Email lists

[yesthattom]

At work we have a lot of email lists. Each team has a list, often an additional one that is strictly just the team, no voyeurs. Each manager has a “me and my direct reports” list, and often a “me, my directs, and everyone below them, (transitive closure for you math geeks)”. There’s a “miscellaneous discussion” list for the entire company, for each building. There’s a “ miscellaneous discussion” list just for engineers. Since there is a self-service web page that lets you create a list and set attributes like “anyone can join” and “permit posts from inside the company only” so there are just tons of lists. In fact, and I think this may be the shameful part, there are more mailing lists than there are employees.

There’s one for every club, including the black employees group, the LGBTI employees group, and the Women In Engineering group.

Well, since half our company is engineers, and the other half are sales, it was only a matter of time before women in the sales half of our company created a list. It’s called “girl tips” and I’m told that so far most of the discussion has been where to get the best manicure, makeup, and so on. It started in my building and now there is a “girl tips” mailing list for each of the major sales offices (or offices big enough to have both sales and engineering).

The women in engineering that have heard about this (very new) phenomena have all sort of shrugged and/or made disparaging remarks. Not one of them has screamed, “Squee! I’ve gotta join and get tips on where to host my next spa party”.

What does this say about female engineers that I hang out with?

Discuss.

Comments

[tamidon.livejournal.com]

It says engineers are different from sales people.Gender is not the main difference here.What if it had been work out tips,sports bar recommendations or team booster events?How many engineers would there be?

[n5red.livejournal.com]

It says that you should start introducing me to a number of them.

[bruhinb.livejournal.com]

Sales is about projecting an image. Engineering is about building a product.

[catness.livejournal.com]

I think I have to agree with tamidon.

We have the same List Setup/Issues where I work. And yes, it's true that I would not be on any "girl tips" list. Largely this is because I just don't care very much about that stuff (and also my girl engineer roommate already knows all the good places to get a manicure if I actually wanted one).

However, I wouldn't join the golf or the hockey list, either. I *am* on the "for sale" list and on the list that talks about fun things to do around town; usually music.

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

So, being male, I often feel on the outside of this sort of thing. Much of my extracurricular time in the last couple of years was spent doing one of three things: Computer Club business, Physics Club business, or coordination with one of the tenured physics professors on what we usually called WiSTEM - Women in Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics.

There's a disparity. Period, end of story. There are lots of women in STEM, but nowhere near the number we could expect if it were the sort of field that were split fifty/fifty. So the question becomes "Why"?

The old viewpoint, the viewpoint that probably shocks and outrages most people these days, is that there aren't more WiSTEM because women just aren't cut out for those fields. Women are wired differently or their brains are different or (in it's most offensive assertion that there are significant differences in cognitive ability between women and men) women just aren't smart enough.

That is bullshit.

So all of that is kind of backstory, and sets us up for the discussion of these mailing lists and the reaction of WiSTEM to them: there are fewer WiSTEM than MiSTEM because of a severe cultural mishandling of gender identity.

This mishandling may cause or be caused by (the direction of that vector is unclear, but it is probably complex enough to be not a single vector at all) the sort of attitudes we see displayed regarding the girl tips mailing lists. Women who are not in STEM, at least in the sample that we're talking about, associate certain things with being women (or in the case of their own mailing list, girls) and women who *are* in STEM at least outwardly reject that point of view.

So why? Why the mutex? I'm not certain. But it's a source of distress. It suggests that we have an amazing resource of bright, talented people, and that over the course of their lives we discourage them from certain avenues of personal and professional growth. This can, in the long run, only be to our detriment.

Gah. Sorry for the rant.

[mangosteen]

Out of curiosity, are there also typically "everyone in the group but the manager" lists? In my experience, such lists have also been completely unarchived, but I know that's not The Google Way. :)

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

Like the previous poster, I think that this is more a function of people who become engineers versus people who go into sales. I suspect where it does become gender specific is when you compare what the men in sales discuss on their list.

From the sales people I known (most of them in pharma and financial services) looks is a much bigger deal for sales women than it is for sales men. The women I knew spent (what to me seemed to be) an in ordinate amount of time discussing manicures, makeup, hair tips,etc but, when compared to their male counterparts, their physical appearance was very important.

