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From: knudsen@ihnss.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Computing Gender-Specific?
Message-ID: <1674@ihnss.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 8-Sep-83 19:30:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihnss.1674
Posted: Thu Sep  8 19:30:31 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Sep-83 02:57:51 EDT
Organization: BTL Naperville, Il.
Lines: 23

After 10 years as a computer profiessional (I do most of my hacking
at home!), I have repeatedly noticed the following event:
A woman, who has had either very little education or the "wrong" kind
(eg, MA in History), is hard up for a job and takes some low-level
job that relates to computing in some way.  She takes a few junior-college
coursses in computing (my company pays for such things) and discovers,
sooner or later, that she has a real aptitude for programming the
damned things, and in a couple more years is a computer professional
(not a hacker, too bad...).

I've observed this several times.  My explanation is that society
has not yet developed a pat set of ideas as to what sort of people
are or are not suited to computing, except that computing is
mistakenly equated with "math", when computing is unrelated to
anything most people would recognize as mathematics.
Of course women, including brilliant liberal or fine-arts scholars,
are expected to be bad in "math" and have never tried much anyway.

So what you get are lots of women who really have an aptitude and
potential love for computing.  But only a few ever get into a situation
where they try it out.  Anyway, it's been a pleasure to observe these
people discovering themselves in computing and related fields.
	mike k