At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical juvenile male chauvinist (apparently easy to earn that stamp in here), it is my experiences from the women I've worked with in university and real life etc. that they favor the "softer" areas around CS (management, analysis, requirements, planning, estimation, negotiation). Mind you, that is not the same as saying there aren't any female hackers, or that they are bad... but evidently they are few and far in between. I could easily mention 10+ male hackers, whereas I'd be hard pressed to do the same for female hackers. How about you?
My wife works within childcare, she has never had a male colleague (though they exist) and so any man would certainly stand out and potentially be subject to whichever skewed environment has grown to be the norm there. For what it's worth, I think the open source story has been blown somewhat out of proportion (you can always find extremes) and if there *is* something there, it's must be the result of a general lack of exposure to women within our industry. Some comments in this thread makes me think it's taboo to talk about this difference, even if it is very much a real thing. On Dec 8, 1:09 pm, Carl Jokl <[email protected]> wrote: > I wonder if it is simplistic of me to think that there are fewer women > who are interested in Computer Science also that having subjects or > areas which attract one gender more than another doesn't have to be a > problem and doesn't have to be because it is being actively > discouraged. > > I wonder if any male dominated environment would feel uncomfortable to > women and a female dominated environment could feel uncomfortable to > men. > > I have worked in one small office environment which did feel pretty > testosterone charged. There were not that many developers to begin > with and no female developers. The only women in the company were > basically reception and admin. > > When conversations were had about past experiences with recruiting > female developers, remarks were made about finding them like "a > chocolate fireguard", very tasty but not a lot of use. > > I had worked at other larger companies which had had some female > developers. I had known some extremely competent ones. I thought it > would have done some of the staff good to have met some of those. > > One of the male project managers had his sexuality questioned due to > coming into work wearing a jumper. The company at one point had some > representatives in from a recruitment agency. One of the > representatives was an attractive young professional woman. You would > have thought from the reaction of some of the staff that they hadn't > seen a woman before. > > I found the whole attitude very juvenile and like being back at high > school. This was just one place and I hope an exception and not the > rule. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
