On Dec 11, 2011, at 9:38 PM, Cat Okita wrote: > I dearly hope that you're wearing your asbestos underwear :P
Always! :-) >> I was really pleased to look around LISA this past week and see a focus on >> getting women involved and interested in careers in the tech industry, and >> sysadmin work in particular. But I also saw a decent number of women at >> LISA. We know that LISA skews higher, attendance-wise, than the actual >> industry does, but still. There were quite a few. > > Quite a few? Would that be up to 5%, perhaps? Indeed. I don't have the demographics, but it's a percentage that continues (thankfully) to at least appear to improve year-over-year. > ITYM "People that were clearly black to my eyes" -- which isn't necessarily > the same thing (and I'm a tad surprised that you're only looking at US-based > sysadmins of colour there ... and that there's only one colour, at that…) Well, I think you might be taking my statement a little pedantically. Obviously, I mean anyone of, let's say, African descent (and please let's not get überpedantic about this and try to point out that northern-African/Arabic demographics are actually somewhat well represented, proportionally speaking). > While I'm sure you're intending this to be "Hey, look, we've got another > problem" rather than "Eh, women, we're up to 5%, that's plenty", Which is not at all what I said, so I'd hope nobody would take that from it > (b) phrasing the question as an inclusive "in addition to" instead > of a "this is more important than an existing problem" Well, I think it might in fact be both. It's certain an additional/different problem, and I'm not suggesting "5% is enough" when it comes to female tech employees. However, it could also in fact be considered to be a worse problem. When a significant population-segment has *near-zero* representation that might be considered to be representative of an even larger problem than one of simply a reduced representation. Cheers, D _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
