Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!agate!rcj@moss.ATT.COM From: rcj@moss.ATT.COM Newsgroups: comp.society.women Subject: Re: The Technical Core in Computing Firms Message-ID: <11230@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 21 Jun 88 07:51:44 GMT References: <11101@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <11165@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany NJ Lines: 58 Approved: skyler@violet.berkeley.edu (Moderator -- Trish Roberts) Comments-to: comp-women-request@cs.purdue.edu Submissions-to: comp-women@cs.purdue.edu In article <11165@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> marla@Sun.COM (Marla Parker) writes: }If "women don't like to be in the tech cores of companies" I think it is }because women don't like to be where they aren't welcome, and we were }never welcome in tech cores until recently (recent decades, maybe). I I wouldn't put the plural on "decades" -- I have a good friend who joined Bell Labs 15 years ago and she could not legally be a Member of Technical Staff (the usual designation for someone with a Master's) because she was a woman. Also, my little sister is finishing her MSEE right now at Mississippi State University, and she can tell you some wonderful modern- day horror stories about sexual discrimination and harrassment in today's engineering college environment. TAs threatening to fail her if she didn't sleep with them, long-tenured untouchable professors starting the first day's course lecture by explicitly saying they don't believe women should be in engineering, the whole nine yards. And, ironically enough, the main reason she stayed for the Master's was because, despite *incredible* success as a co-op with the Navy, her self-confidence has been eroded quite a bit by her college experience. She wants to be "more solid" in her field before going out into the real world. }Furthermore, if you compare the properly degreed SE's to the other-degree }SE's, I expect that the percentage of SE's who are an asset to their }company (i.e. they're good) would be about the same. Some of the }people who switch into software aren't any good, but neither are the many }fools who major in CS just because they want a good salary, not because }they like it or are any good at it. Women got a bum rap at my school for switching from marketing and management majors to CS just to get jobs. The unqualified people who did this were uniformly despised, but it just so happened that 5 out of every 6 of them were women at my school around 1980. Thus it was "these damned women diluting the field" when actually it was "these damned unqualified money-grubbing marketing/management-type people diluting the field". It was easy for those already predisposed against women to use this as just another weapon against them. }for software engineering is rare stuff indeed. I disagree. I think it }is very common. It is just the art & science of problem solving. All of Amen! }The practical aspects of how to switch from being an unemployed history }graduate to an employed software engineer are another matter altogether, }one that I know nothing about. Tech writer->tech support->engineering }seems to work for some people, but maybe someone who has transferred }into software from a different field could write about how to do this. I know someone who went from teaching "special education" for many years to her current employ as a very talented microcoder on my project. She took a computer course at a local college (in Oregon) to help keep her teaching certificate current, found she had a knack and a yen for programming, and ended up getting her BSCS in night school. She entered the software field as a microprogrammer right from the start at age 37. Curtis Jackson -- moss!rcj 201-386-6409 (CORNET 232) ...![ att ulysses ucbvax allegra ]!moss!rcj ...![ att ucbvax akgua watmath ]!clyde!rcj