in which I write about stuff
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I like Joe Clark’s writing, most of the time. He’s smart and funny, if often brutal, and I have immense respect for his acerbic writing on accessibility, web and otherwise. But his latest blog post strikes me as almost entirely wrong. I rarely write directly on the women & technology discussions — on that topic, I link to others and participate in the Ada Lovelace Day writing, and that’s about it. But this just got me fired up to the point where I had to write something. To pick it apart a bit at a time:
“First of all, it can’t be simultaneously true that women and men are equally suited to “technology†jobs and also that women have specific immutable characteristics that need to be catered to.”
Sure it can. Some characteristics that may need accommodations are not related to one’s actual skill in programming. But more to the point, some of those common gendered characteristics are in no way immutable; they’re cultural. Assertiveness, which is something that Nicole wrote about, and others have written about previously, appears to be much less of an innate characteristic, and something that is deliberately groomed by our culture, and groomed out of women, both subtly and overtly. (Did he read a different Pink Brain, Blue Brain than I did?) And hey, it doesn’t have anything to do with programming skill, either!
“Some of those savants have exactly the qualities needed to program computers – actually caring about programming computers, for one, and a willingness to expend virtually unlimited time on the abstractions implicit in computer programming.”
Are these really the best or only qualities needed to program computers? (“Expend virtually unlimited time”? Really? Is that at all a good thing for anybody?) Does one really need to be a savant to have them? From Nicole’s post: “When Harvey Mudd changed their CS program admission criteria to accept a broader range of people, and stop selecting for the socially-challenged-uber-nerd[s], they found that everyone’s grades improved. It benefits everyone to have a diverse group of people in our field.”
And none of this is related to whether, even if it were true that being out on that extreme end of skill were desirable, that the resulting culture should be so aggressively macho. Nicole’s comparison chart of cowboy-coders vs good developers is a handy reference to the problem with hiring “savants.”
“Child-rearing isn’t discussed.”
Hmmmm: “Recognize the need for work-life balance. Most women still have primary responsibility for children and home. Women need to be equals at home first, but perhaps companies can make it easier for them to get access to awesome childcare and flex time.”
I also seem to remember several of the commenters mentioning the specific issue of child care and conventions. Also, this is a problem for women with careers in every field, at least outside of Scandinavia. (See article about Sweden from the NYT. Changes in policy can in fact make for changes in culture.)
“Hostile work environments are real” vs ““Underrepresentation†is an insulting concept.” and “there are exactly as many people who choose an occupation as there should be”
(This is where my reaction ran off the rails.) Fuck you. No, seriously. Fuck you. My mother was so excited to get her first job after going back to school when I was a teenager, and it was RUINED because of the misogynist assholes that she worked with. She left a male-dominated workplace — as in, she was the only woman on the production floor — and retreated (?) to a woman-dominated field. Admittedly, she’s damn good at her current job, but I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t have been good at that one, too.
She was driven out of that occupation, because life was already hard enough as a widow with three kids and two mortgages without having to deal with that kind of bullshit. Her spirits were crushed day after day, until she was giddy with relief to be quitting THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS. (It brings me to the edge of tears remembering that time. Mom worked HARD to get where she was, and those fuckers ruined it. She didn’t talk much about it, because that’s who she is, but us kids definitely knew the score.)
Women become underrepresented when they get forced out of a profession, either being headed off at the pass during their education (“even the best women in a CS program are far more likely to drop out than the worst guys”), being told by the culture that they wouldn’t possibly want to do that, or by blatant harassment.
And actually, having worked in a college with dental hygiene, nursing and early education programs, there IS concern about the underrepresentation of men in those training programs. One problem is that “women’s work” in general pays for crap compared to “men’s work,” so men don’t care so much about it. (IIRC, there’s a well-documented history of pay declining in fields where women enter in force, so that it becomes a self-reinforcing loop. Librarianship comes to mind, though I don’t have references, ironically enough.)
