I think this is economics.
4 Nov 2012 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouWe've been having dinnertime discussions over the past few nights about whether certain advancements in society could only happen because of previous advancements -- specifically, a shift in perception or understanding of one's role in the world. Like, for instance, the development of unions. There were guilds in the western medieval world, but those were owned/operated by the master craftsman. The workers themselves -- apprentices, journeymen, not-quite-masters -- weren't the ones who had say-so. Seems like the guilds acted more like chambers of commerce, in some degree; they allowed the businesses to band together to set prices, to protect a monopoly, to lobby the local government for lower taxes or better treatment, and they might extend loans to their own. Still, not quite the same as a union -- and I would say one of the biggest things unions did was present the notion of a place where workers could air grievances, be heard, and get bad situations changed. Like, allowing for lunch breaks or not making children work (let alone for twelve-hour shifts) and so on.
CP's comment was that the union movement seems to have its sociological nucleus in the socialist/communal movements of the early 19th century. In other words, that you couldn't think of "the worker's rights" until you had some kind of framework for understanding what a "worker" was. As in, not an individual but as one of many other "workers" who formed a collective, and could/should claim rights as a collective.
The same kind of goes for democracy, in that it's not like the US was the first to think of sufferage (not being truly universal until almost 150 years after the country was founded). It was just the first to think of broader sufferage, having the most lenient voter requirements anywhere -- sure, not even a fifth of what we have today, but compared to its contemporaries, damn near any (white, male) could vote regardless of class, education, land ownership, finances, or marital status. Now I can't remember where I read the essay last week, but apparently there was representational government elsewhere (ie Britain, and I think Germany) but it was highly limited. The upshot was that of the white male population in those places, roughly one of every twenty or so men (or fewer) actually qualified to vote. When the US first began, it requirements put the sufferage closer to one of every five adult white freedmen could vote, and the rest of our history has been knocking off the rest of the requirements, one by one*.
My point is that the notion of "universal" sufferage wasn't really possible until certain other factors had been satisfied. As in, at a certain point universal sufferage became conceivable, but it wasn't considered feasible until other major shifts had occurred. Like, for once, realizing that human beings are human beings regardless of the color of their skin, which translates to "and therefore adult black men should get to vote, too". But first there had to be the shift from seeing a segment of the population as insignificant to seeing them as part of that voting collective, or having the potential to be part.
This kind of stuff intrigues me, especially since my current wip has heavy leanings towards being more alt-history than fantasy. (Or more like alt-history with a heavy veneer of fantasy, I guess.) But the historical basis means paying attention to what would be an anachronism -- and, say, feminist mindsets would be anachronistic. Even the Iroquois, whose influence is definitely there in the earliest American feminist essays, were more proto-feminist. But meeting them proved to be the consciousness shift required for someone to take the next step.
What lies underneath this, I think, is money.
Not to be crass about it, but when slaves were freed, they stopped being something you paid for and became someone you paid. The economic freedom of owning your own home (your own castle, as it were), putting food on your own table, and providing for your own family, becomes a first step for people to demand further rights. In a way, it's a repeat of the earlier process the British colonists went through during the French & Indian War -- having economic opportunities they'd not had in Britain, they chafed at heavy-handed British rule. (Another case of "something had to shift before something else could happen"; if the French & Indian War hadn't occurred and started that major shift in self-perception for the colonies, the US might be the southern half of Canada right now.)
Anyway, it's a different set of issues with Native American sufferage, since IIRC that was less of an economic thing and more of a political issue (boiling down to taxes), and had to do with whether individuals of a sovereign nation had rights to vote in US elections. Given the various treaty-holders were thus at the mercy of those they hadn't elected, duh. But that's kind of its own case, so forgive any misstatements or glossing, here.
With women, though, I'd say it's also economic. The industrial revolution didn't just get more women into work in the various shirtwaist factories and cotton mills and so on; it also brought about advancements that were major housewife time sinks. Like gas stoves, and electricity, and widespread indoor plumbing, and so on. Being able to get out of the house and get a paycheck leads to economic independence (or at least less economic dependence); the rise of the unions also benefited women, too. What had been wifely chattel became something (someone) that might, someday, achieve economic parity, and the push for sufferage -- which seems to have been pushed aside by abolition and then reconstruction (at least in the US) -- rose again.
