<p>In my days, I have seen, heard, and experienced a lot of belittling, bashing, and degradation of women in the IT business; and so, it seems, over the years, I have armed myself with being defensive and competitive most of the time. Women in the IT industry are often pushed back to encoding jobs, to minor coding, or even just into testing. Sure, these different aspects of a software development cycle are all that important, but why can't women be given equal chances of fair play in the field?</p>
I just opened my mail a couple of minutes ago. I know it seemed like I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, spent almost half the day trying to fix the cables and internet wirings and stuffs when I found out that our DSL provider doesn't work. I did the whole lot of the IT department work single handedly.. planning, coding, running to and fro to fix cables, etc. Really, it was a pretty exhausting, irritating day.
Then.. I got this post from one of the groups I belong to, that was very very bad. Issue 160 of the Linux Journal for August 2007 had this ad for (I don't want to mention the company name.. its just gonna be another ad for them..) which was very offending. I thought that this kind of "anti-women" treatment was just here in the Philippines, until I saw that post, and the article written by Brian D Foy. (I thank him for that very well said post). I didn't know that even the Linux Journal would tolerate that kind of ad. I haven't read/seen/heard a reaction from Linux Journal though (nor from that company). Well, women of the IT industry, go ahead and see for yourself what the very offensive marketing ad was.
What a shame. Really.. a shame on these people.