I'd be very happy for my daughter to pick up some scientific or IT-type
work, but so far I haven't been too successful. Maybe it is because
she's not even 3 yet :-) But she got her first computer around her
second birthday -- not a Barbie one but an old Pentium II with KDE on
it, icons scaled up until they are really big and all mouse buttons
mapped to button 1. She likes watching me use it, but she doesn't want
to interact with it herself.
Obviously that's starting quite early and I didn't really expect much
enthusiasm yet -- the main reason for building her PC (and her special
computer desk) was that I had that old machine without a purpose. But
while I'd enjoy her doing something close to my heart, I don't think I'd
ever push anything onto her. If she likes playing dress-up (and she
does), then she shall. If she wants a career in sports, then she shall
(that's far from my heart).
My main educational goals are a certain level of general smartness and
independence. Sometimes I feel too successful in the latter ("Go away,
Papa!"), but I'm certainly not trying to manipulate her into following
my footsteps. I didn't follow my parents either. But then: it's a long
way down the track for us.
Having said that: I'd personally love to see more women in IT. The once
I've worked with tended to be very good colleagues. Not counting admin
staff my ratio over the years is probably around the 15:1 mark, which I
consider reasonably good in this line of work. And BTW: I also noticed
(similarly to some other poster) that a lot of them were more in the
managerial positions.
I'll wait another decade or so to see what my little girl will be doing.
I'm sure it's going to be interesting in many senses of that word :-)
Peter
On Wed, 2009-02-18 at 15:25 -0500, Dianne Marsh wrote:
> So now that I have at least SOME people's attention on the gender thing,
> I'm wondering if I can engage those of you who are dads ... or uncles
> ... or influential adults. One of my employees said that she was
> strongly influenced into computer science by her parents. There's no
> reason to limit that to moms. I bet that the dads are equally baffled
> about why their daughters might not be interested in computer science.
> So let's get the dads involved.
>
> What can you do? This is a smart group of people. Can we brainstorm a
> bit? Women tend to view this as "our problem", but why? We don't have
> all of the answers, just because we're women. And face it. If ALL of
> the women developers worked to impact their daughters' decisions of a
> profession, we STILL wouldn't make a very big dent. You GUYS, OTOH, ...
> you have NUMBERS in your favor! I think that if we want to increase the
> number of girls in CS (and other math/science), you're our best hope.
>
> BTW, this idea of getting the dads to influence their daughters was one
> of my employee's. She said that she was strongly influenced by her
> parents, and brought up the fact that DADS are the ones that can make
> the difference in a male-dominated profession. Turns out her mom is a
> software developer (and only 2 years older than me, but that makes me
> wince, so we don't usually talk about that).
>
> So ... any chance you guys want to brainstorm a bit on how we might be
> able to influence a 50/50 gender mix at the [Java?] Posse Roundup 2025?
> ;-)
>
> Dianne
>
>
>
> Robert Fischer wrote:
> > It's not just baffling to you. Women not being attracted to science, math,
> > and software development
> > has been a huge issue since people started paying attention. But despite
> > huge amounts of money
> > being thrown at the problem and all kinds of systems intended to
> > support/encourage women in that
> > direction, general adoption remains low. Why that's the case is baffling
> > to everyone, and people's
> > answers to those questions tend to have less to do with evidence and more
> > to do with people's
> > pre-conceived paradigm on gender issues.
> >
> > ~~ Robert.
> >
>
>
>
> >
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