FWIW, I work for a large university and I see similar sort of differences in the umpteen email lists I subscribe (and am subscribed) to as well.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

No, the Google Way is to say things to your manager that you would hide at other companies. I'd imagine planning a surprise bday party would be the exception, but that'd be rare.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Honestly, in most places I've worked that would be big enough to have such a list (but not so big that you only ever see other engineers), the women in positions where looks are important aren't very tolerant of women like me. I would expect that even if I found a list like that useful, joining it would be unnecessarily exposing myself to attitude I really don't need.

It's OK for me; I can talk to the metro PM boys for my spa and tailoring recommendations. What does worry me is that much earlier along the line girls who do a better job of conforming are steered away from the technical track.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Oh, weird gender vs. mailing list dynamics anecdote: some of the guys at work have proposed a weight-loss mailing list and it seems as if there's some real discomfort around being a guy and starting such a thing. I may take pity on them and create the list already.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Also feel the need to point out that a female engineer might well feel that she would be looked down upon should she publicly squee about femme stuff. A lot of us have found that one of the ways to effectively be a woman in a male environment is to disavow as much femininity as possible.

[luggage.livejournal.com]

Hehe.

My reaction to reading about the 'girl tips' list was... "can I join?"

But then, I'm on the gay end of the male (and sys admin/web app dev) spectrum. It's definitely a concern about appearance.

http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/careerist/48564

But I wouldn't expect engineers to dress the same as sales. I'd actually be very surprised if they did. Engineers are trying to do stuff with computers and work with their peers. Sales are trying to program other people who will give money to Google -- definitely not a peer relationship.

Of course, if the sales people are working with geeks at other companies, then they're pushing all kinds of buttons that those geeks might not have pushed otherwise (based on some of the sci-fi and geek culture I know around these parts -- Texas :/ ).

"I like working with Google because the sales people are better looking than Amazon's." or "I like Java because the Sun brochures are glossier than Perl's."

[inflectionpoint.livejournal.com]

I'm female. I'm a chemist who moved into biochemistry.

I went into science because I liked it and found it interesting. One of the other reasons is that the "dress code" in science is not as insanely demanding as in other careers. There's a standard of attractiveness expected from women in sales, marketing, etc... which is close to inhumanly possible.

Look at what male sales people have to do to look good. Then look at what female sales people have to do. The list of tasks, the amount of time and mental energy required, it's insane. There's the whole issue of size, and staying very tiny, which takes a lot of work and energy. There's the clothes. And the hair and the makeup and all that. There's also a rather narrow range of presentations using that toolset that are considered acceptable. I just didn't feel like adding "performing the role of female in a way that my coworkers and team lead find correct" to my job requirements.

There's a lot of emotion and resentment bound up in this for me - I have never been able to perform female in the way that is acceptable for most people. And I'm neither genderqueer nor trans, I'm just me. I went looking for a place where I could do my job and not be required to spend a lot of time and energy on a performance I suck at and find unpleasant.

Here's the funny part tho - remove make up and dressing up from the task of performing as female and I love them. Dress up is fun, as long as I know it's dress up, do it on my time and my decisions and don't have to do it everyday. And pedicures are sheer heaven.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

"Sales is about projecting an image. Engineering is about imagining a project."

[bruhinb.livejournal.com]

well said! Much more accurate than my version.

[feorlen.livejournal.com]

There *is* peer pressure to not do "girl things" for women in technology. With the gender skew there is also this idea that "geek things" are the same as "guy things". To be part of geek culture is to be surrounded by guy things. I forget where but just recently I saw a discussion about if conventional attractiveness and grooming in women is a career negative for highly technical positions.

I got a few jabs at the office for letting it be known that I went to the new spa down the street to get my nails done. (And my sense of geek identity compels me to justify it by saying it was because of an impending family wedding.) But not as much as my male teammate who got a pedicure (and explained it by saying his girlfriend insisted he do something about a toenail issue.) We both felt we had to somehow explain away the aberrant behavior.

