crime and greater economic stability in countries where women are equal to men in numbers and power in government.
Dr. Barres had it right--if a woman wants to succeed, she has to change into a man.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
Amazing--the fact is women in America are *not* getting equal pay for equal work--thereby proving your entire base assumption false, and blowing your entire argument out of the water.
Try exposing yourself to something besides Faux News and Rush Limpdick.
Cripes, talk about stereotyping. Man, I've been building stuff all my life, ran one of the first BBS's in my area, and jumped on computers the minute I could afford one (A VIC-20!)--and learned BASIC on it because that was about all you could do with it.
..and I hate the phone.
And I'm female.
I switched over winter break a couple years ago..took less than a week after 20 years of typing qwerty. I did it because my wrists were falling apart. They're a lot better now, and my typing is more accurate most of the time. I didn't bother to change keycaps around, tho sometimes if something uses odd keys I'll mark them on the keys temporarily.
I'ts gotta be the easiest typing system to learn evar, tho. Since most of the keys you use the most are in the home row or the top row, you have them down almost instantly. Unlearning qwerty took longer than learning Dvorak.
It starts in first grade, when teachers discourage parents from teaching their children to read or add. Many schools still don't teach reading at all (See Spot Run is NOT reading.)
Then classes full of propaganda..I remember history as being disjointed, with nothing really relating to anything else. Later I realized that it was because they left out everything the current administration or religious types didn't approve of.
And on and on.
One of my sons is an electronics engineer now--and hasn't been in a school since 4th grade. He and I had a blast blowing stuff up when he was growing up, and he taught ME electronics.
School doesn't hold a candle to the internet and a pile of stuff to do stuff with.
Hey! I've been using the Dvorak layout for the last 4 years. It's done wonders for my wrists, and only took about 2 weeks to learn, after doing qwerty for 20 years.
People don't switch to it for the same reason people don't switch to linux. They think it's gonna be too hard. Dvorak was 10 times easier to learn than qwerty.
My, you are a trusting soul, aren't you?
Remember Guantanamo? Our illustrious leaders might "choose" not to enforce unconstitutional requests...but they don't *have* to. That's what makes it obscenely scary. They're more likely to enforce it selectively, as power is *always* wont to do.
What bothers me here is the assumption that 'maturity' means giving up mental flexibility, energy, etc. The baseline assumption is wrong. You can do more with the data you acquire with experience, if you remain open to the data in the first place.
Misery is a choice. It's *all* a choice. I fail to see anything at all wrong with retaining the good stuff of youth, coupled with the experience of age. Old men I know are always moaning "if I had the energy they have with what I know now.."
I am old enough (barely) to remember when Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" came out. Environmental laws followed in profusion, almost in a panic. The Bald Eagle was nearly extinct, we were down to one small breeding group of Sandhill Cranes, Lake Erie was as dead as a cesspool, and when my mother discovered a clump of Trilliums in our woods, she showed them to us and warned us to "never, EVER pick them" because they were almost gone.
Now, our woods are carpeted with the things. I see Bald Eagles hovering over our highways, Sandhill Cranes stalking through farmer's fields, and Lake Erie has fish in it again. The recovery was far faster than predicted. Basically, the anti-pollution laws worked wonders, though businesses bitched like hell about 'em. We have cleaner cars, cleaner air, cleaner water in many places (except Houston, Texas, which appears to have the highest cancer rates on the planet.)
I do remember the debate when the book came out, it was very similar to the debate we are having now. "There's no conclusive evidence that pesticides are causing the eagles to die off." Heard that one repeatedly. Something was thinning their eggshells, obviously, but there was some evidence that low levels of DDT could do that, but so could other things. All of them man-made, however. Little in science is ever totally beyond question, but a little common sense can go a long way. The planet has never been carpeted with wall-to-wall people before, all busily releasing a million years worth of stored CO2 into the air in the blink of a geological eye. It can't *NOT* have unpredictable effects, because it's never happened before.
Laws reducing greenhouse gases will also have a number of other good effects, like breaking the oil-company monopoly on world energy supplies, further-reducing air pollution and the generation of new sources of income such as new farm industries, new technology industries and the creation of many decentralized (and therefore terror-proof) energy sources. The benefits of treating this as a reality far outweigh the difficulties a few extremely-rich corporations might have to face.
Of course, the benefits will be to everyone else, and that makes them entirely unimportant to this administration.
I didn't buy any music at all for close to 20 years, because it cost too much to buy an album with only one good song on it. If they lock it down so I can't dl an album first, I will simply stop buying music again. I've spent more on music in the last 3 years than I did my entire life before.
P2p is the reason. And I boycott the RIAA and MPAA now since they revealed their true colors.
Well, no, some channel doesn't. I did not buy a single cd in the 15 or so years prior to my discovery of p2p. Not one. Because the music I heard sucked and too many cd's were full of bad songs. 15 bucks for a single song is just too much.
Since p2p, I've been on a music buying spree. I'm finding music I love everywhere, download the entire cd, and then buy it direct from the artist. I like my audio uncompressed and in it's natural state, and most music lovers I know feel the same way. At first I bought from stores, until RIAA sued it's first kid. I immediately began boycotting RIAA affiliated stores and musicians.
The music industry is not losing money on piracy. They're making more than ever. What they *are* losing is the musicians they've been treating as slaves all this time. If they'd treated fans and musicians decently from the start, this would never have been an issue.
So that's the real-world result of 'piracy'. Musicians are actually getting my money for the first time since I was a teenager.
Cynthia McKinnon also voted against the "patriarch act"..repeatedly. And she's voted against many other assaults on freedom including bills to regulate the net.
I haven't had anything get past AVG free in over five years.
I learned long ago not to allow Microsoft OS's to autoupdate. The updates invariably break more than they fix. I simply don't use any M$ apps anymore. And with the rumors (plans) for Vista's DRM spyware, I'll simply be taking all my M$ boxes off the net entirely. Linux runs web apps beautifully.