So. That's what I'm thinking: that as a group achieves -- or finally realizes the potential for achieving -- economic independence, the next step is to reach for greater social power. Or maybe I should say: seeing economic independence within our grasp gives us the sense that we now also hold the currency of power, and we'll trade on that for social, political, emotional, etc, power. I know I'm glossing a lot of details, but I think the basic concept is sound, here.
Which brings me to something I'd been thinking about several weeks ago, about political power and how it's tied to economic power. What triggered the contemplation was reading a review of... uh, I can't even recall the story's title. I'm pretty sure it was SF, and by an avowed feminist, and most of the reviews indicated the story showed its age (late 80s, mid-90s, maybe?) in terms of its gender flipping. That was big, for awhile, to reverse everything like some kind of a thought experiment. I'm not bothering recalling the title since it's not really an issue with the book per se (which I haven't read), so I can't say whether the book handled the premise well. It's just the premise itself that jumped out at me.
The story posits a world where women have the political (and cultural and religious/magical) power, and men are the subservient class. Highly objectified and sexualized, as well, almost a one-for-one flip in those regards. Here's what jumped out at me: the men continue to be in charge of commerce. (One reviewer made a comment to the extent that the story posits commerce/trade as 'dirty' and therefore not something that women would lower themselves to do.) In short, a world where the political/social power is in women's hands, yet the economic power appears to remain in men's hands.
Uh. I can't think of a historical instance where this would be true. The one who does the work and brings home the money -- the cash, to buy things and pay for things -- is the one "in the world" and thus the one with the social/economic clout to be part of that world. This doesn't seem to change even if one brings home the money and gives it to someone else, like in Japan where the wives (whether or not they work) appear to be the vast majority of household-account managers, including giving their (working) husbands a weekly allowance. Who ends up with the money doesn't change who earned the money, and I think it's the earning that's the signifier, here. Or else all those Japanese women, like plenty of American women in the past, would have far more economic power by dint of being in charge of their household's overall income.
It's possible the story had other factors in play, to offset the shift that'd come about from such economic realities. Like, say, I don't know, some kind of mass hysteria that strikes men in political situations. Or something. But barring that, the ones who hold the economic power -- the ones able to earn -- are the ones who get to run the show.
That in turn reminded me of one of the rare cases where a matriarchal society exists and the woman are the money-earners. (There are other matriarchal and matrilineal societies, but in a lot of those, it appears it's similar to the Japanese setup, where the men willingly turn over their social power and/or earnings to the women's control.) It's the Haenyo ("sea women") of Jeju Island, in South Korea.
Note: the Wikipedia entry says the women only started near the end of the 19th century, but the translated-from-Korean articles I've found give dates more like around the 16th or 17th century. From what I'd read previous, I'd been under the impression it was a matrilineal society where maybe the women doing the ocean-farming (for abalone, seaweed, and other sea-floor goodies) were given their positions by dint of the older indigenous religion, or some such.
Turns out that it's actually due to Confucian assumptions that the only person in a family who'd ever earn a wage would be the husband. When the Joseon nobles decided they needed to increase tax revenue, they decided that the products of sea-farming were luxuries (and abalone was a huge luxury in massive demand), and therefore should be taxed heavily. The tax was just too high to make a living, though, and the men who'd been sea-farming had to stop, and start looking for other work.
I have to wonder who had the bright idea, since it seems so obvious but it's the last thing that'd be obvious if you had the big blindspot known as Confucian Assumptions: the women do the sea-farming. Women aren't taxed, after all. From what I can figure out, the women weren't taxed for a really long time, because taxing them meant the Confucian minds in charge of Korea would have to acknowledge that women could a) work outside the home, b) get paid for it, and c) get paid enough to owe taxes. Just A alone probably made some of their heads explode, let alone carrying onto wrapping their Confucian assumptions around B and C.
However, the result of this paradigm shift was that now the families had children and homes that needed caring-for -- and the women were busy making a living for the family. Over time, by necessity that role fell to the men, and now among the Haenyo communities it's the men who take care of the house, do the cooking and cleaning, and raise the children. Incidentally, the Haenyo also retain more of the pre-xtian indigenous/shamanic rituals/beliefs than other similar groups, which maybe has to do with the shamanic traditions in Korean history being strongly pro-women, compared to Confucian and Christian assumptions. I guess if you're the wage-earner, you also get to say what religion the household is going to be. Which is another duh, but speaks to how economic power also informs religious power.
