Re: gender mix

Eek.  Please tell me this list hasn't turned into Mars Needs Women.
I guess for the moment it has.

My observation is that there is a particular type of computing activity
that I almost never see women in, and that might best be described as
software "point," as in "point man."  Figuring out how to do something
with few or no guidelines, ripping up a current approach and starting
over, coming up with and implementing and defending a new approach.

Donna, for example, is a very skilled and clear-thinking programmer.
But she doesn't seem to come up with the Big Ideas.  She takes bits
and pieces and fits them together, mutates them, writes whatever is
needed to fill in the gaps.  She doesn't visualize and create whole 
new things as a rule.

This is what I think of as the ego-driven, "impractical" side of
software development.  My desire to create software isn't always
driven by utility or pragmatic concerns.  In fact the things that I
feel most compelled to do are often contrary to the obvious path.
I do them because I'm stubborn and contrary and feel like my vision
of things is a better one than the way things currently are.  Like
I said, ego-driven.

I have known a few women, Donna for example, who play computer games
(for 16 hours at a stretch just like guys), who have an excellent
grasp of programming and architecture concepts, who know what's
a hack and what's elegant, and so on, but do I know any women who
are working on the next rn or Mosaic or Perl?  No.  In fairness, of
course, although there are a lot of guys working on the Next Great 
Thing, few of them accomplish it.  But some men seem driven to do 
this.  I know women who are similarly singleminded and ego-driven
and creative, but in other fields.  Art, literature, music, math,
science, and the like.

I think this is at least partly cultural, as I have seen more Asian
and Indian women who tend toward this type of activity in engineering
or in-between fields like medicine, biotechnology, law.  I may well
have made the acquaintance of some women who are indeed "from-the-
ground-up-hackers" in the computer world but I don't know specifically, 
personally, of any who are.

I'm not going to comment on whether I think this is a biologically
founded distinction, in part or in whole, or whether it has to do
with white male domination of the world, or anything like that.
I'm not qualified to render such a judgment and I'm not really 
interested in it anyway.

  -joseph

--
Joseph N. Hall, 5 Sigma Productions        mailto:" <joseph> "@5sigma.com
Author, Effective Perl Programming . . . . . http://www.effectiveperl.com
Perl Training  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  http://www.perltraining.com

On Mon, 17 Jan 2000 10:29:59 -0600 [email protected] (Elaine -HFB- Ashton)
wrote:

* Madeline Schnapp [[email protected]] quoth:
* *>
* *>I have interviewed several male Perl programmers that work for two
* *>companies that actually develop products and services completely with Perl
*
* Interesting perspective. Have you interviewed any of the women? One
* thought I have is that many of the women don't get sent to training for
* one reason or another. The computing field is *SO* homogenously white male
* that I don't accept the idea that well, white guys are the only ones
* either good at this or like this type of work...in fact, there are a lot
* of guys who aren't that good at it :)
*
* Perhaps ORA could poll the companies who send people to TPC as to how many
* women they employ and how many they will be sending to the conference and
* perhaps get them to comment. It gets really old going to these things with
* all the good old married guys who talk in the conference about how the
* wife or the little woman is out shopping, etc.
*
* *>So you are a female programmer, why do you like programming?  Was your Mom
* *>a programmer?  What kindled your interest?
*
* I'm an SA, a different kind of problem solver. :) And, my father was an
* EE, mom ran out-paitient surgery and, out of 4 daughters there are 2
* Martha Stewarts, me and a nurse practitioner who makes me look like Mary
* Poppins. I have no explanations as to why or how I was interested in
* science from a very early age.