Recovered from the Wayback machine.
update
This discussion in Kevin’s comments has quickly degenerated into how women and men are different, physically, and how women can’t do math and engineering. I would stay to uphold the fight against this attitude, but I have to go to work. Doing the thing I should not be able to do, being a woman and not having the brain for the work.
Earlier
Kevin Drum, aka Calpundit, reflected on an article out today in the LA Times about the lack of women in IT, saying it reminded him of the previous writing I did, Outside even among the Outsiders. He writes:
I imagine this is at least part of the reason for the relative lack of women in IT: they feel enormously pressured by the obsessive, almost semi-autistic nature of some of their prospective IT colleagues. In most of the IT groups that I’ve been involved with, you have to be willing to engage in rhetorical near-war in order to be heard, and you have to put up with challenges to your ideas that are so aggressive, so intense, and so basically anti-social that it’s almost impossible not to take them as personal affronts.
I have seen this aggressive behavior, frequently, in IT. However, as one person mentioned in the comments attached to Kevin’s post, women in IT can also demonstrate this same aggressive behavior. Perhaps it has something to do with getting instant obedience from our computers, and demanding the same from those we work with?
I do know that IT is very competitive, a culture I think that originated with the early computer people, part of the older scientific community’s need to prove my brain is bigger than yours. This competition is probably responsible for 80% of our innovation. However, it’s also probably responsible for 80% of our inability to agree on standards, as well as 80% of application development failures.
Anyway, interesting and thoughtful post and discussion at Kevin’s on this topic.