Not a regular series because most Saturday nights I’m either out on a hot date or fighting off the horde of children I’ve produced, due to previous hot dates. Next Saturday night we’re going to The Magic Flute with some of our favorite neighborhood friends, week after that, back to the horde.
So here it is, Saturday night, alone in the house, desultory thoughts:
- Isn’t there an incredible proliferation of layers in computing: operating systems, virtual operating systems, server software, network, client software, browser, browser extensions and plugins, another operating system and device drivers… how does anybody debug this? Count me as glad I’m out of maintenance programming, although it’s fun if you approach each bug as a brainteaser. Maintenance is way harder than architecting a new system and too often discounted.
- An elementary school in my neighborhood tells kids to use their “wizard brain” not their “lizard brain.” But isn’t intuition the only way to figure stuff out sometimes? Especially when there are so many layers (see item #1)? Does intuition come from our lizard brain? And how do we learn to trust our lizard brain? Alternately, how do we know when our lizard brain is wrong?
- Related to item #2: is our physical experience of the world much more important than most intellectuals allow? Is George Lakoff right that our thought proceeds from physical experience?
- Isn’t William James the coolest? He rescues religion for me. I’m not a religious sort–I argue with everyone about their irrational beliefs about god–but I want religious experience anyway.
My cousin the army major is in Iraq now. I hope he stays safe. I don’t pray for him, see item #4. But I think about him a lot.- Why does CNet News Extra’s list of “blogs we read” only include male bloggers, at least for the single-author blogs they mention? Crap, that’s so depressing. What is wrong with the media or with us women or with whatever? Sometimes I feel like doing a Norah Vincent, at least online, to see how different it is to be a man. I think this might have to do with item #3, that women’s experience of the world is fundamentally different on a physical basis than men’s experience, and that comes out in the way we write online, at least in nominally unbounded spaces like blogs, cf. this post.
- Related to item #3 and item #6 and tangentially if not directly the introduction to this post, how can anyone call women like me part of the castration crowd? What kind of limited experience of women must someone have had to think that calling for our inclusion and participation amounts to an indictment of the masculine? I can only speak for myself, but one of the main reasons I love working in technology is the male energy in it.
16 Comments
There is nothing wrong with women.
Frankly, as a man, I have very different relationship with men than women. (wow, really?)
Nothing better or worse, but I do admit, male blogger voices usually hit more high notes for me.
Of course, I read more male blogs than female.
When a blog is as good as yours, it makes no difference.
Good stuff is good stuff.
Matt, I find more men write stuff I want to read than women too. So that’s part of why I was asking what’s going on with women in the tech blogging world. Is it just that so few of us are interested in technology? That we can’t keep our personal stuff out of our blogs? That we aren’t as pressured professionally, so we don’t work as hard at promoting ourselves? I don’t know what it is. But it’s frustrating to look around and so often see that the people who are succeeding are different than I am in a fundamental way.
Echo Matt: “good stuff is good stuff”; and no, I don’t worry about any personal stuff that creeps in (even when it gets a bit close to the bone, like the post about your father-in-law the other day).
Why do you think you aren’t as pressured professionally? - my impression would be otherwise - hell, I was able to delegate most of the child-rearing to my wife (and yes, I DID do some!) and effectively ignore it in my professional life - most women don’t get it so easy when they have family.
“… But it
Ric, when I said women aren’t as pressured professionally, I am talking about external pressure to succeed rather than constraints and pressures in day-to-day work life. I mean that we aren’t judged as strictly on our professional achievements. We are also likely to be erratic or secondary income providers to our families if we are married with children. So women may have less motivation to say, start a pure technology blog and put the effort and strategy into pushing it to the top of the rankings. That’s setting aside all the other reasons why women aren’t, for the most part, top ranking tech bloggers.
“define success”: in this context, I was speaking of success in tech blogging and related professional work, but good point that success isn’t always about high blog rankings or massive ad income or being listed on some random big website’s list of blogs to read. Sometimes I do, however, compare myself to other people on conventional measures of success.
“would you rather be them than you, regardless of their ’success’?” Absolutely not, I want to be me and be successful, in lots of different ways
Thanks for your comment, Ric.
You said, “And how do we learn to trust our lizard brain? Alternately, how do we know when our lizard brain is wrong?” I think people know somewhere that what their lizard brain says may be wrong, because they tend to lie when asked about something out loud. An old example, people said out loud that they didn’t believe Iraq was the source of the terrorist attacks but in the privacy of a voting booth they voted with the fearful lizard brain instead.
I think the challenge of the modern age is to find a way to work with the powerful instincts of the lizard brain that encourage us to think agressively and tribally and behave with a “them vs. us” mentality in a world that no longer works on a tribal scale.
