A Woman Who Spends Her Time Creating Tech Stuff Instead Of Cataloging Insults
Oops! She forgot to be a victim!
Meredith L. Patterson writes at Medium:
Growing up with autism is a never-ending series of lessons in how people without autism expect the rest of the world to relate to them. This goes double for those who -- like me -- went undiagnosed until adulthood: the instructions are far less explicit and the standards are higher. "Stop drumming your pencil, don't you know you're distracting people?" "Don't be so direct, don't you know you're being insulting?" "Put yourself in her shoes -- when are you going to develop a sense of empathy?" Invariably, the autistic behaviour is marked as less-than, called out as needing to change. So we adapt; we learn to keep our "abnormal" attitudes and behaviours to ourselves in the hope of blending in, and when we discover communities where, by chance, we fit in a little better without having to try so hard, we cling to those safe spaces like a drowning man clings to a lifebuoy.I stumbled into my first such space when I was eight, and its name was FidoNet. I didn't think of myself as a programmer back then, just a girl who liked fractals and science fiction and BASIC on my IBM PCjr, but the virtual world of BBS message boards made orders of magnitude more sense than the everyday world of classrooms, sports teams, church groups and grade-school social dynamics.
Nobody on FidoNet ever told me "no girls allowed" -- or even implied it, at least to an extent that I might have picked up on -- and as a result, the assertion that "technology is a boys' club" has always been foreign to me. Sure, I was always one of a scant handful of girls in the after-school computer or science club, but none of that mattered when there were NASA missions or flight simulator games to geek out on. I was well into my twenties before anyone of any gender thought to remark on the rarity of a woman being interested in the finer points of, e.g., C++ memory management; I'd come from the Midwest to my very first tech conference, and at the time I was far more amazed by the sheer concentration of people who were interested in C++ at all. I made friends largely by virtue of not knowing who I was supposed to be impressed by. I was there because I loved working with technology, and I gravitated to people who shared the same passions. Everything else was background noise.
I have since been made painfully aware that my experience is atypical. Every time, it has been a woman who has done so. Every time, it has been a lesson in how the woman I am talking with expects the tech world to relate to her and other people like her.
...Ironically, I have been discriminated against in the tech world because of my gender; I just didn't notice until it was brought to my attention long after the fact. Several years ago, I posted an idea for a new feature to the developers' mailing list for an open-source project I used. It got one reply -- a few questions from another list member -- and the thread ended there. Those questions helped me refine my thinking about the feature, and over the next few months, I implemented it. Much later -- after I'd presented my implementation at a couple of user groups and conferences -- one of the commit-bit holders for the project mentioned to me that there had been some additional discussion of my proposal, on the private commit-bit holders' mailing list. There had been interest, but one of the committers had dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it. It was the funniest thing I'd heard in months -- I literally doubled over laughing at how nonplussed he must have been to see it not only implemented, but implemented to rousing success.
The world will not always be your oyster. Not if you're a woman, not if you're a man.
What do you do? Instead of whining, you keep doing -- till you're so good they'd hire you if you were a tree frog.
Great read w/a lot of good points and one damn good quote. For me,
1. Let me give you what I can instead of shutting me out.
2. I've put in the time and focus to be successful. Have you?
3. I'm an individual w/certain characteristics that have both helped/hurt my efforts. Why ignore that?
I feel sorry for most of the SJWs because evidently they have given up their individuality to the 'hive'. They know it. They know they have nothing w/o the hive. They are scared.
Those of us who blindly found our/a way by doing/thinking find these guys to be clueless about real life.
You know the one where at some point you live or die by your own efforts using whatever luck God (Odin, Athena, The Good Witch) threw your way.
I was 18 before I found out that DAMN a lot of the kids I was competing against OWNED their own Double Bass. AND took private lessons! No wonder they were good (and some were better than me).
Did I double-down on practice or go cry on 'da Net? Well, since the Net did not exist for me I simply considered them just like the bigger older football players and competed as best I could (on the Oboe instead which was easier for me).
Today, these kids are told from the get-go. You can not succeed because you are _______________ (black, white, male, female, whatever).
Thank God I was left alone to my own insecurities and no one else's.
By the time I informed I was a loser/racist/misogynist/anti-whatever I knew what behavior was guilty as charged and should change, and more importantly knew when it was BS.
Bob in Texas at July 26, 2015 6:10 AM
Go Bob!
kenmce at July 26, 2015 7:33 AM
Bob, absolutely right on with these:
And with the rest of your comment.
Amy Alkon at July 26, 2015 8:26 AM
The science for my next book is so hard that I sometimes feel dumb while reading it. The good news is, I felt lots dumber in December than I do now. I just worked and worked (and worked) to learn and understand. (This is why I've been running repeats of my radio show, which I love doing -- and I think I'm almost through the hardest part of my book and should be back to doing live shows very soon.) The cool thing is, two books by neuroscientists that read like they were in another language in December are now absolutely understandable to me.
Amy Alkon at July 26, 2015 8:30 AM
Good luck Amy and I don't doubt you will succeed. You've admitted it's hard and drove on. Done deal. The rest is easy.
Bob in Texas at July 26, 2015 12:07 PM
Amy Alkon
https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2015/07/a-woman-who-spe.html#comment-6124187">comment from Bob in TexasThanks, Bob -- I'm just willing to do the work. I didn't understand how hard it would be until I really got into the research, but this is the book I want to write and I'm just hammering away!
Amy Alkon
at July 26, 2015 10:41 PM
More power to her. And it does illustrate the point that in child-rearing (and society in general), making sure we leave room for outliers.
Cousin Dave at July 27, 2015 9:47 AM
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