Henri Yandell wrote:
On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, Julie MacNaught wrote:
I am a big corporation's employee (IBM), not an individual contributor.
My current pet theory is that due to quotas,
Dang, so much for sensitivity and respect...
Bill
Henri, your email could be interpreted in an unfavorable way but I know you had no ill intent and I should have added a :-) to my comment. :-)
soap box:
No one wants to be thought of as 'a quota'. The US policy of Affirmative Action is often called a "quota system" by people who are against it. AA would be a quota system only if one assumes that there are no members of a so called "protected class" (women, some racial minorities, etc) that are capable of doing the job. The fact is, there are lots of really talented folks that are members of 'protected classes' and companies like IBM aggressively recruit strong talent wherever they find it. Rightly so imho. My personal opinion (based solely on my experiences inside a big US multinational company) is that AA has about outlived its usefulness. No sane recruiter ignores talent based on gender, sexual preference or race and those that do deserve what's coming to them (failure in the marketplace).
Julie, Thanks for your post. I think your observation is spot on. Women are, on average, not as assertive as men in mixed company. Communicating via a mailing list 'hangs you out there' so to speak on the assertiveness scale. I know in my early days in the Apache HTTP Server community, I had my head handed to me on a platter on a couple of occasions (by someone whose opinion I trust and respect, fwiw). That's a pretty typical experience I expect. Those types of experiences tend to filter communities for a certain set of personality traits; being averse to confrontation is not one of the traits folks in the Apache HTTP Server community tend to have, for better or worse. :-)
Bill
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