Second of all, it's a social networking / matchmaking site. How difficult would it be to sign up for a freebie account and just search for his damn name? Seems to me like that would be a lot more definitive than checking the magic 8 ball of "Does he have an account?"
Well, there you are. And then she would end up having an account there too and he could at that point symmetrically accuse her of cheating. Or, alternatively, claim that he'd only signed up to check out whether she was a member.
Kind of like holding up one mirror in front of another one.
Once upon a time, the men went out to work and the women stayed at home "in the kitchen", and society and the workplace were structured accordingly. The man provided for the family (monetarily) while the woman did the work necessary to make a household run smoothly (and economically! not for nothing do they call it "home economics"), look after the kids and possibly aged relatives, organise everybody's lives and so forth. This was an essential supporting role because, working long (or even normal) hours it's quite hard to have wholesome meals on the table, clean clothes etc. without spending a fortune on third party providers of such services (who will in any case never do certain things as lovingly as a wife or mother...)
Now however, women also go out to work, often in the same jobs as men, but society and the "rules" of the workplace have not really changed to accommodate this shift, so that in addition to their "official" work hours women tend to also continue doing their former tasks, essentially working if not two, then at least one-and-a half jobs. Consider, from the Fourth European Working Conditions Surveys (2005) :
- The results show clearly that working women spend more time in unpaid work than do working men in all European countries. - While men work longer hours than women in paid employment in all countries, women in fact work more hours than men when paid and unpaid working hours are combined. - When considering paid and unpaid work in combination as measured by the European Working Conditions Survey, female part-time workers work more hours in total per week than male full-time workers (56 against 54 hours).
I believe this added burden of unpaid work is the real reason why women are less tolerant of long hours (in paid work), all the more so where there are children involved. I think this is also why men do not face such a stark choice between children and career as do women: they can probably still rely on their female partners to shoulder the added domestic and family responsibilities, thereby freeing them, the men, to put in longer hours at work. Though, not to belabour the point, the women still end up doing more work overall.
So for women to really have "equal opportunities" in IT jobs (and elsewhere) would require first of all a societal change, with a more equal distribution of the unpaid work burden between women and men. Obviously, this would mean men in their turn would no longer be able to put in such long hours, and would therefore also require a change in the workplace culture, to one which puts less of a premium on "facetime" and more on actual performance/productivity.
For the record, I do (as one might suspect) happen to be a woman, I like technology, I used to be an industrial embedded systems developer (a job that put me under the metalworkers union collective contract here in Italy), and firmware/software would be still be my no.1 choice of work if it didn't interfere with picking up my son at 3.30 p.m. from preschool (and if the salaries on offer for an 8-hr day plus commute didn't correspond to only about 30% more than I can make working flexibly freelance from home just 4 hrs a day, though admittedly doing something less interesting).
Incidentally, I remember that in the hardware-firmware lab where I worked, PC-based software was generally looked upon as a rather 'girlie' endeavour, you know, undertaken by effeminate keyboard-tappers who wouldn't get their hands dirty poking round the innards of the machine... (I am just saying this to show how much unfounded prejudice there can be--within any group--against the members of some other group!)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there you are. And then she would end up having an account there too and he could at that point symmetrically accuse her of cheating. Or, alternatively, claim that he'd only signed up to check out whether she was a member.
Kind of like holding up one mirror in front of another one.
Yes, let's question it (the working environment):
Once upon a time, the men went out to work and the women stayed at home "in the kitchen", and society and the workplace were structured accordingly. The man provided for the family (monetarily) while the woman did the work necessary to make a household run smoothly (and economically! not for nothing do they call it "home economics"), look after the kids and possibly aged relatives, organise everybody's lives and so forth. This was an essential supporting role because, working long (or even normal) hours it's quite hard to have wholesome meals on the table, clean clothes etc. without spending a fortune on third party providers of such services (who will in any case never do certain things as lovingly as a wife or mother...)
Now however, women also go out to work, often in the same jobs as men, but society and the "rules" of the workplace have not really changed to accommodate this shift, so that in addition to their "official" work hours women tend to also continue doing their former tasks, essentially working if not two, then at least one-and-a half jobs. Consider, from the Fourth European Working Conditions Surveys (2005) :
- The results show clearly that working women spend more time in unpaid work than do working men in all European countries.
- While men work longer hours than women in paid employment in all countries, women in fact work more hours than men when paid and unpaid working hours are combined.
- When considering paid and unpaid work in combination as measured by the European Working Conditions Survey, female part-time workers work more hours in total per week than male full-time workers (56 against 54 hours).
I believe this added burden of unpaid work is the real reason why women are less tolerant of long hours (in paid work), all the more so where there are children involved. I think this is also why men do not face such a stark choice between children and career as do women: they can probably still rely on their female partners to shoulder the added domestic and family responsibilities, thereby freeing them, the men, to put in longer hours at work. Though, not to belabour the point, the women still end up doing more work overall.
So for women to really have "equal opportunities" in IT jobs (and elsewhere) would require first of all a societal change, with a more equal distribution of the unpaid work burden between women and men. Obviously, this would mean men in their turn would no longer be able to put in such long hours, and would therefore also require a change in the workplace culture, to one which puts less of a premium on "facetime" and more on actual performance/productivity.
For the record, I do (as one might suspect) happen to be a woman, I like technology, I used to be an industrial embedded systems developer (a job that put me under the metalworkers union collective contract here in Italy), and firmware/software would be still be my no.1 choice of work if it didn't interfere with picking up my son at 3.30 p.m. from preschool (and if the salaries on offer for an 8-hr day plus commute didn't correspond to only about 30% more than I can make working flexibly freelance from home just 4 hrs a day, though admittedly doing something less interesting).
Incidentally, I remember that in the hardware-firmware lab where I worked, PC-based software was generally looked upon as a rather 'girlie' endeavour, you know, undertaken by effeminate keyboard-tappers who wouldn't get their hands dirty poking round the innards of the machine... (I am just saying this to show how much unfounded prejudice there can be--within any group--against the members of some other group!)