11 Years of IT Solitude?
I am going on my 11th year of working in IT and although I am used to the 'only-woman-in-the-meeting' reality, it doesn't make it any easier to deal with. I don't complain about it very often, mainly because what bothers me isn't really the crude sense of humour I have been conditioned to enjoy. There are deeper problems of culture, social responsibility, complex adaptive management, process-vs-results, perception of success (to mention just a few), that are fundamentally different between groups of men working together, groups of women working together and mixed groups.
The saddest result of my life is that most of the time, when I encounter women in IT I am annoyed by them. Women are competitive in passive-aggressive ways nobody else perceives. Add that to the character adjustments we have had to make to survive in male-dominated work environment and you're talking major virtual cat fight. This predicament is very disheartening and it makes me want to scream.
A while back, I read (and promptly resold) an awful book titled: "Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office" which should have been titled "How to erase your gender and become something else others may be willing to buy". I was shocked and disgusted and decided that I will be damned to follow advice on how not turning my office into a pleasant working environment will somehow make me more credible. The whole book could be summarized into a main theme of how femininity robs women of credibility which is ridiculous and obcene. Men and women who think that were raised by men and women who believed this and it perpetuated a myth of credibility based on gender. How sad...
I wasn't very gender aware growing up in Greece bacause discrimination there is so blatant and expands to so many variables that being a woman was only one of the many things one could be discriminated against. We like to call it "equal opportunity to offend and discriminate", as in EOOD...On top of it, my parents never really said that I couldn't do something because I was a girl, or that my brother couldn't do something because he was a boy, and were raised fairly gender-blind. I am not sure that was a fantastic predicament...I went from being the only woman in my dad's board meetings and business trips to the only woman in my job in most cases and that habit of 'only woman' has made me become allergic to environments that are full of women. Large groups of women scare me at first and they make me very self-conscious. You would think the opposite should be true but in reality, habit is what it comes down to.
This isn't some great conspiracy against women by men, but a legacy that has been inherited unchecked, especially by women like me who are used being the only ones...There are instances of blatant discrimination that have always bothered me but I have come to ignore them. In one of my first jobs I was hired on a bet because apparently there was some sort of threshold of ugly that I exceeded to be able to do a technical job. I didn't know about this and weeks after being hired and performing better than some of the full-time folks (I was part-time), my boss apologized for ever doubting me and when some guy from another department sexually harassed me and stalked me repeatedly, he threw him out of the repair shop. Apparently, I should take all this as a compliment: too pretty to fix stuff. It helps that I am an alpha female or I would be on anti-depressants from all this type of abuse all these years...
What I have learned from my 11 years of solitude is that gender discrimination in the workplace is mainly a socially constructed problem and the only way to fix it besides educating the next generation to be more socially-aware, is to speak up if you are indeed offended. Most people aren't out to get you: they are just misguided or unaware. Women have their own stereotypes of men and a little more empathy on our part wouldn't kill us. Men also oppressed by other groups of men in suits or expectations to enjoy sports or like to blow things up...
As a summary, I have been reading a report from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (http://www.ncwit.org/ABI_Report.pdf) which is scratching the surface but focuses mainly on the US.
If you think that you feel bad where you are, imagine having to work in a country that requires a picture with your resume, along with date of birth, marital status and other personal information. Imagine a job listing that reads: "seeking young woman 18-23, single, presentable for X job in our company". No thanks. I would rather come to my office where I may discover my stuffed animals in compromising sexual positions than having to compete in some other market like the one I came from...
And when it comes to parenting, here's a tip: one of the few things my parents actually did right is that they always told me "don't let anyone push you around", instead of the more common "don't let any man push you around". Sometimes, generalizing is a good thing...
