Posts Tagged “career”
Stephanie • 2nd Aug 2007 • webdesign • big picture, career, communication, future, gender, learning, web design
A few weeks months ago Jeffrey Zeldman posted a summary of the results of an An Event Apart fact finding mission on women in IT (web design was deemed too liquid a field to study). Jeffrey’s blog post sure sparked a discussion and a few basic ideas came up:
- is there is something about IT that doesn’t attract women?
- do men and women contribute different things?
- do women self promote? do men do it more? how is it perceived?
- how much of the above is cultural or learned behaviour?
In response to all of that I can say: I think men and women are fundamentally the same and any differences in our behaviour is cultural or taught. This is based on any number of my own personal observations the most relevant of which are: no matter what the stereotype, there is always an exception to what is considered typical or biological behaviour and that around the world the typical traits of each gender are different things in different cultures.
If there is a difference in the number of women doing something (a career in this case), it follows that there is some learned behaviour responsible for that disparity.
I’ve been talking these ideas over with my friends and I think the most interesting new piece of information to come out of this discussion, for me anyway, is the idea that men and women communicate in different ways and communicate with each other in different ways. So while a man might demand a raise and be respected a woman might not even phrase a request for a raise as a demand. The idea that the lingering pay disparity might be because women just haven’t asked for a raise is kind of a new thought for me.
I spent a few weeks thinking women needed to learn to be more aggressive and then at one of the panels at the CADE-AMTEC conference on gender in online discussion one of the other audience members (the only male in the room) suggested that maybe men needed be socialized to be less aggressive. The idea that maybe women have it right was a new idea for me too. I suspect the ideal path lies some where in the middle and is, at any rate, not the decision for one person to make anyway since a society changes only when the majority of the people who comprise it change.
I wrote most of this within two weeks of Jeffrey’s blog post and I was going to delete it rather than posting it but, well, some new information came up so I thought I’d post the two together.
Also mentioned in the discussion in response to the blog post was the idea that many of the women doing web design don’t think of themselves as web designers and aren’t in IT, they’re women in pink collar jobs who are doing design as part of a slew of other duties they have.
Last week we had a meeting with the leaders of our distributed web publishing community. These are the people who are in charge of ensuring their entire department or school is following our guidelines before a change goes public. They evaluate pages for good IA, UX, adherence to coding standards and writing style guidelines, and nitpicky details too. It was a room full of very talented women, all women, who contribute to the web site as a small part of their other job duties.
This whole gender thing really makes me think.
Stephanie • 30th Mar 2007 • personal, webdesign • accomplishment, bcit, big picture, career, code, HOPE, microformats, podcasts, self-taught, sociology
I just finished my first micoformatted page! When I was writing the information page for HOPE’s spring dinners I coded all the dinners as events and the organizers as hcards :) I did work with Brandon to re-do the BCIT Contacts application to use microformats but he did most of the coding on that project. This is the first time I’ve done it myself.
I didn’t actually tell anyone at HOPE that I’d done it that way since it doesn’t effect the way the page looks and I figure they’ll discover it for themselves if it’s useful to them. However, my friend thinks I should tell them so they recognize just how good a job I’m doing for them.
I don’t really feel like I did anything other than my job. Isn’t it my job to do a good job?
In the last two weeks of February, CBC’s IDEAS aired a couple programs on the ideas of Richard Sennett, a sociologist and author who has studied the organization of work. Among other things he suggests the Western world is obsessed not with the idea of craftsmanship but with productivity. In other words: it doesn’t matter how well you do you job – just how quickly.
The speaker at my graduation ceremony spoke at length encouraging us to “strive for excellence
” in everything we do. Not just in the work we do but also in our interactions as part of our daily lives. From answering a client’s e-mail to cooking dinner, he urged us to do our best.
Is doing a good job something society has to be told to do now?
Stephanie • 20th Mar 2007 • personal, webdesign • accomplishment, bcit, CADE, career, Catt-Trax2, excited, nervous, presentation, Terry, Winnepeg
One of the projects I’ve worked on at BCIT is Catt-Trax2. The website is for Danny Catt who is traveling through South America and Antarctica exploring conservation and sustainability issues and talking to the people in those regions working with those issues daily. He’s taking photos, video, and sound clips of this journey and blogging about his experiences. I helped architect the website and did some design and implementation work on it. We have fun stuff like a Google Maps mashup showing his route too.
The project manager for the project is an Instructional Development Coordinator named Terry Fuller who has done an excellent job pushing the team to give their most while restraining Danny’s overwhelming enthusiasm to keep the project in scope.
She’s asked me to co-present about the project at a conference for distance educators that is happening in Winnipeg in May. I’ve applied for funding to go with her. Our names are already on the website, so I hope I get the funding :)
Stephanie • 14th Mar 2007 • personal, webdesign • bcit, big picture, career, future, learning, vivian
Vivian is such a great motivator. I’m still sorry to see her go.
I just came out of a performance review where Vivian simultaneously told me what a great job I’m doing and laid out the changes I need to make to my life to have the world laid out at my feet by the time I’m fourty.
She said to me that in IT there are kind of two main career paths; one which is super specialized with one specific area of technology and one that sees the big picture and manages.
She thinks I should, and told me I have the right skills and thought processes to, be a manager.
I’m not sure I agree with where she wants me to go but she sure made me feel like I could get there if that’s where I wanted to go :)
Which begs the question, where do I want to go?
