From: stewart@geophysics.harvard.edu (Cheryl Stewart)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: on-line discrimination
Date: 21 Nov 1992 20:04:22 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Distribution: world
Reply-To: stewart@geophysics.harvard.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

  Gender and the Cultural Construction of Computing

..

This is a terrific article, and very accurate in the areas it actually
investigates.

One area that I find terribly fascinating, that often goes unnoticed,
however, is in the differences in tasks actually assigned women vs.
men in their first "programming" job.  

I've observed that women often wind up doing the documentation in their
groups, even if their background is CS or Mathematics or Physics, while
in the group down the hall, there's also a woman doing the documentation
who was promoted to the position of technical writer from secretary, has
a degree in English.  It's very strange.  

It's like technical writing has become a real women's ghetto in the computer
world that it seems acceptable to push women into regardless of their bona
fide qualifications.  How much you wanna bet they wind up making the same
stinking salary after 10 years of that, when the men get much bigger promotions ---
because they did the "real" work. 

So I have a question.  How much effort do women have to put into making
sure they stay in the technology-creating main stream, how much push do 
you feel toward the outer edges in the types of tasks you're encouraged or
ordered to do in your day-to-day work?  

Do you feel that women are shunted into "management" too soon sometimes,
leaving them without the hard technical experience and accomplishments,
thus setting them up to be leap-frogged by younger men (whom they will
no doubt be asked to train?)

The reason I ask is that I wound up being pushed into sort of a 
"user services" role (show users how to log in!  do graphics!  
eat their lunch!) when my actual education and experience was 
entirely technical.  I really had no interest in "working with
people" yet because I was female, it was assumed I would be good
at it!  Personally, I can't stand most people, and particularly
dislike some pimply 22-year-old grad student treating me like 
his  unix scullery maid.  For instance.  

I'm just a  misanthropist.  It's why I prefer dealing with computers 
than people.  But because I'm female, I'm supposed to want to help
people.  Shoot.  Whenever *I* wanted the answer to anything,
I had to RTFM.  It was good enough for me, it's good enough for
them.  If I asked a sysadmin a question, I would be patronized
like some stupid girl that never made it past trigonometry.  Oh,
but if a guy asks me a question, I'm supposed to read the manual
to him like his momma reading him a bed-time story.  Even if 4 new
machines arrived, the disk just crashed across campus and there's
a broadcast storm on subnet 32 caused by someone's ancient VMS
behemoth that they keep around to warm up the basement. Cripes.

It drove me back to graduate school.  Thank God.  


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