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> Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 27 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 <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