Friday, the 13th of December 2002

Woohoo! Friday the 13th. You gotta love those rare days.

So, anyway, I've been poking around my friend Luke's blog, and found this little gem about men and women in the tech industry.

And I quote:
"I’ve given most of my female friends access to a fast server and all the open source programming tools they could want. None of them have done anything."

Oh, and this one:
"I say women don’t make up a large part of the tech industry because most of them are simply not interested."

and
"...the Web would be filled with excellent personal sites about programming, sysadmining, etc. written and maintained by women. But there aren’t any."

::Cough:: Newsflash, Luke.

Just because women may not seek out the dubious glory of needing to get publicly patted on the back by their peers, doesn't mean that they aren't as interested in technical stuff as men. While working for O'Reilly, I've had quite a few women in my Evangelist program, being in positions of power at technical websites. The User Groups O'Reilly supplied with goodies were often led by women. And at the conferences, there were always a surprising amount of women. They were all just a lot more low-key about it than the men.

Granted, the majority of nerds are still men because it is traditionally a male-dominated industry. Only 40 years ago, it would have been unthinkable to have women engineers. We were raised and trained to fulfill the role of the homemaker and mother. Only recently, women broke out of that mold and went after jobs that only men used to get hired for.

We've got a lot of catching up to do.

PS: Should this website evaporate in a few days, you'll know that Luke has kicked me off his server. I guess I should have been more technically smart than pissing off the guy who's hosting me. ;-)