Sure, two more (three more?) blog posts won’t do anything, but there are things that will. The culture of a profession is that: a culture, and cultures can in fact change. For one thing, sufficiently hostile work environments are illegal in the United States, and quite possibly more people could be filing lawsuits. (Sometimes I wish mom had fought back about her hostile work environment, but it was 1990 (?), and she was exhausted.) Or, people could listen to what women like Nicole are saying and take them seriously. I’m also trying to remember which college (the same MIT study that Nicole mentions? Harvey Mudd?) that took some very specific steps, and they were able to change the culture and gender balance there. This is not brand new, nor is it rocket science.
“That’s what you’re really saying when you make the claim that women are “underrepresentedâ€: That women haven’t made the right choices and that men need to be displaced.”
No, that’s not at all what I’m really saying. The tl;dr version of “what I’m really saying” would read: “Men and women need to be able to pursue the careers that are most fitting to their talents and interests. They aren’t always able to do so now.” I believe that sincerely.
There SHOULD be more men as nurses or elementary school teachers. I had great male teachers in 4th and 5th grade; I think they were a important balance to the dearth of men in my home life in those years. And similarly, there SHOULD be more women writing software, coding websites, or yes, even being construction workers. And yes, women in the past HAVE tried to make inroads into some of those dirty/dangerous professions, and faced much worse than anything software doodz have dished out. See Nicole’s comment on working as a carpenter…and my mother wasn’t trying to get a job as a programmer!
“I doubt the sincerity and intellectual honesty of men who claim to be upset over this issue.”
Really? REALLY?! You don’t think they’ve ever seen someone they loved get crushed by gender discrimination? Just that they’re trying to prove their sensitivity? (What, so they can get laid? Stereotype much?)
“Proponents of women in technology insistently maintain their cause is just, implying no other cause is.”
Wanting to see more women working in technology does not mean that I don’t think there shouldn’t ALSO be more people with disabilities (some of whom may even be women!) or gay men or ethnic minorities or [fill in the blank] working in technology.
This isn’t a contest. It’s an effort to ensure that a profession that has a huge impact on the rest of society is open to all of society, that there really is a free choice. Because saying that there’s a free choice now, without looking at the context, is BULLSHIT.
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This post wasn’t hard to write, but it was tough to edit and difficult to decide whether to publish, for a lot of reasons. (Special thanks to kitchenMage for reading an earlier draft, encouraging me to post what I’d written, and finding the URL of the NYT article on family leave in Sweden. Thanks also to C for letting me bounce some of this off of him, and for being even more foul-mouthed in his reaction than I was.)
Note: if you haven’t commented here before, your comment will be held for moderation, and it may take me a bit to get to it. And if things get too nasty, I’m entirely willing to close comments. This is my website. You’ve got something to say that I find totally offensive? Then as the MeFites say, GYOB.
A light and pointless (?) blog post from a prompt, while I muse on posting some other stuff….
It’s odd, the first thing I think of is something I haven’t eaten in many months, but it is THE comfort food for me: macaroni & cheese.
Not any old macaroni & cheese*, but precisely the one that we ate every single Friday (go Catholics!) of my childhood, my mother’s version of a Good Housekeeping recipe from 1963. That recipe book fell open to that page; that or the hamburger stroganoff recipe. It took me at least a year after I was living on my own before I figured out mom’s exact modifications, which involve making it even MORE mid-century American than it was to start with. Velveeta FTW!
As a food, it’s simple: fat and starch, creamy and hot, which makes it an ideal wintertime comfort food. It’s easy to make and is done reasonably fast, but has enough steps to feel like you’re actually cooking something. It doesn’t microwave especially well, and that gives it a certain immediacy that’s oddly comforting.
But beyond that, because of “every Friday” and “mom’s modifications,” it has all this resonance emotionally as well, of the good parts of childhood, eating together. The ritual of making mac & cheese has all these particular touchstones: the double-boiler in particular, since that was the only thing it was ever used for when I was growing up. (True story: when I moved out in college and relatives gave me dishes for Christmas, my sister gave me a double-boiler specifically so I could make myself mac & cheese.)
