Re: gender mix

>>>>> "E-A" == Elaine -HFB- Ashton <[email protected]> writes:

  E-A> More women are in 'web design' because it is hot and the industry
  E-A> is hiring anyone who can spell http. Women who are starting to
  E-A> find that they can make more money than being a lowly research
  E-A> assistant with a masters degree in a hard science and can easily
  E-A> make this jump. If you contend that women are more often
  E-A> associated with the aesthetics of the design, this is probably
  E-A> true but has nothing to do with ability to grok all three volumes
  E-A> of Knuth.

you missed my point. women (for whatever reason, cultural or gender)
have been a force in the graphic arts and publishing worlds for
generations. there is no geek stigma to overcome and plenty of women
coworkers around you. migrating from there to web design is a natural
thing. most of the web designers are not geeks but artistic types who
use tools for their html. in fact many of them don't even know html at
all, they just know how to use a web editor. we hired a web designer
recently who was just like that. she knew frontpage and photoshop and
did fine creative work. and she definitely says there are many women in
that field. and the women randal and i were talking to agreed with
that. but as you get deeper into web design, perl crops up more and more
and that is why those women took randal's class at that web
conference. they are coming from the other direction than traditional
geeks. and the geek side is still predominantly male (i won't go into
any reasons). 

so some perl classes in the right circumstances may have much higher
female ratios than others. this means if you want to attract more women
to your classes, market them in ways that will get to those in the web
design fields as opposed to the regular programming jobs. perl is a way
for them to expand on their web skills

  E-A> And, web site building IS technical and I wish more people would
  E-A> get that so we would get better web sites that wouldn't be quite
  E-A> so punishing on the users/surfers and on the sysadmins like
  E-A> myself charged with keeping the bloody things running when
  E-A> someone has made extremely poor design choices.  Web sites are a
  E-A> heck of a lot more than HTML these days...

i agree, which is why these web designers are starting to learn perl and
other non-html stuff. but telling then that to their face won't get them
(women in particular) to learn perl. marketing perl classes to them as a
way to improve their web skills and get bigger and better projects would
seem the best approach.

  E-A> I don't think that Grace Hopper is alone in history or in the
  E-A> present of computing and the sciences. There are just too many
  E-A> people saying that chicks don't dig math, etc. If you say
  E-A> something often enough it starts to become a self-fulfilling
  E-A> prophecy.

but name another famous female from that era of computing? grace was an
admirable and singular woman in a sea of men. (puns intended).

uri

-- 
Uri Guttman  ---------  [email protected]  ----------  http://www.sysarch.com
SYStems ARCHitecture, Software Engineering, Perl, Internet, UNIX Consulting
The Perl Books Page  -----------  http://www.sysarch.com/cgi-bin/perl_books
The Best Search Engine on the Net  ----------  http://www.northernlight.com