On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Jenny Brown (was Gable) wrote:
>
> It doesn't bother me that there are guys on linuxchix... I just
> wish there were more outspoken women! :) I'm not in much of
> a position to contribute though, as I'm still a beginniner with
> linux myself; my talents are in programming.
>
I wonder if the guys just tend to bull ahead with answers, and more women
second-guess themselves--that seems to be a common pattern of how men and
women react in general. I know I do this myself quite a bit. I'm not a
Linux guru, but I'm far from being a beginner, or at least I should be,
having used Linux for 6 years, and using it as my primary operating system
for 5 1/2 years. But I *still* don't feel confident that I can answer
many people's questions. One thing I think is that I'm a more hands-on
type of person--I have trouble figuring out what's wrong with someone's
system unless I have access to it. I wonder if other people are like
this, or if many women are particularly like this?
One confidence-boosting thing happened to me a few years ago--a friend of
mine was having trouble using his Linux shell account. I logged in his
account and instantly found out what was wrong, called up the system
administrator of his ISP and told the sysadmin exactly what to fix. But
unfortunately I second-guess myself when someone posts with even a simple
problem, and get frustrated that I can't look at the system myself. It
helps if people make the posts long and detailed, with exactly the right
logs and output I need to look at, since I can't do it myself on their
system. I don't even *think* about typing dmesg or looking at the output
of ls--I just do it, and figure out the problem on the fly. I guess I
relate to computers intuitively, and find it hard to abstract enough to
give others advice. I also don't want to look like a big dummy. :)
I'm sure the lack-of-confidence and second-guessing, if any goes on
here, is specifically a 'woman thing', but I don't know about the hands-on
or intuitive thing--I think that might be just me. Anybody have any ideas
on that?
psyche
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