Re: New EU FLOSS survey, with a twist on women involvement
Quoting Enrico Zini (enrico@enricozini.org):
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 10:12:14PM +0200, Emanuele Rocca wrote:
>
> > - Women work more effectively than men
> > I do not know :P
>
> I was pissed by this questions, because the available answers are either
> "true" or "false", but no way to say "there is no difference".
Well, this question is not really politically correct, for sure. But,
speaking for myself, I have to admit (and therefore share) that I do
have an opinion about this and my answer would be "yes" (btw, is the
correct English word "effectively"? Isn't it "efficiently"...or is
this again a consequence of my bad airport English?).
In our field of activity (IT technology in general), competition is
often a driving force...but also often a source of conflicts (think
about usual flame wars in FLOSS).
My current experience with working with both women and men leads me to
conclude that, most often, women are less influenced by competition
than many men. This, for instance, usually makes women more efficient
in team work because of a better ability to accept others point of
view and usually accept to being "wrong" or accepting others decisions
is not "losing".
This is of very strong importance in team work. This is probably one of
the reasons which make this place (d-w) so friendly.
And, as someone involved whose advice has importance when recruiting
people for jobs in our IT department, it admit that women probably
have a little advantage because of that opinion of mine
(unfortunately, we don't often have opened positions...so we're mostly
like all other IT departments : 4 women out of 25 people).
I perfectly assume this to be potentially considered as sexist. I know
that drawing general conclusions ("women are this", "men are that")
may be proven false when applied to individuals, of course.
But, well, I also assume that this is part of my judgement :
statistically, if I prefer a woman over a man for the same position, I
minimize the chances of future conflicts and degraded team work.
I have often talked of these topics with my beloved wife (who works
in the Human Resources Department of a famous French company in
optics) and this seems to be a known fact in recruiting people.
Unfortunately (this is again confirmed by my wife), IT departments most
often only focus on technical skills rather than human qualities and
all other non technical stuff...and I'm afraid that still most IT
heads think that technical skills is a "men quality".
Funnily, a consequence of this is that it seems that IT departments
are very prone to "overskilled recruiting"...that is giving so much
importance to technical skills that they end up recruiting people with
too high skills when compared to the real job. Not saying that
replacing men by women would lower that....don't make me say what I
don't intend to...:-). But just saying that the balance in factors
which influence a decision is often not equilibrated.
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