Rebecca Ore on Tue, 13 May 2003 17:37:14 -0400


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Re: [PLUG] Philly Linux Chix


On Tue, 13 May 2003, Edward M. Corrado wrote:

> 
> Actually, come to think of it I have not seen much more then a few
> isolated incidents to say that there has been much discrimination
> against women from IT professionals[1], but this may be more a function of
> where I have worked (all my jobs in the IT area have been in academia or
> the library world which tends to be much more progressive then say, the
> corporate world) then reality. Not to mention that a women could
> probably rightly say (at least to some extent) that since I'm a guy I
> may have had my head in the sand and didn't notice the incidents.

The word in other venues that academic IT departments are often
fifty-fifty; this hasn't been the case where I've worked in Philadelphia
or what I've heard about other commercial work places here.

Events like LISA have noticably more women than events like LinuxExpo or
whatever it was I went to in NYC a few years ago.

What I've heard about Temple's IT department is that it's hard to get
women to take the classes.  

Sometimes the fact that there aren't others like oneself isn't really an
artifact of prejudice, but my black students got very nervous when I
took them for a drive into the NC mountains and they didn't see other
blacks around.  The people we did meet were utterly civil, but I was
doing a lot of both way explaining so that the church folks with the
bake sale didn't feel offended and the black kids didn't feel like they
were buying from the Klan.

On the other hand, sometimes there are unpleasant reasons for there not
being any women programmers or sysadmins.  Hard to figure in the
abstract, really.  I have worked more than once for people who actively
discouraged women from trying anything other than straight secretarial
support work.

> 
> What does this all have to do with anything? I have no idea - probably
> nothing, but I thought it might provide a little background into where I'm
> coming from. 
> 
> If my presumption is correct that almost all of the people involved with
> LUGs would like to see more female involvement, how is that accomplished?
> 
> I wish I had a clue on how to answer this - but I really don't. However, I
> think this is probably a very good question to look into. If anyone does
> have some ideas, especially the women on the list, I'd love to hear them
> because I think it is something that should be investigated. Besides an
> answer to the general question on "how to get more women to a LUG
> meeting?" I'd like to hear some suggestions on what type of questions LUGs
> should be asking of themselves and what they should be asking of female
> Linux users.
> 
> Ed C.
> 
> 
> [1] I say from inside of the profession versus not at all because I have
> seen many more cases of people from outside the IT departments thinking
> that because I sound like a guy on the phone I'd be better able to help
> them with a question. Ironically, I've seen this work the other way in
> Library-land when people can't possibly believe that I'm the correct
> person to help them with a reference question since I'm a man.
> 
> [2] LUG/IP is the Linux Users Group/In Princeton (NJ). For information go
> to http://www.lugip.org or e-mail me.
> 
> _________________________________________________________________________
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-- 
Rebecca Ore
http://mysite.verizon.net/rebecca.ore

_________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group        --       http://www.phillylinux.org
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