Hi Virginia, nice to see you here. I didn’t consider the lizard brain in the context of our current political situation, but it’s obviously relevant. That’s a situation where the wizard brain (i.e. our analytical, higher-level processing powers) should be used.
But there are probably also situations where our emotions and instincts “know” something important that we’re not consciously aware of. The blink effect, I guess. It’s hard to separate out kneejerk reactions that are wrong (like how we stereotype people based on gender or race) and our emotional reactions that somehow get at what’s true or important.
Re: Women being put out - Anne, I feel this way in everything from gender to race. Even though I’ve learned to “go with the flow” (an ugly variant of ‘go along to get along’, I would like to see people who look like me wrangling things I like (business, marketing, tech)
What saddened me most was when my tech blog (long since dead) was noticed not for what I posted, but for my appearance and character (smart, young, black and female)
Keep going. If it helps, I’m listening.
I for one, prefer the lizard over the wizard. My assumption, however, is that I have a magic lizard in my brain.
And “castration crowd”?! Holy crap! The seal is awesome. The larger point of busting the tech echo-chamber is always lost on men who rebel against the suggestion that we should refresh all our tech-babble with new people. To be frank, it’s to feed the lizard-brain: it gets bored listening to all these wizards. Hopefully the witches will make it laugh more.
Nice one Cote’!
Anne - my apologies if a) I got you wrong, and/or b) you got me wrong.I think my point was that BECAUSE you pay more attention to other interests, there is pressure on women to be ‘uber-successful’ just to be seen as ’successful’ professionally. I’m also not sure if it’s possible, or even desirable to see (e.g) Anne Z as just a “professional”, or just a mother - there is too much ‘bleed’ from one part of your life to the other, and part of what makes you a “good” professional is that other part of your life, and vice-versa. I’d like to point out that I think the same applies to men as well - and any guy that tries to ignore one or other side of his life will pay a very high price for the privilege (whether he knows it yet or not). Maybe it’s just that women are more cognizant of the potential costs then we are.
Personally, I like dealing with smart people - and I don’t feel any more castrated if they are women than if they are men - and there’s a few smart people right here in this conversation.
I missed Jeneane’s post on the castration crowd, but it’s depressingly familiar after 25 years in technology. Either we’re castrating, or we’re sleeping with someone to get ahead; there doesn’t seem to be a way for many men to disregard gender when considering technical and business merits. It’s not just technology, however: I saw the results of a study at a conference recently that showed that when a US-based orchestra held blind auditions, more women musicians were hired than with auditions where the gender of the musician was known.
There’s an “illusion of inclusion” for women in technology, but we’re still outsiders in many ways.
When I started my business blog, my gender-neutral name meant that many thought that I was male. I actually contemplated leaving it that way, although I guess that only would have worked until a conference appearance or podcast got out.
By the way, I’m going to The Magic Flute this weekend, too.
Isabella, it definitely helps to know people are out there listening and that we can air these things out even when there aren’t necessarily good ways to solve them. I think talking about it helps, and it’s useful to get men and women together to do that. I’m sorry to hear you don’t have a tech blog any longer, because I’m sure I would have enjoyed it. But happy to see that you do still blog.
Cote’: a magic lizard brain? So that’s how you come up with so many good ideas on your podcasts–redmonk radio was one reason I was pondering instinct/intuition versus analytical mind because you guys come up with stuff so fast I imagine it’s got to be mostly instinct. But how do you know whether you’re right or wrong? I find my instincts are often right–but I worry about saying something wrong or dumb.
Ric: no apologies necessary, I understood what you meant I think and just wanted to clarify where I was coming from on the career pressure issue. I think I am more ambivalent about putting myself out careerwise than my husband because (1) we don’t expect as much from women’s careers and (2) women don’t get as many benefits of working hard at a career (lower pay, fewer promotions, etc.).
Yes, plenty of smart people here, men and women.
Sandy, we will have to compare notes on the magic flute next week. The one we are going to is some Maurice Sendak version (he’s the where the wild things are author)–not sure exactly what that means but I sure am looking forward to it.
I never had the experience of people not knowing I was female since I chose to use “Anne” in my blog name. I’ve been curious about what that would be like though–could people tell I was female just from the way I approach even apparently gender-free topics? How would they think differently of my ideas? Guess I’ll never know.
There is definitely an “illusion of inclusion.” It’s painful, but just one of the things to deal with in order to do what we love.
In addition to asking whether people could tell the you were female by what you write, consider if you would write differently if you were masquerading as a man?
Sandy: that part would be interesting too!