skyler@violet.berkeley.edu (07/30/88)
For reasons which are obscure to me, I'm slightly frustrated that my point about the technical core was so badly expressed. I'm going to try to explain it a little better. The classic scheme of organization (basically taken from Weber) is the pyramid. In America, this has also been combined with the idea of "the science of management"--that is, that there are people who are trained in management and can manage anything, including firms which produce things they wouldn't even recognize on a silver platter. This kind of management has a variety of problems. And, among them is that those people who make technical decisions are completely isolated from thos people who make administrative, legal, or marketing decisions. It has been suggested that women don't like to be in the technical core, because women like to mediate and women like to have more contact with the general public than being in the technical core allows. Supposedly, computer firms had a different organization, more akin to the way that academic departments are arranged. In many academic departments, the chair of the department is a professor who still teaches classes and will, at some time, return to teaching full time. That is, members of the technical core would manage groups while continuing to do technical research. They might "move up" the ladder of the organization, but would continue to do some technical research all the while. They would, in any case, sometimes return to doing research full time. This could be better for women in that one could be involved with mediation and technical research at the same time. So, I have a series of questions. The first is, does this kind of organization still exist? If so, is it better for women? -Trish
paw3c@galen.acc.virginia.edu (Pat Wilson) (07/31/88)
> It has been suggested that women don't like to be in the > technical core, because women like to mediate and women like to have > more contact with the general public than being in the technical > core allows. I have trouble with this, because, in _my_ case, at least, it's just not true. I would _dearly_ love to be in a "technical core" where I could just work on something, rather than having to deal with other people (I'm a system administrator, and so am responsible to about 300 users). I think that IF there's a reason women _don't_ like to be in the technical core, it might be because those who are _already_ there (kind of by default, men, right?) don't _want_ women there, and make them feel unwanted in subtle ways. Pat Wilson paw3c@acc.virginia.edu || uunet!virginia!paw3c || paw3c@virginia.BITNET