Am I being a traitor if I say that’s actually pretty good…. all things considered.

(god, i feel evil saying that… but I reckon it would be a lot worse if I were an accountant, say)

I agree it’s difficult to talk around this subject. I think that what you are describing clearly exists. But so difficult to not operate in vast generalisation (or constantly make disclaimers for them).

I’ve felt this challenge over in the women/2.0/blogging/conference posts lately. But, what’s the option. To not talk about it? That doesn’t seem to help either.

So, for the time being, I guess I’ll just have to run the risk of offending some people with generalisations and being labeled a rampant feminist (or neo-feminist, it seems we’re up to now!).

It seems a better choice to maybe make women aware of the fact that often they’re being *too* quiet (unassertive, not self promoting).

eh. pass me my blue stockings….

Actually, I wasn’t trying to conflate geekdom with assertiveness. The first part of my statement, about the assertiveness and cultural expectations, should probably have been in a separate post from the second part.

What I meant about assertiveness was that – in my humble experience – women are less likely to assert their value than men. I don’t think it’s because we don’t feel we’re worthy. There’s something more difficult going on here. Maybe it’s linked with that thing where men are more likely than women to talk over another person in conversation.

i don’t know. It’s hard to talk in generalisations like this. But having employed and managed a lot of people in my time, I do know that – in my own experience – men are much better at arguing for their worth. Oddly, most of the time they seem not to have to. Perhaps it’s a body language thing. Who knows. it’s all very discomforting to think about, since I’ve always tried to treat everyone with absolute equality.

it is a bit of a conundrum tho’, isn’t it.
Geeky voices, whilst often most authoritative, are also often quietest.

Non-geeky – often loud, but sometime embarrassingly so…

(and that’s not intended to be a gender specific statement)

In a related trend, when I attended the national summit on women’s participation in ICT last year I was phenomenally disappointed to hear women in industry talk about the need to attract more women into the “non-geeky” roles in IT, such as marketing etc. Which is, of course, one way to perpetuate all of this. Grrrrrr.

“How much higher/lower is the difference for usability experts than the average for all jobs/careers?”

“I read somewhere that women make $0.76 for each $1.00 men make. (much more than the 10% difference in usability experts).”

“However differences in salary can be much less when values like age, # of years with the employer, and rank are taken into account. The question for this study would be: are men in general more senior than women in this field?”