The Haenyo themselves, maybe more than anything else, are shining examples of just how ingenious humans can be when it comes to figuring out how to get around paying a penny more in tax than required. (Death and taxes, the two truly universal experiences.) But beyond that, it's also a counter to the argument that bringing home your income and giving it to your wife makes her the 'economic power'. No, it just makes her the person holding the purse strings; she's still within the domestic sphere only, with no social/political currency except as what's borrowed from her (money-earning) spouse.
A story that posits women as the money-receivers, while men remain the money-earners, feels too much to me like the premise my grandfather thought was appropriate: the man does the dirty work, and the woman (up on her pedestal) shouldn't worry her pretty head about the cost of things. She has power over him, but only insofar as it's power he's granted her. She doesn't actually have power on her own; that must be earned, and she's got no chance to earn it. (It's especially ironic that my grandfather felt this way, given that my grandmother made $5 more a week than he did when they first got married, and she continued to make more than him until she finally left work -- eight years later! -- to have their first kid.)
But anyway. Am I missing something? Is there another solid economic example somewhere, in which the past few centuries of social patterns (male wage-earner, female wage-receiver) ever resulted in women having the social/economic power? Does that even seem likely, given the entire history of women (up to this day) marginalized income-wise compared to men? Or am I the only one who sees a correlation between the slow but incremental increase of women's wages as a percentage of men's and the slow but incremental increase* in women's voices within the social/economic/political spheres?
* not counting those places that would really really like us to backslide and undo the past fifty years, but I figure these things come in waves.
CP's comment was that the union movement seems to have its sociological nucleus in the socialist/communal movements of the early 19th century. In other words, that you couldn't think of "the worker's rights" until you had some kind of framework for understanding what a "worker" was. As in, not an individual but as one of many other "workers" who formed a collective, and could/should claim rights as a collective.
The same kind of goes for democracy, in that it's not like the US was the first to think of sufferage (not being truly universal until almost 150 years after the country was founded). It was just the first to think of broader sufferage, having the most lenient voter requirements anywhere -- sure, not even a fifth of what we have today, but compared to its contemporaries, damn near any (white, male) could vote regardless of class, education, land ownership, finances, or marital status. Now I can't remember where I read the essay last week, but apparently there was representational government elsewhere (ie Britain, and I think Germany) but it was highly limited. The upshot was that of the white male population in those places, roughly one of every twenty or so men (or fewer) actually qualified to vote. When the US first began, it requirements put the sufferage closer to one of every five adult white freedmen could vote, and the rest of our history has been knocking off the rest of the requirements, one by one*.
My point is that the notion of "universal" sufferage wasn't really possible until certain other factors had been satisfied. As in, at a certain point universal sufferage became conceivable, but it wasn't considered feasible until other major shifts had occurred. Like, for once, realizing that human beings are human beings regardless of the color of their skin, which translates to "and therefore adult black men should get to vote, too". But first there had to be the shift from seeing a segment of the population as insignificant to seeing them as part of that voting collective, or having the potential to be part.
This kind of stuff intrigues me, especially since my current wip has heavy leanings towards being more alt-history than fantasy. (Or more like alt-history with a heavy veneer of fantasy, I guess.) But the historical basis means paying attention to what would be an anachronism -- and, say, feminist mindsets would be anachronistic. Even the Iroquois, whose influence is definitely there in the earliest American feminist essays, were more proto-feminist. But meeting them proved to be the consciousness shift required for someone to take the next step.
What lies underneath this, I think, is money.
Not to be crass about it, but when slaves were freed, they stopped being something you paid for and became someone you paid. The economic freedom of owning your own home (your own castle, as it were), putting food on your own table, and providing for your own family, becomes a first step for people to demand further rights. In a way, it's a repeat of the earlier process the British colonists went through during the French & Indian War -- having economic opportunities they'd not had in Britain, they chafed at heavy-handed British rule. (Another case of "something had to shift before something else could happen"; if the French & Indian War hadn't occurred and started that major shift in self-perception for the colonies, the US might be the southern half of Canada right now.)
Anyway, it's a different set of issues with Native American sufferage, since IIRC that was less of an economic thing and more of a political issue (boiling down to taxes), and had to do with whether individuals of a sovereign nation had rights to vote in US elections. Given the various treaty-holders were thus at the mercy of those they hadn't elected, duh. But that's kind of its own case, so forgive any misstatements or glossing, here.
