[UbuntuWomen] Article: Computer World: Why women quit technology careers

[Tricia Bowen]

Hi Elizabeth,
You should submit this article to slashdot. It's a good counterpart to your
last post: Slashdot "Do women write better code?". I had to give up reading
the comments on that one because they were horribly one sided. I would love
to see what the commentary is on this one.

This article hit home for me. I'm turning 40 next April. My career has taken
the back seat since my daughter was born 6 years ago. Since then I've been
consulting on a part-time basis. Now that my kids are in school I am force
to rethink my career choices. Do I want to go back to a conference room
where men google "anna kournikova" obsessively and display crude pics of her
on the projector screen before meetings? Do I want to got back to an
atmosphere where the bosses male lunch buddies get promoted while the few
women, who have no position of power, are stuck back in the office doing the
grunt work? Do I want to sit in another stinking "war room" pulling an
all-nighter to make the higher ups feel good, when I know the reason we're
all here is because of poor planning. Poor planning that was pointed out
months before the launch date.

The answer is a big NO. As good as the money was, I'm thinking  High School
Math Teacher is the next career phase. I've played quite a bit with Edubuntu
and can't wait to build my lesson plans around it.
--Tricia

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Elizabeth Bevilacqua <lyz at ubuntu.com>
wrote:

> Another interesting article came across my desk today, aysiu posted
> this in the Ubuntu-Women forums:
>
>
> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=319212&pageNumber=1
>
> Excerpt:
>
> "Based on the demographics, it seems likely that they leave to start
> families. Is that what happens? No. I'm not trying to pretend that
> work-life balance is not important, but we found four other more
> important factors about the culture and the nature of the career path.
> We call them "antigens," because they repel women.
>
> Tell me about those. The most important antigen is the machismo that
> continues to permeate these work environments. We found that 63% of
> women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual
> harassment. That's a really high figure.
>
> They talk about demeaning and condescending attitudes, lots of
> off-color jokes, sexual innuendo, arrogance; colleagues, particularly
> in the tech culture, who genuinely think women don't have what it
> takes -- who see them as genetically inferior. It's hard to take as a
> steady stream. It's predatory and demeaning. It's distressing to find
> this kind of data in 2008."
>
> --
> Elizabeth Bevilacqua
> http://www.princessleia.com
>
> --
> ubuntu-women mailing list
> ubuntu-women at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-women
>



-- 
--Tricia
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