On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Wood, Mary wrote:
> ***GENERALIZATION WARNING***
> In a lot of ways, I feel that the biggest obstacle women
> have to overcome to achieve equal status is the female
> gender en masse. For every one of us who is honest and
> confident about her abilities, there seems to be a lot
> more playing the helpless, submissive housewife role
Interesting -- I took this a different way. While I agree that women are
more likely to be somewhat modest (defined as slightly underestimating
their skills) I think men are way more likely to overestimate. In my
experience, I've had plenty of clueless conversations with men (ranging
from "my modem is 56k so you ought to be able to connect at that speed
even with your 14.4" to "isapnp works with pci pnp devices" to "the reason
that windows sucks so much is because they forgot to close brackets" and
so many more! :) ). This is also a big generalization, but I think it's
accurate to say that while the clueless who don't believe they are are a
very small subset of men, 100% of the ones I have met (and having been a
PC Tech and done my time in tech support, this gives one plenty of chance
to meet the clueless :) ) have been male. Women are on the whole more
clueless (another big generalization) but they also are willing to admit
it and won't spend fifteen minutes trying to convince me of things that
break laws of physics :)
That said, what I found really interesting about your response was the
assumption that women were doing something wrong. While I agree that women
do need to have obvious confidence in whatever they do, and it's lacking a
lot of the time (I also think that there are reasons for this -- like if I
say I can do something, and then can't, *someone* will bring up the
possibility that it's because I'm female, whereas I've never seen anyone
say "he can't do X on the computer because he's a guy" ) I also think that
the societal structures that have guys convinced that they should/must
brag about their computer skills and stick to their guns even when they're
wrong bear some looking at too.
V.
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