[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Wed Nov 22 14:35:25 UTC 2006

David Gerard wrote:
>
> Also, you know how any technical field laments the strange lack of
> women? Technical fields have had that strange lack of women for a
> hundred years and still there's no solution to what the heck is
> culling them so early.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
>   
This is not anything but anecdotal, however it may shed some light: when 
I was in high school, I signed up for wood shop - and the instructor 
ignored me. It was as though I were inaudible and invisible. He would 
hand out materials for an assignment, except I didn't get any. If  stood 
in front of him with my hands out, I did receive a cold stare until I 
moved - but not a scrap of wood. If I reached for a tool, he grabbed it 
first or took it out of my hands. If I asked a question, there was no 
reply - none. This is not an exaggeration. I don't know how bad it is 
now, but then... it was bad. I dropped out of shop. To this day I don't 
know much about practical woodworking. In recent years, I have observed 
meetings where women were ignored or dismissed. If a man said something 
people responded to his words - if a woman said something then she got a 
verbal pat on the head. In my office, where there were 57 people, mostly 
men, the women cleaned the kitchen/break room always, and made the 
coffee more often than men - including the head of the office, a woman 
with a doctorate and 35 years in her field. It was easier than dealing 
with trying to get the men to do any of it. And this is in software 
development, a field with less earnings gap than almost any other field 
in the US. So why do women leave technical fields? I'm guessing it is 
because they are full of men, men with bias. I don't want to sound 
misogynistic here - certainly some men were more biased, some less, some 
not at all, and some were feminists. But they still didn't clean the 
kitchen.

-kc-