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From: mcgrath%paris.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Roland McGrath)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: On our own terms
Message-ID: <7079@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: 25 May 89 06:15:34 GMT
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In article <6970@ecsvax.UUCP> eliz@cs.rochester.edu writes:

   Some other traditionally feminine values that have a place in the workplace:

I don't see why these are feminine values.  I'm male, and all of these things
are important to me and things I try to do...

[There were several replies on these lines.  There is an important difference, 
however, between "female" and "feminine."  "Female" is determined by biology;
"feminine" is a set of characteristics determinedy by culture.  So it is
pefectly possible for a man to be "feminine" and a woman to be "masculine."
Hence, to say something about masculinity is _not_ to say something
about men.  All this means that I think people are actually agreeing--
that the traditionally, stereotypically feminine approaches to life
could have good consequences in computers.  The question is whether or
not there is a "feminine" approach to computers, and, if so, what it
would be.  TR]

   These issues are all very relevant to the computing profession --
   you can figure out the details.  Let's just say that if no one can
   listen to clients, it doesn't matter how many stud coders the company 
   has.  Sure, there are women stud coders.  But there are other ways to 
   succeed.

There are also male programmers who are not `stud coders', even if they produce
code of equivalent (or better) quality than the `studs'.  In fact, the stud
coder is likely to produce worse code, because he probably has the machismo
complex of "it works and you can't figure out why, so I'm cool".

--
	Roland McGrath
	Free Software Foundation, Inc.
roland@ai.mit.edu, uunet!ai.mit.edu!roland
Copyright 1989 Roland McGrath, under the GNU General Public License, version 1.