I wish I knew how this post originated. I must have missed something.
I like what both Mary and Vinnie said. There _are_ still a lot of women
who buy into the idea that "playing dumb" is a good way to get guys to do
all of that oh-so-complicated stuff. Sadly, some of them aren't playing.
They actually believe that there is a whole world of "guy stuff" that they
are incapable of learning. There are those who have it bad, and those who
have it to a lesser degree. On this list's tech section, for example, how
many times do we see women post a question prefaced with something like,
"This is a really dumb question, but..." Do women have a predisposition
for feeling judged before they even perform an action? Or is it a remnant
of the old, "I'm here and I'm sorry" kind of thing? I'm 43 years old, and
I remember my mom telling me constantly, "Don't ask questions. Don't
bother people." I hope that is something which has gotten better since I
was a kid, but I believe it still exists.
As Vinnie said, guys have a way of speaking with confidence about that
which they know nothing. My favorite is the guy who said to me, "You
can't really explain how the internet works. It's all binary." I'm
laughing all over again about that one. What a dweeb!
I'm the only woman at my company. It's a small software company with 10
people... 9 guys and me. Anyway, there's one who will say things without
knowing what he's talking about and push to see if I'll back down. Today
he did it as we were discussing something to do with sendmail. We're
having some area-wide internet access problems right now in the Seattle
area. Web pages which are cached can be reached, whereas those not in the
cache are returning host not found errors. Something bad is going on with
DNS stuff. Anyway, I mentioned that email doesn't seem to be effected
the same way that web surfing is. Mike said, well that's because all of
the dns information for places you've emailed in the past is cached. "In
sendmail?" I asked. "Yes." he answered most emphatically. "How in the
world does sendmail do caching?" I returned. "Well, it just does. I'm
not sure exactly where, but it's part of every email client." "Hmmm." I
answered skeptically. Now, I know he's full of it. He knows he's full of
it, and he knows that I know he's full of it. Nuff said. With very few
words, I know how to say what amounts to, "I don't have any interest in
continuing a conversation with a moron."
I'm taking a course in C programming right now. There are 17 people in
the class. I'm the only woman who is not Asian. There are no black
people, no hispanics. There is one guy who is older than I, but all of
the other men are in their 20s. These guys rarely ask a question. All of
us women do. The men act like they're not learning anything new. It's
pretty funny. But it astonishes me that they are able to learn anything
at all. How can they master things like computer programming when they
are afraid to ask directions? When they have to keep up that macho front?
This is a mystery to me.
Oh, well...thanks to both of you for your comments.
Nancy
On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Vinnie wrote:
> 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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