On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 7:20 AM, Lucy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > computers is mainly because of social upbringing. For example, in > India (and some other asian countries) there are more equal numbers of > men and women working in programming). It wasn't so long ago that
This wasn't my experience during my 2 months at Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram, training IT developers and interviewing for new ones. There wasn't one woman involved in the IT area, which numbered about 20 or 30 personnel, and not one of our interviewees were female. I was actually surprised at this. In contrast, in the call centre which was in another wing of the same building, there were hugely more women than men. What worries me about any thread such as this is that there is a serious danger that we create allegations of discrimination when in reality it's just the way it is - women are programmed differently to men (no pun intended) and seem, from my observations at least, to drift by default into different types of job to their male counterparts. The nursing profession, for instance, is dominated by women whereas road builders and railway maintenance engineers appears to be virtually a male domain. I grew up in a very exciting period when it came to computers, just as the home computer concept was starting. My school in Glastonbury initially had an RML-380Z which did exciting things like text-based puzzles and not much more. The BBC Micro then arrived in my second year of secondary school and we used to play "Digger" and "Space Invaders" at lunchtime. A fella called Hogan then took over the maths department and set up a network of Commodore 64s in the Maths Room - it was always a fight between the BBCs in the science dept. and the Commodores in Maths. BBC was most definitely the better, though - you could actually do things without having to use PEEK and POKE all the time. For 'A' Levels I went to the private sports-orientated school Millfield. They had a really nifty Econet network, which ran on 5.25" floppy disks. But technology was improving at a pace and by the time of my upper sixth this had been replaced with a network of BBC Master Series computers with (shock!) hard drives for storage. Interesting thing here was that it wasn't trendy at all to be involved with computers - you sort of got sidelined, called nerds, and so I had to also do cross-country running to keep my reputation intact and visit the Computer Room with dark glasses and false beard. As for women on computers, there was only Mrs Thomas (God bless her!) - no Millfield girls would have been seen dead near a computer. During my time there, however, I met the mighty Hugo Fiennes who is now working (I believe) for one of the major MP3 player manufacturers, having sold his EMPEG business to them which was a pioneering car MP3 player which achieved relatively cult status in the mid-90s. But this was much earlier... together we coded a BBC-micro based BBS system called Viewdata+ which was based on Prestel and at one stage had 7-10 Sysops around the UK using it. But I never recall any females phoning my BB. Sean -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
