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I first got bashed by a few unprofessional men when I attended my first Usenix conference in 1984 and I most recently got bashed by an unprofessional man on the qmail mailing list -- he accused me of believing that "all email was magically delivered by the smtp fairy".

The fact of the matter is that we shouldn't need special HOW-TO's and interest groups to deal with cultural issues, but we do. Be we male or female, the one thing we're most reluctant to accept as human beings is the one thing we can't avoid and that's change... and we all get threatened when someone dares to change what we're used to whether it was right or wrong. From my perspective, what has done the most damage over the course of the last 20 years with respect to women in technology is the fact that a lot of women simply gave up because it was impossible to get ahead.

In the late 80's, I interviewed for a job with a DOD consultant. I went into the interview exceeding the job requirements. I got hired but it had nothing to do with the fact I was qualified. When I left the company two years later, the VP of development told me he had approved my hire solely because I was a Native American woman and would help satisfy EOE requirements, and that he had threatened to put my manager's head on a chopping block if I didn't work out. He actually apologized for having a preconceived notion that a woman couldn't fill that particular position. I had a similar albeit not-so-blatant experience five years later, but my nemesis was actually a woman in senior management who thought that woman made great managers but couldn't possibly be technical enough to be software engineers and architects.

The moral of the story is this: We make progress one bigot at a time. Bigots don't have gender. Professional courtesy and respect don't have gender. The ability to be openminded doesn't have gender. But our professional and personal culture is so jam-packed with it because it was pounded into our heads from the time we first began to understand the spoken word.

I've come to learn that when changes are proposed, the ones who scream loudest and longest are the ones you can't possibly hope to convince. 'Tis better and far more efficient to concentrate on the fence-sitters because you have a much better chance of winning them over and increasing your numbers.

So hats off to LinuxChix and to all those who are writing the required-but-should-be-unecessary how-to's or making any contribution to gender-bending the technical community because some day, somewhere, some bigot will look on the other side of the fence and wonder "when did the grass get so green on the other side"?

Posted by Brenda Bell on 7 Jan 2003 to the Issues mailing list hosted by LinuxChix

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