The long tail, Music and the small bookshop

James O'Neill's blog — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:07:01 GMT

I've talked about the millennial thinking before . I've heard it  said that the "iPod Generation"

re: Sometimes I feel like a woman.

Melissa — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:08:56 GMT

> Sometimes I feel like a woman.

> No. Not like *that*.

Thank heaven for that. ;-)

But seriously, you're right that all too often when people talk about "women's issues" they actually turn out to be everyone's issues (or at least everyone sane).

A similar issue with needlessly framing things in gendered ways arises when it comes to trying to make IT more diverse. The issue is often framed as "How do we get more women into the IT pipeline?", but in reality the question is usually really "How do we get a more realistic balance of personality types into IT?". It turns out that about 33% of men who could succeed perfectly well in the field don't match they classic male-geek stereotype and feel completely out of place (with along 67% of women) -- as intelligent capable people they have other choices besides IT and so they take those choices instead. Framing those personality types exclusively female only serves to increase the isolation of those men.

Similarly the women who are in (the highly technical parts of) IT are typically among the 33% of women who are okay with the whole computer geek thing. They tend to get pissed off by people saying "Let's do X to attract women!" because they never wanted nor needed X to be attracted to the field.

(The two-thirds/one-third thing comes from a talk I went to by Jane Margolis, author of _Unlocking the Clubhouse_.)