[copper-horse]

I'm sorry, but if people don't get your Star Wars humour, that does not make them stupid. May be they just didn't like Star Wars. And may be somehow they thought that being "in marketing or law or something" is just as worthy an occupation as writing spam filters for google.

I guess the reason they form a community in the short time of an IT event, and "the nerds" are always on the fringe is this same dismissive attitude of superiority that makes people fiercely unattractive and isolated. Men or women.

[vacri]

Working in marketing and law for Google isn't working in IT. It's working for IT, but it's working in marketing and law. Would anyone seriously think that the sysadmin for a law firm could seriously present at a 'women in law' presentation?

[dragonwriter]

> Working in marketing and law for Google isn't working in IT.

It is working in the IT industry. It is not working in an IT profession. "Working in IT" can mean either.

I suspect that there is a group of people who would be interested in a presentation on issues facing "Women in the IT industry" as well as one with interest in issues facing "Women in the IT profession", and I suspect that those groups overlap considerably. Though, I would also suspect that there is a substantial subset of each group that is not in the other.

[vacri]

It would seem pointless to have an education faire for an industry rather than a profession. "Come and see what you can do working in the Water industry!" -> you could be a hydrologist, a lawyer, a receptionist, a pipelayer, a sysadmin, a farmer, a payroll officer... it's nonsensical, given the context. It'd almost be easier to list the jobs that can't be shoehorned into such a broad industry.