I probably wouldn't encourage other women to enter the field, either. It's not the brutal experiences in sexism: the guys who were cabling the unix lab I managed who had extensive meetings with me about where I wanted the ports and then wished me a happy secretary's day; the interview where the guy told me that he hadn't wanted to interview girls today but it turns out that I was actually competent; the co-worker who harassed me for years after a bad divorce and the bosses who either did nothing or lied to the guy and told him they'd seen me crying over his treatment of me so couldn't he lay off it; the boss who tried to bring me to his viewpoint by saying "this is your dad speaking". Those brutal experiences invite brutal responses, and I know how to play political hardball.
It's not even the random experiences of gender disconnect: the new co-worker who had to take 30 seconds to process out loud about how I'm really technical for a woman as if I've never heard that before before he started to geek out with me like he would have a guy; the blog entries and speakers that went along about the common geek experience, lulling me into the sense that just maybe they understood that it transcends gender before they made a gendered joke, perhaps about how we're all the same in that the wife just doesn't understand about our need to packrat hardware, to remind me that they consider me an outsider; the constant use of "your mother" as the archetypical naive user as if some of their geek friends weren't *already* mothers. Those serve to remind me that a lot of people forget that it's OUR world now, too... but as an eternal optimist I have hope that with excellent work and a working sense of humor, we can remind them.
No, the thing that really gets me is that these all point to a fact that's immutable and beyond my control to change: as long as I am in this field, I have to constantly confront my belief that I get paid less and treated as a less valuable employee than my male co-workers of the same level. And that it's almost worse that that belief is likely to be untrue during some parts of my career... because the odds are, it's true much more often than it's false. And so I get to second-guess continually: would I have gotten that raise if I were born with a penis? Would my boss have rated me higher? Would my co-workers listen to me more? Would I be able to work a little less hard or a little less long of hours for the same result?
no subject
I probably wouldn't encourage other women to enter the field, either. It's not the brutal experiences in sexism: the guys who were cabling the unix lab I managed who had extensive meetings with me about where I wanted the ports and then wished me a happy secretary's day; the interview where the guy told me that he hadn't wanted to interview girls today but it turns out that I was actually competent; the co-worker who harassed me for years after a bad divorce and the bosses who either did nothing or lied to the guy and told him they'd seen me crying over his treatment of me so couldn't he lay off it; the boss who tried to bring me to his viewpoint by saying "this is your dad speaking". Those brutal experiences invite brutal responses, and I know how to play political hardball.
It's not even the random experiences of gender disconnect: the new co-worker who had to take 30 seconds to process out loud about how I'm really technical for a woman as if I've never heard that before before he started to geek out with me like he would have a guy; the blog entries and speakers that went along about the common geek experience, lulling me into the sense that just maybe they understood that it transcends gender before they made a gendered joke, perhaps about how we're all the same in that the wife just doesn't understand about our need to packrat hardware, to remind me that they consider me an outsider; the constant use of "your mother" as the archetypical naive user as if some of their geek friends weren't *already* mothers. Those serve to remind me that a lot of people forget that it's OUR world now, too... but as an eternal optimist I have hope that with excellent work and a working sense of humor, we can remind them.
No, the thing that really gets me is that these all point to a fact that's immutable and beyond my control to change: as long as I am in this field, I have to constantly confront my belief that I get paid less and treated as a less valuable employee than my male co-workers of the same level. And that it's almost worse that that belief is likely to be untrue during some parts of my career... because the odds are, it's true much more often than it's false. And so I get to second-guess continually: would I have gotten that raise if I were born with a penis? Would my boss have rated me higher? Would my co-workers listen to me more? Would I be able to work a little less hard or a little less long of hours for the same result?