karen_cote (10/6/2010)
I got a chuckle out of the 'geek factor' - that's exactly why I decided to enter the field! Finally, after being the odd-girl-out, I fit in.There is such a drive today to make everyone gain soft skills and present a 'businesslike' front for management, that something is getting lost - I'm surrounded by a growing set of women 'analysts' with no computer background at all, who are designing systems and making a huge mess because they don't have the computer background to understand the implications of what they're doing.
There are so many roles today, why do the geeks need to change to accomodate management's idea of political correctness? The type of 'oddness' that defines a geek also defines their imagination and ability to synthezise and think out of the box. I wouldn't give up my nerd herd for any price, even if it came with more women and a larger paycheck!
Great comment. It is important the realize that equal opportunity is essential, but the people going after the opportunites in different fields may not have the same makeup.
There are peculiarities to the IT field that do not necessarily exist in other science and technical fields. While there is no behavior exclusively male or exclusively female, many people who gravitated to the IT world started out as teenagers obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with manipulating computers (and also, parallel, obsessed with gaming). Psychologically this obsessive behavior (which is often pursued to the detriment of other social contacts) is far more common in young males than young females (who tend to vary their interests more). So the 'geek' mindset (lots of intelligent people are not geeks) has a biasing effect on the field.
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --