Women in Technology

Hear us Roar

Article:		To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source
Subject:		Wow, Selena, I am impressed!
Date:		2007-10-09 12:55:20
From:		masinick

I have only known a handful of true, 100% geeks during my thirty four year involvement in software. There were, I believe, three women who graduated along with me in the Computer Science program back in the seventies. All three of them were very smart, but I would not label any of them as geeks. I have known a lot of very good software engineers, and even among them, I would only label a handful of them as real geeks. But the descriptions you gave, whether actual events or hyped up exaggerations of real events definitely qualify, not only as geek events, but stereotypical geek events - more intense than any I have known. I do know geeks to frequently sleep by day whenever possible and come out at night. In the seventies, that was when we could get the best use of computer time, and have fewer than a dozen people using computers of the day with "mainframe" capabilities. A few geeks I knew literally slept in the computer room. I'm not sure you will find very many women who behave like or typify the kind of descriptions you've given. It's that kind of stuff that probably scares many people, male and female alike, away! Nevertheless, I found your article amusing, and I could see elements of truth in it for the small handful of geeks that I have known. As for me, I could only claim perhaps 10% geek in my blood! ;-)