Engineers do tend to concern themselves with minutiae of their disciplines rather than what the rest of the world thinks of them as people, by which I mean the general first impression of one's physical attractiveness and mate potential. As an engineer, I value what I do much more than what I look like to others and I don't see the point of going through all that trouble. So much so that I often can't maintain friendships with non-geeks because I have so little in common there. I tried to have a conversation with a woman on the sales team who gets in similarly early but she is interested in what bar she went to last night and so on.

I feel about the same for women who refuse to be seen in public without the full hair and makeup package as I suspect they do about me, who can barely identify major classes of product at the cosmetics counter and has been known to make wardrobe selections based solely on the most recent laundry cycle. So while this is a serious failing for most sales jobs, it means I fit right in with the guys who are already everywhere in engineering. But if I did somehow turn into a fashion diva, what would my engineer peers think of me then? I think indeed there would be some sense of "not one of us" to add to the already obvious element of "not-male."

Fortunately I now live in the social bubble that is San Francisco, where I don't have to be concerned about people accusing me of credit card fraud because "there is no Society of Women Engineers" (I carried their affinity card for many years) and telling me isn't it sweet my husband lets me drive his truck. There is different peer pressure ("what do you mean you don't need anything from Fry's??") but the mix of gender identity and behavior to be found here means fewer assumptions are made. My few transgressions are minor as long as I keep up my geek cred. Elsewhere I've had problems in the office for my disinterest in conforming to the assumed social standards for my sex, men and women alike were afraid to get too close because the only context they have for male-female interaction is sexual.

[feorlen.livejournal.com]

Fancy meeting you here, kimuchi!

That's an interesting comment, as there is much more tolerance of overweight men than women. Female-dominated chat lists are completely full of obsessing about how the diet is going and it's thought perfectly normal but it seems it just Isn't Done if one is a straight male. Maybe a general exercise/fitness list would be a less threatening way to get started.

Really

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

I'm having trouble coming up with any women you regularly hang out with who are the traditional "girly-girl" type. Even the non-engineers. Straight, gay, bi, whatever, I can't think of anyone you know who is obsessed with their nails and lives for trips to the day spa. Admittedly, I don't know everyone you know (no one does!) but I know a good cross-sample.

Re: Really

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I think you are correct. Even the M2Fs that I know aren't in that category.... except one that you haven't met.

Re: Really

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

So, is there an email list for M2Fs who want beauty tips?

Re: Really

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

I would totally live for trips to day spas if they were free. ;-)

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of calling the list "meat".

[shakal.livejournal.com]

It says that the women in sales who created and participate in the list have different interests and/or priorities than the women you know in engineering, and/or it means that the women in sales are more comfortable putting those interests/priorities on display in their professional-peer setting via their participation in the mailing list. Would either of those possibilities really be a surprise to you?

[mg4h.livejournal.com]

We have different priorities. If it was a girl tips list about what's the coolest new game that doesn't make women look like big-breasted airheads, I'd be SO on that list.

*cough*girl_gamers*cough*

;)

[mg4h.livejournal.com]

I've never had this happen to me. How odd.

[cartographer.livejournal.com]

And yet, these things can be surprisingly useful..

-------------------
To: Girl Tips NY
Date: 1 Feb 2008 18:08
Subject: Unperfumed moisturisers

Hey ladies,

I've just relocated here from Ireland. At home I use Simple brand
skincare products (http://www.simpleskincare.co.nz/simpleskincare/)
but they don't seem to exist here. Does anyone have a recommendation
for unperfumed moisturisers and facial washes?

Alternatively, what do people with sensitive skin use in this part of
the world? :-)

Thanks!

Tanya

--------

3 replies so far.

Discussions I've noticed so far are mostly around finding a good {doctor, restaurant, hairdresser, cat-sitter} or announcing discounts and useful sites. It's not offensive at all. I thought you'd find this knowledge valuable :->

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Yes, interesting!

Tom "Wondering if you recalled this post or were reading my old posts :) "

[cartographer.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard of the list until I read this post, so they're locked together in my mind. The real question you should be asking is whether I really have so little to do these days that paging back to find it seemed like a good use of my time.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

You're in my internetz, stalking my journalz! :)