So there it is, the platonic ideal of a comfort food, at least for me.
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* I did not eat the stuff in a box until I was in college, when (alas) I ate quite a bit of it: box mac & cheese was in the imagery of a poem I had published when I was younger.
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There’s a second post that I’m trying to write, and failing miserably, about the scrapbook that my mother just sent me, along with a big envelope full of childhood photos. I held back the previous post because I was hoping to tie the two together, but it wasn’t happening. Instead, I’m going to keep noodling around with everything that’s brought up in my head, and just let the story of the china go off into the ether.
A few years ago, one of my uncles called up and offered me a set of china that had belonged to my grandmother. I don’t remember the exact story, but he found it, didn’t want it, and was offering it to me as the oldest granddaughter. I said yes, which in retrospect may have been a mistake. Because: wow, flower-printed china, and a huge set of it. I boxed it up in two big tupperware containers and forgot about it.
But recently I opened up the boxes to see what it looked like and then decided to get rid of it. I emailed my local sister to see if she wanted any, then put it back into a box, more loosely packed, to wait for a trip to Goodwill (or whatever).
Then I took out two plates to put into rotation in our dishes. We don’t really have any plates, honestly. we have some “plate-like bowls” from Ikea, and one plastic plate that C bought me as a gift with an owl on it. After just a couple of days, I found that I really like them. Not the design, really; still way too frou-frou for my tastes. (haviland-limoges with frilly edges and blue flowers!) But they’re damn solid plates, and just the right size for big soft taco tortillas.
Plus I think of my grandmother (gone five years now) when I use them: stern, but with a somewhat hidden wicked sense of humor. Grandma Dillon was probably the most involved in our lives of any relative, either side of the family.She was one of the people who often took care of us after dad died, the other being renee across the street: an elderly woman in a wheelchair from polio, who also owned pit bulls. No, really.
She took us to museums in her a little gray Toyota Tercel, I think, a three-door, so that we had to climb into the back seat, and someone (usually Elizabeth) had to sit on the “hump.” Once I rode along with her when my cousin drove her car to Camp Pendleton. and he was speeding and got stopped by an MP, on the freaking base. I want to say that she chewed out the cousin, but I could be just making that up.
Lunch at the cafeteria in the LA County Museum of Natural History, down in the basement. For the longest time they had an exhibit of old (Mercedes-Benz? BMW?) cars down there. I was fascinated by the pre-30s models. I remember her walking very slowly.
Going over to her immaculately clean house, which has (obvs) since been sold, and IIRC torn down. The garden window over the sink looking out onto the front yard, with a little snowflake ornament catching the light. The gorgeous white (50s?) stove. Water in a glass pitcher with yellow flowers on it. A metal tin of cookies, and getting to pick out just one.
I’m pretty sure these aren’t the plates from Thanksgiving. I don’t know who ended up with THAT set, but it was more complete than this one, if memory serves, but they aren’t terribly different. Until I was in high school, Thanksgiving was always at grandma’s — Christmas too, usually — and she brought out the good china, the good silver, the white tablecloths. We ate at the kid’s table on the porch? patio? sunroom? that opened out onto the dining room and the living room. That was the same area where they set up the Christmas tree.
all of this tumbles through my head, if only in the background or subconsious, while I stand in the kitchen and assemble my tacos or serve up bacon & eggs.
I think I might divvy up the plates (it’s mostly plates) and keep a few extra for myself, if Edith really wants some of the set. The big stuff, though, is pretty ridiculous for my life: tureens! and will go away, somehow. Then I’ll have those (useful) pieces, with the associated bits of memory, until I either switch over to something in our design style, or they get broken.
Update, 12/9/2010: I ended up keeping the the plates & bowls, at least for now. My sister’s going to look through the big stuff and see if there’s anything she wants.