With women, though, I'd say it's also economic. The industrial revolution didn't just get more women into work in the various shirtwaist factories and cotton mills and so on; it also brought about advancements that were major housewife time sinks. Like gas stoves, and electricity, and widespread indoor plumbing, and so on. Being able to get out of the house and get a paycheck leads to economic independence (or at least less economic dependence); the rise of the unions also benefited women, too. What had been wifely chattel became something (someone) that might, someday, achieve economic parity, and the push for sufferage -- which seems to have been pushed aside by abolition and then reconstruction (at least in the US) -- rose again.
So. That's what I'm thinking: that as a group achieves -- or finally realizes the potential for achieving -- economic independence, the next step is to reach for greater social power. Or maybe I should say: seeing economic independence within our grasp gives us the sense that we now also hold the currency of power, and we'll trade on that for social, political, emotional, etc, power. I know I'm glossing a lot of details, but I think the basic concept is sound, here.
Which brings me to something I'd been thinking about several weeks ago, about political power and how it's tied to economic power. What triggered the contemplation was reading a review of... uh, I can't even recall the story's title. I'm pretty sure it was SF, and by an avowed feminist, and most of the reviews indicated the story showed its age (late 80s, mid-90s, maybe?) in terms of its gender flipping. That was big, for awhile, to reverse everything like some kind of a thought experiment. I'm not bothering recalling the title since it's not really an issue with the book per se (which I haven't read), so I can't say whether the book handled the premise well. It's just the premise itself that jumped out at me.
The story posits a world where women have the political (and cultural and religious/magical) power, and men are the subservient class. Highly objectified and sexualized, as well, almost a one-for-one flip in those regards. Here's what jumped out at me: the men continue to be in charge of commerce. (One reviewer made a comment to the extent that the story posits commerce/trade as 'dirty' and therefore not something that women would lower themselves to do.) In short, a world where the political/social power is in women's hands, yet the economic power appears to remain in men's hands.
Uh. I can't think of a historical instance where this would be true. The one who does the work and brings home the money -- the cash, to buy things and pay for things -- is the one "in the world" and thus the one with the social/economic clout to be part of that world. This doesn't seem to change even if one brings home the money and gives it to someone else, like in Japan where the wives (whether or not they work) appear to be the vast majority of household-account managers, including giving their (working) husbands a weekly allowance. Who ends up with the money doesn't change who earned the money, and I think it's the earning that's the signifier, here. Or else all those Japanese women, like plenty of American women in the past, would have far more economic power by dint of being in charge of their household's overall income.
It's possible the story had other factors in play, to offset the shift that'd come about from such economic realities. Like, say, I don't know, some kind of mass hysteria that strikes men in political situations. Or something. But barring that, the ones who hold the economic power -- the ones able to earn -- are the ones who get to run the show.
That in turn reminded me of one of the rare cases where a matriarchal society exists and the woman are the money-earners. (There are other matriarchal and matrilineal societies, but in a lot of those, it appears it's similar to the Japanese setup, where the men willingly turn over their social power and/or earnings to the women's control.) It's the Haenyo ("sea women") of Jeju Island, in South Korea.
Note: the Wikipedia entry says the women only started near the end of the 19th century, but the translated-from-Korean articles I've found give dates more like around the 16th or 17th century. From what I'd read previous, I'd been under the impression it was a matrilineal society where maybe the women doing the ocean-farming (for abalone, seaweed, and other sea-floor goodies) were given their positions by dint of the older indigenous religion, or some such.
Turns out that it's actually due to Confucian assumptions that the only person in a family who'd ever earn a wage would be the husband. When the Joseon nobles decided they needed to increase tax revenue, they decided that the products of sea-farming were luxuries (and abalone was a huge luxury in massive demand), and therefore should be taxed heavily. The tax was just too high to make a living, though, and the men who'd been sea-farming had to stop, and start looking for other work.
I have to wonder who had the bright idea, since it seems so obvious but it's the last thing that'd be obvious if you had the big blindspot known as Confucian Assumptions: the women do the sea-farming. Women aren't taxed, after all. From what I can figure out, the women weren't taxed for a really long time, because taxing them meant the Confucian minds in charge of Korea would have to acknowledge that women could a) work outside the home, b) get paid for it, and c) get paid enough to owe taxes. Just A alone probably made some of their heads explode, let alone carrying onto wrapping their Confucian assumptions around B and C.
