> 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.
This was the hardest thing for me to realize when I entered the IT
field. If I'm not sure about an issue, I'm way more likely to look it up
to make sure before I make a comment, which doesn't seem to be true of
most of the men I've encountered in IT. I had to learn to separate
different types of people based on their personality, and then decide what
is truth and what is just 'talk'. I suppose that's true in all fields, but
it's so blatent here in IT, because there's so many different ways to
do the same things, and of course everyone thinks their way is right.
The second biggest obstacle I had to overcome was
acronyms. pcwebopedia.com saved my career.
Jen
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.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> issues mailing list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/issues
>
_______________________________________________
issues mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/issues
