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When chatting to your male coworkers, what happens when you don't know something or accidentally say something stupid? In my experience, a man may get a brief ribbing, whereas a woman gets a long, patronising or sarcastic lecture, and their mistake gets brought up for months afterwards as evidence that woman are ditsy and don't know the things that real geeks should know. e.g. it was a running joke at my last job how women didn't know anything about hardware, but there was a male programmer there who repeatedly used "memory" to mean hard disk space and "hard disk" to mean the case, and nobody ever said anything. And a guy can banter back - this guy's comeback when anyone corrected him was "who'd want to know boring nerd stuff like that" - but a woman quickly gets pegged as sour, bitchy or snooty if she talks back. And after a while of every dumb slip-up being jumped on, is it any wonder that some women don't leap gleefully into the conversation? (Plus as female coder I am always happy to talk about programming, retro computing, science fiction or other "geek" topics, but 80% of the Man Chat in my office is about cars and Top Gear, which don't interest me at all.) Don't get me wrong: very few of the male IT professionals I've known have been openly hostile. But there have been those who have seemed slightly confused by my presence and ignored everything I said, those who regularly met up outside work without asking me and months later said "we would have asked you, but we didn't think you'd be interested", those who say nothing when someone louder insults women... ...and the ones who rush to applaud when a woman insults another woman, which to be honest I found your post rather close to with its implication that any woman who's had a harder time in IT is whiny, antisocial or doesn't "know their shit". (Apologies if this reply just seems to continue that trend. I'm grateful to you for starting this topic, which I've found interesting, at any rate.) |