However, the result of this paradigm shift was that now the families had children and homes that needed caring-for -- and the women were busy making a living for the family. Over time, by necessity that role fell to the men, and now among the Haenyo communities it's the men who take care of the house, do the cooking and cleaning, and raise the children. Incidentally, the Haenyo also retain more of the pre-xtian indigenous/shamanic rituals/beliefs than other similar groups, which maybe has to do with the shamanic traditions in Korean history being strongly pro-women, compared to Confucian and Christian assumptions. I guess if you're the wage-earner, you also get to say what religion the household is going to be. Which is another duh, but speaks to how economic power also informs religious power.
The Haenyo themselves, maybe more than anything else, are shining examples of just how ingenious humans can be when it comes to figuring out how to get around paying a penny more in tax than required. (Death and taxes, the two truly universal experiences.) But beyond that, it's also a counter to the argument that bringing home your income and giving it to your wife makes her the 'economic power'. No, it just makes her the person holding the purse strings; she's still within the domestic sphere only, with no social/political currency except as what's borrowed from her (money-earning) spouse.
A story that posits women as the money-receivers, while men remain the money-earners, feels too much to me like the premise my grandfather thought was appropriate: the man does the dirty work, and the woman (up on her pedestal) shouldn't worry her pretty head about the cost of things. She has power over him, but only insofar as it's power he's granted her. She doesn't actually have power on her own; that must be earned, and she's got no chance to earn it. (It's especially ironic that my grandfather felt this way, given that my grandmother made $5 more a week than he did when they first got married, and she continued to make more than him until she finally left work -- eight years later! -- to have their first kid.)
But anyway. Am I missing something? Is there another solid economic example somewhere, in which the past few centuries of social patterns (male wage-earner, female wage-receiver) ever resulted in women having the social/economic power? Does that even seem likely, given the entire history of women (up to this day) marginalized income-wise compared to men? Or am I the only one who sees a correlation between the slow but incremental increase of women's wages as a percentage of men's and the slow but incremental increase* in women's voices within the social/economic/political spheres?
* not counting those places that would really really like us to backslide and undo the past fifty years, but I figure these things come in waves.
no subject
Date: 4 Nov 2012 03:02 pm (UTC)And of course the reverse happens as well; work once viewed as pink-collar work and then turned into a Profession starts excluding women. :/ I should probably know more about how this happened to programming. (There's the no-true-Scotsman moving-the-goalposts hilarity of "project management/design/testing/documentation/systems administration/sales/graphics/etc. aren't REAL tech jobs" but I know the scene now and how it used to be, not so much about the shift from one to another.)
I can't find the original place I heard this related insight, but: back when nursing, teaching, and convents were the only places that smart, ambitious women in US/UK could shine, of course we had amazing work for very low cost. Now we actually need to pay well to get good nurses and teachers, because smart women have other options.
You linked to Wikipedia -- the Wikimedia Foundation is hiring, including for a visual designer. (I work there and find it woman-friendly and respectful of its workers.) More apropos of your point and of kaigou's, "Quilted is a five-person worker-owned and cooperatively managed web design, web development, and print design company." I think the wish to be treated respectfully at work is a huge reason people end up starting their own tech businesses.
no subject
Date: 4 Nov 2012 04:16 pm (UTC)I hadn't thought specifically about the goal-post moving (though coincidentally, it's happened with the sea-fishing, in that South Korea now sees free-diving farming as a woman's job and not suitable for men!) but that shift from "real tech jobs" to "something the chicks do" has been going on over the past decade. Given that agencies (marketing/advertising) seem to be fairly well-infiltrated by women, two things suddenly make more sense. One, that most of them outsource their "tech" jobs -- the coding/programming -- to companies that are almost always male-dominated judging from the voices on the phones -- and two, the instant I use the words 'technology' or 'technical' I get discounted. It feels almost like a kind of defiant internalization, in that the earliest years I worked (as analyst) with dev people, there was always a kind of quiet dismissal from them about support positions like mine that didn't require hands-on experience but a hell of a lot of technical knowledge all the same. I guess eventually the trend became to not just accept this dismissal but to embrace it, to the point that admitting you like technology -- let alone understand it! -- puts you on the other side of the fence. At times it's felt like what had once been dev-support has become almost luddite in the unspoken but very firm belief that we don't need no stinking technologists here, thanks.
