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From: utah-cs!shebs%defun.utah.edu.uucp@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Stanley T. Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Women Wizards?
Message-ID: <11795@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 7 Jul 88 03:47:12 GMT
References: <11734@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
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In article <11734@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> marcia%hpindl8@hplabs.HP.COM (Marcia Bednarcyk) writes:

>[...] why are there no women computer wizards, and what is preventing them (if 
>anything)?

First off, I wish to nominate at least one counterexample:  Sandra Loosemore,
a veteran :-) PhD student at Utah and a (former) 5-year employee of Evans &
Sutherland, who has hacked all kinds of software, from user interface tools
to graphics routines to machine-language internals of Lisp systems, and who
is well-versed in the technical literature as well.

She has mentioned occasional annoying sexist incidents at E&S, but has also
had a woman manager most of the time, so it's been better than one might
expect from a company with a large Mormon contingent.

(I speak up, because she's too modest, and may not read this group anyway)

>I don't understand why this is so. A first possibility is that people 
>still don't believe down deep that a woman can be as technically
>competent as a man, and subsequently won't go to her even though she has
>the knowledge. This would decrease her opportunities to exercise her
>knowledge, and thus miss a lot of oppotunities to learn more. I guess
>I don't understand this because women are supposed to be (through their
>socialization) good support people - who better to help fix problems?

A "true wizard" is basically anti-social.  She doesn't care much whether
or not people come to her for help; she learns on her own, by playing
around with the system and its software.  The old joke was that wizards
were "red meat" people - they live behind a locked door near the computer,
you slide your problems under the door, and they slide the answers back
(this was before the days of e-mail).  There's a slot in the door where you
throw in red meat every so often, to keep them fed.

Seriously, "true wizardry" seems to involve devoting the majority of one's
time and energy to the machine.  I know very few wizards with well-balanced
personalities and fully developed social skills (this should garner a few
flames!).  It's no surprise that most wizards are men, since this fits the
default male socialization perfectly; spending one's days in isolation
interacting only with a computer, is little different from traditionally
male occupations like driving a truck, plowing a field, or drilling for oil.
Yes, truckers talk to each other and roughnecks work as a team; but
fundamentally, the jobs focus on machinery and nature, and any human
interaction is either part of break time or the minimum necessary to
accomplish a task.  In the same way, wizards' interactions seem to be
recreation-related, as in Usenet :-), or directed only toward a specific 
problem.

So here's a next-level question:  assuming that you agree with the above
analysis of wizards, is the inherent nature of wizardry and hacking such
that it must always remain the province of "male" types?  To put it another
way, is it possible to "feminize" wizardry, in the way that some feminists
have advocated for technology in general?  If so, what might have to change
about computers themselves to make this possible?

							stan shebs
							shebs@cs.utah.edu