So I'm annoyed. What's new, right?
One of the fastest and surest ways to piss me off is to be a misogynist. I'm hardly a militant feminist because some of their "arguments" are seriously absurd. But I'm fed up. Really.
FIRSTLY: the "women in the kitchen" and "make me a sandwich" jokes. If you think these are funny, fuck you and fuck everything you stand for and fuck everything you have ever loved. There's not a whole lot else I can say.
SECONDLY: How women are perceived in the world of IT and tech. This is a complicated issue, because on one hand my experience says one thing and mass media says something completely different. In my personal experience I've only gotten a slight whiff of sexism in the workplace, and exclusively from my last place of work.
But if you believe the media (oh, that wacky, nebulous media machine), the handful of us vag-possessors are browbeaten on all sides, struggle for positions of power, and are all forced to deliver blowjobs in server rooms across the country for a shred of recognition in our respective companies. But there are so few of us that the question is asked: why are there so few women in tech? And it's asked over and over and over and over and over.
But here's the thing: we're already here! Hi! Yoo hoo! Over here! And over there! And over there too! We're here working our asses off every day the same as anyone else in any other industry, male or female. Nobody in the real world seems to be making much of a stink about the fact that we have ovaries and are fixing computers because we're just doing our jobs.
By making a stink about gender ratios and whatever bullshit affirmative action-type programs that should be magicked out of the air across the business world to bring more vaginas to the party, the stink-raisers are only marginalizing us further. It doesn't have to be us-versus-them, male-versus-female, or any other polarizing make-believe. We're all just humans doing our jobs. Ants in the hill. Lemmings on the same treadmill.
And then there's the sexualizing. Because surely all any woman wants to do is take their clothes off and appear on the cover of a magazine, no matter how much innovation and technical knowledge she brings to the field.
That all said, I do like the idea of networking. We can trade war stories or deal with workplace issues as they come up as a community of females who happen to share an affinity for technology. I'm all for that.
What pisses me off about organizations like Girls In Tech ("Girls"? Really?) is that they're lumping PR and marketing in with tech. Frankly, it's off-putting. My job is so far away from PR and marketing it's not even funny. I don't want anything to do with that industry. If I'm going to network with someone, it's only going to be useful to me if I can have a discussion about how other companies are handling wireless security in the office, or which commercial MPLS options make the most sense for the size of a business, or who makes the best business-class laptops. I don't give a rat's ass about building brands, corporate social networking, anything involving the word "leveraging", spin, adspace, or SEO.
Miscellaneous crap pertaining to the in-between life of an in-between girl called PikaPikaChick.
1 comment:
I'm with you on really disliking the broad (bad pun! Har!) definition of "women in tech." One of the networking groups I used to rely on for great advice on programming tasks has disintegrated into uselessness, thanks to an "inclusive" policy which rendered its mailing list a male chauvinist's dream of unimportant, time-wasting chatter.
For all the hand-wringing about the numbers of women in tech, there seems to be precious little concern for *retaining* women who are already working in tech. The emphasis seems to be, as you've noted, on input, on girls. Is the problem of female attrition mid-career just too embarrassing for the industry to confront?
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