I don't have the energy for a long response, but my feelings can be summed up as thus: misogyny is everywhere in American culture, in every profession. Is it worse for women in IT? I would say that it has barely affected me at all, but I have spent my career at very large companies with serious commitments to diversity and decent HR departments.
The place where I feel it most is in the comments on tech-focused blogs and bulletin boards when topics related to women come up. Slashdot is so bad I had to quit the site. HN is pretty much only ok because the topic rarely comes up, but even pg has expressed the kind of juvenile "yuk yuk I prefer when entrepreneurs aren't 'PC'" sentiment that serves to encourage bad behavior and silence criticism of it. He has lost a significant amount of respect in my eyes, and left me very wary of the startup scene in general.
But in the end, It will never get better if women avoid the profession. I would like to believe that most of the men in the field actually do respect women even though, when presented with a totally male frat house working environment, one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. But tech is in my mind one of the areas women need to embrace if we really want to achieve economic equality. It is not a glamorous profession most of the time, it is hard, but it is a profession that you can raise a family on. I would absolutely encourage any young woman I knew to go into tech, although I think the "sys admin" job is a poor choice because that is a dying breed.
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Date: 2010-06-03 01:12 am (UTC)The place where I feel it most is in the comments on tech-focused blogs and bulletin boards when topics related to women come up. Slashdot is so bad I had to quit the site. HN is pretty much only ok because the topic rarely comes up, but even pg has expressed the kind of juvenile "yuk yuk I prefer when entrepreneurs aren't 'PC'" sentiment that serves to encourage bad behavior and silence criticism of it. He has lost a significant amount of respect in my eyes, and left me very wary of the startup scene in general.
But in the end, It will never get better if women avoid the profession. I would like to believe that most of the men in the field actually do respect women even though, when presented with a totally male frat house working environment, one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. But tech is in my mind one of the areas women need to embrace if we really want to achieve economic equality. It is not a glamorous profession most of the time, it is hard, but it is a profession that you can raise a family on. I would absolutely encourage any young woman I knew to go into tech, although I think the "sys admin" job is a poor choice because that is a dying breed.