Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!utah-cs!shebs%defun.utah.edu.uucp@ames.arc.nasa.gov 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> Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: PASS Research Group Lines: 56 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 <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