Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
On Jan 14, 2007, at 10:54 AM, Todd Walton wrote:
What are you getting upset about? You're not a chick, you're a
developer.
That's even worse than your original comment. So bad that I have to
wonder if you're kidding, which wouldn't make it any better.
No, he's completely serious, being the greatly insensitive clod that he
is. We should all gang up together and roll him at the next meeting.
...
Sheesh, people, what's with the sudden uptightness?
First, you are correct. Lan has a dry wit. One of the hazards of a dry
wit is the ability to be misunderstood. Doubly so in email. You may
note that I don't take particular offense at Lan calling me part of the
religious developer whackos in his second retort.
Second, Lan often sounds off about source control stuff since it is near
and dear to his heart. What his actual target was was *very* unclear.
He could have been targeting: me, the Mercurial chooser, the Git
chooser, RedHat, developers who don't use SVN, generic developers in
general, all of the above, none of the above. I have no problem with
any of this as I like a good rough and tumble debate as much as anybody.
So, I chose a subset of those and nailed a response to see which ones
Lan was actually targeting.
Third, while I am not a believer that female/male ratio numbers should a
priori be equal in computers, there are many little things which stack
up to drive out some who should be there. Research continues to accrue
that discrimination borne of microreactions is far more important than
overt group pressure. Lan's offhanded comment made me cringe twice. It
would also make some of the female portion of one of my teams or one of
my classes cringe while the rest would simply mumble "stereotypical male
developer" even if they found it humorous. And one woman I know would
say, "You just try to swap my Caps and Control keys and see what I do
with this rusty fork ..."
Finally, his comment is a subset of the "well, if women were in charge
...". One of the nice things about the 21st century is that we finally
have some women in true upper management slots. In the true spirit of
equality, they are turning out to run the gamut of competent,
incompetent, generous, nasty, trustworthy, criminal, etc. just like
their male counterparts. The fact that both sexes really do appear to
be pretty equal in both good *and* bad characteristics gives me great
hope for the future.
-a
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