[Linux-aus] The Ada Initiative - Should Linux Australia support it?

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 2:26 PM, Simon Lyall <simon at darkmere.gen.nz> wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2011, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>>
>> You are implying that women that don't choose to take a technical
>> career should not be there because they would not be qualified in the
>> first place. And you don't see anything wrong with that logic?
>
> Perhaps he means that we risk attracting people to computing that are
> unsuited or not like it.
>
> Like those people who got into IT during the .com boom instead of becoming
> accountants or lawyers. Easy to spot, they are aged around 30, wear nice
> clothes to work, don't touch computers outside work hours and have minimal
> interest in areas of IT outside their job requirements.
>
> However I think that we would have to increase the number of women in IT a
> fair bit before we "overshoot" into people who would be unsuited.

I'd be happy about a bit of overshooting actually! There certainly are
males in the IT space, too, that may be better suited to other jobs
and nobody is suggesting that we start discouraging men from getting
jobs in IT because they may be unqualified.

Silvia.