Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!uwvax!dogie!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!cheryl@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu From: cheryl@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (cheryl) Newsgroups: comp.society.women Subject: Re: Moving from humanities to software Message-ID: <11735@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 6 Jul 88 20:27:33 GMT References: <11101@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <11165@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <11535@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY Lines: 67 Approved: skyler@violet.berkeley.edu (Moderator -- Trish Roberts) Comments-to: comp-women-request@cs.purdue.edu Submissions-to: comp-women@cs.purdue.edu Trish asserts that the old-fashioned organization of companies kept an isolated technical core (where supposedly it was easy to keep women out simply by making them uncomfortable and unwelcome) wheras new-fangled organizations have more fluid boundaries, where technical employees are less easily distinguished from managerial, support or sales employees. I agree with Trish that there are these differences in organizational style. But it is then argued that this would make new-fangled companies more congenial places for women in general. I disagree. A new-fangled company might be more congenial for the woman who is not explicitly technically qualified by dint of training or education or experience. And it may even be CONGENIAL for the highly qualified woman. But it might not be the best place PROFESSIONALLY for the highly motivated, highly qualified, technically ambitious woman who wants to be the next Willhemina Gates or Winnifred Joy. It's downright demeaning and stifling for everyone to assume you were somebody's secretary who figured out how to type 'ls' and 'vi' and were suddenly made Technical Coordinator in Charge of Xeroxing Documentation or Manager Of Changing The Paper In The LaserWriter And Doing The Dumps. Particularly annoying is the patronizing attitude on the part of the managers of such newfangled companies, the fact that they portray themselves as some kind of fairy godmother being so kind to these traditionally unqualified women and cutting them a break -- you, Ms. Graduate of Top-Knotch Engineering School INCLUDED. You find yourself wishing there were greater distinctions between the fully qualified engineers and the former secretaries, simply because your education STARTED with calculus, differential equations, physics, chemistry, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, numerical analysis and so on, and here you are being asked to do the same things that 2 doors down someone's doing that was a secretary 2 years ago, and when somebody seeks your advice, it's your former-secretary-female-boss's former-secretary- female-boss asking you "Is Fluid Mechanics a kind of Turbulence?" I have NOTHING against secretaries moving into technical fields, but I DO have something against women being promoted to positions of administrative power over fully qualified women technical core employees, only to have those administrative women impose or encourage their own career path on the subordinate for whom it is completely inappropriate. It is NOT necessary for women graduates of engineering or CS programs to be asked to do a stint in User Services or Customer Support or Technical Writing. Most top MALE graduates of engineering or CS programs wouldn't be. Yet in the New Fangled organization, you can have a woman and a man with exactly the same salary, the same educational background and the same position doing VERY different things after a couple years--the woman having been asked to do a lot of essentially user services, tech support and tech writing tasks; the man having been asked to do (or been allowed the freedom and initiative to choose) purely individually creditable technical accomplishment- oriented projects. It seems to me that the minute women started making it into the technical cores of old-fangled companies complete with their stupid rigid explicit guidelines as to what kind of education and experience qualified you to hold what kind of job--the whole scene had to be changed in order to continue to make women indistinguishable from one another and neutralize women's growing mastery of the old-fangled system. Cheryl