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This is a complicated and (evidently) emotive issue and the following does not represent my sum total of feelings and ideas on the subject, but might be an interesting point of view. I'd certainly be interested in people's responses to this and how it might or might not apply to tech jobs more generally.

Firstly, I am not in favour of positive discrimination or quotas, or giving someone of a particular gender/race/whatever a job because it fulfills some kind of social engineering criterion.

However, speaking as someone who seems to have been 'hardwired' (or whatever the reason is, I don't pretend to know) to enjoy a lot of things which are typically male dominated, and speaking from some (limited) experience of the recruitment procedures of a few of these fields, and experience of currently working in a very male dominated software/hardware/systems engineering group, these are some of my thoughts:

I have come round to the idea of 'positive promotion' if I can call it that. What I mean by that is "the promotion of a particular career choice to groups which are currently under-represented within that career."

Why? Because regardless of whether you think there are 'too few' or 'too many' (for example) women in (for example) perl (how you would ever measure that I don't pretend to know), it can be intimidating and off-putting to enter a job where (as someone earlier said better than I will) you look around and don't see people (superficially?) like you. You might (even subconsciously), or perhaps due to stereotypes/discriminatory opinions which haven't died yet, start to think

  • 'Why aren't there more female/black/male software engineers/firefighters/nurses?'
  • 'Is there some kind of bias that I don't know about?'
  • 'Is there something that might make me less good at this job because of my gender/race/whatever?'

There are, I'm sure, people confident enough in their own abilities not to ever worry about these issures. But there are also at least some who are not. Of course, you've got to take care not to go too far and discourage the people making up the typical demographic of your career by making them feel no longer welcome and this can be a difficult balance to get right.

As a concrete exmple, in my opinion, the UK fire and rescue service (at least some brigades, I won't mention specific ones) have a good attitude to female recruitment. They run 'positive action' days for women, which are designed to show interested women what the career is about, to show them that the infrastructure is in place to make a very under-represented group (female firefighters currently make up afaik ~2-3% of total firefighters) feel 'welcome', and to show that it is possible to make a success out of a career in a field which many girls would never consider 'open' to women. It also made very clear that female firefighters had to pass the same strength, fitness and aptitude tests, do the same training, and do exactly the same job as a male firefighter, but that these things were all possible.

When I was looking into careers in the military, I got more of an impression that females were grudingly accepted rather than welcomed. This is not because at any point someone went 'oh but you're a woman---why on earth are you thinking about doing this?' but rather an accumulation of little things: someone saying 'oh you won't be interested in engineering, you need A-levels in maths, physics, etc. for that' (they were aware I am educated to degree level and for the record I have a degree in physics, all of which was on a sheet in front of them. I can't prove that he assumed that because I'm female, but I can't think of any other reason.); the fact that height requirements are biased towards men's average heights; the fact that women aren't allowed in some branches.

Now, I have always felt that all this 'positive action' stuff was a bit namby pamby and uneccessary, and if I think about it logically, there's no reason for me not to follow either career should I want, but when I think about it purely emotionally, I have a positive impression of the fire service, and this slight niggling feeling that I might not be welcome in the military.

Here's an interesting twist though: as I understand it, the fire service is suddenly interested in getting women involved in the fire service because of government quotas. If it is making it easier for women to get in compared with men (which I doubt is happening strongly (at least I really hope not) because most of the tests are objective---strength, fitness, multiple choice tests) then I think that's wrong. But the result at the 'front end' i.e. raising awareness and making women feel comfortable is, imo, good. So does this mean that quotas are needed to force people/organisations to face up to the issue of discrimination/under-representation rather than just paying lip-service to it? I don't know. I still don't agree with quotas, although in this instance they seem to have had a positive outcome (the good awareness campaign).

This thread already seems to have deviated from both perl and its original topic so I hope you'll forgive me for being somewhat off-topic..

some_bird

p.s. I've posted this anonymously because I'm a paranoiac about writing about careers/potential careers online! :)

In reply to Re^2: Women in Perl - Ada Lovelace Day by Anonymous Monk
in thread Women in Perl - Ada Lovelace Day by Anonymous Monk

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