Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!pasteur!agate!marla@Sun.COM
From: marla@Sun.COM (Marla Parker)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Moving from humanities to software
Message-ID: <11880@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 8 Jul 88 02:00:19 GMT
References: <11101@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <11165@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <11535@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <11735@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
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In article <11735@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> cheryl@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (cheryl) writes:
>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.
>

I've worked at Daisy and Sun, both companies born in the 80's.  I think
it extremely unlikely that competent women in the technical core at either
company have ever been asked to do the sort of less-core jobs that
you describe.  It would be a demotion, and viewed as such by everyone.

The other problem you describe, the once-a-secretary now-a-manager
boss giving poor guidance and making unreasonable demands on her
technically superior employees, this is a subset of the general
problem of unqualified people being promoted to manage techies.  If
women are being especially grouped together under the non-technical 
managers...that would be dreadful indeed.

Marla Parker
{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!marla
marla@sun.com