Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I honestly have come to believe that women do not belong in IT/Engineering.  Yes, there I said it.  I'm a bigot.  Sue me.  But I think that women are counterproductive and not conducive for a thriving IT industry, unless the following recommendations are made.

• Women make great project managers.  I think women are better project managers maybe even pure managers than men.  The reason is that women actually try to understand people rather than look at pure deliverables.  Actually, the more I think about it, it's better to have women exclusively as project managers leading a team of engineers who are for the most part men.  Also, the organizational aspect and multitasking parts make women natural project managers.
  
• Women make excellent help desk support.  1st level support.  Answering phone calls, trying to honestly help people.  Guys are terrible at this type of thing.  Guys lack the patience, organization skills and ability to handle screaming jerks on the phone.  Also, the fact that you need to handle multiple things at once make this an automatic winner for women.
• Pure managers who have no technology decision making powers.  See project managers.
• QA.  Again it seems natural that women can figure out how to break a system better than a guy.  My mom would never be able to get a printer to work.  So if she served as a QA person, companies like HP would figure out that their products are far too delicate for the average person.
  
• Web Designers.  Not HTML coders, but just the look of a page seems better suited for women.  After all, women read all those magazines and have a naturally better eye at color than most guys do.

Roles involving heavy technology just do not fit women.  To be a technologist, you have to LOVE technology.  Watch the Dilbert cartoon episode where Dilbert gets pregnant to see the difference in viewpoint between when he was a guy and when he became a woman.  The thing is that most women I meet in technology aren't willing to make the sacrifices necessary to succeed as a technologists.  For instance, giving up Friday night to go out with their friends just to figure out how to implement a piece of source code.  Or going to the local Best Buys/Akihabara and buying components to setup their own system, then installing Ubuntu or some other Linux OS for their home desktop.

Also, I find women, for the most part, to be disruptive to engineers.  Ever participate in a computer class where you have some cute ladies and a lot of geeky guys?  Ever wonder how the cute girls get the best grades at times?   Ever see a woman try to make enterprise technology decisions and then utterly destroying any possible productive technology culture that could come to be?

Now, I don't blame women as women for this flaw.  I do think it's how they're socialized.  And maybe this will change in the future.  For instance, rather than being pressured at school to go on dates and playing with Barbie dolls, they can be pressured into liking RPG games or building Lego, watching Star Wars and coding rather than watching Strawberry Shortcake.  And to counteract the stereotype of getting good grades in computer courses, girls should reject any advances from guys in helping them out and proudly failing tests when they know they're no good.

The thing is that women cannot act like a stereotypical woman to succeed in IT.  They have to act more like a dude and change their way of thinking about computers and their relationship with computers.