As for Wikimedia, I've kept an eye on it, but I keep getting hit by imposter syndrome, especially when it comes to the software engineering. I've discussed it with my mother a few times (the former HR person) and she's mentioned the imposter syndrome has especial difficulty in areas where the skills can be OTJ or traditional. OTJ is discounted for women, as though they don't "really" know the skills, while for men it's seen as sign of ambition and self-starting, which continue to be more valued in male workers. My coding's entirely OTJ and self-taught, so you can see the bind. (Doesn't help that I'm in a city where design and illustration are king, and tech is off on the side. I'm not boy enough to be welcome among the tech, and too tech to be welcome in the areas that would otherwise be glad to have another woman among the ranks.)
no subject
Date: 4 Nov 2012 11:30 pm (UTC)Not quite the same as working for, say, Westinghouse, or Proctor and Gamble, or one of the really stable large financials. Problem with working for various large companies was that there was the expectation of working for one company for a long time, and you get the stinkeye for being fired or for being ambitious and disloyal.
There's always that tension between self-educated vs. "has an official piece of paper to prove it," or an official endorsement, or a good reference.
These days, it's hard to prove what OTJ *means* if you've been dealing with really crumby supervisors and managers who won't give you any kind of reference--or, if they're already infamous in the biz, whose references would be really suspect anyway. (That movie The Devil Loves Prada is coming to my mind again..."Oh, you lasted a whole week with her? My goodness!")
These days it's much less easy for programmers to just say, hey, I learned PERL in a weekend, let's do this-- and yes, I know someone who did that about twenty years ago-- because now many parts of industry and programming work are a lot less wild west (aka, rare knacks + skills in high demand) than it used to be.
Some of the difference is that those folks didn't worry about imposter syndrome. Nobody else knew any better anyway, they're gonna have to wait on somebody who can muddle their way to a solution on this anyway, why not give it a fling?
The folks signing the contracts in admin had no way to know who's any good out there at the bleeding edge, they have to rely on somebody who hasn't been able to fix it so far, to tell them who sounds like they're any good or who's a flimflam artist.
I think some of the big orgs out here have been contracting an awful lot of work with very official, very large scale bulls-@@ artists on the corporate scale, and getting left with the bill for stuff that doesn't work, and they want their own employees to just siddown and shuddup and not admit this fact to anybody. (Oooh, scandal--that gets expensive too.) This creates a hostile environment for anybody with a tendency to point out the Emperor has no clothes, or to try to fix some of the mess.
If the bean counters are saying, "we don't have time for goofs, we can hire somebody else next week better than you," and they can, using official pieces of paper to prove things, that's a whole different scene. OTJ experience can get presented in a more impressive way to those folks, but it does take a bit of attitude-adjustment.
When I read:
"...too tech to be welcome in the areas that would otherwise be glad to have another woman..."
There's a certain disconnect/alien there which has to be overcome.
But you do speak design, so what I see is presenting the idea, "here's somebody who can translate for you, who can fight for what you need because they do understand where you're coming from." The outer gate-guardian, if that makes sense?
no subject
Date: 5 Nov 2012 12:03 am (UTC)It's a matter of perception, and one that would amuse me if it weren't my own career on the line. But it's also not universal, an important note. It just happens to be that I'm in a town where the vast majority of the sound and fury is focused on design, cutting-edge design, and the designers are our superstars. As design is suspicious of technology (reminders of my sister's ID classmates and their undying feud with the architecture students), I was a little slow to realize I'd been shooting myself by admitting I'd gone native -- a big plus in previous cities is a big minus in this one. Whoops!
heh.
no subject
Date: 6 Nov 2012 08:21 pm (UTC)I've spent the last few years in the world of open source (been paid for it for a few years), and while "I have n years of experience with such-and-such" isn't terribly easy to prove in some contexts, "here are my open source contributions" (which can include the proverbial weekend hack) really helps with clueful hiring managers. However, less clueful hiring managers and recruiters will fall back to relying on certificates and CVs and ignore more granular and specific evidence, sigh. And of course not everyone has that weekend, or can contribute to FLOSS while on the clock. (I gave a talk to try to encourage companies to do it, though.)
no subject
Date: 7 Nov 2012 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 6 Nov 2012 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 Nov 2012 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 6 Nov 2012 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 Nov 2012 11:58 pm (UTC)Which is exceedingly ironic, that the original wish -- to make as much money as my male peers -- has become a willingness to make less, again, if only I got treated better. I know essayists like to talk about having it all, but it seems to me the real "having it all" would be making the same as men and getting the same amounts of respect and being-listened-to. That's the "having it all" that even my most successful peers still struggle with, it seems.