Cornelia, DigitalSister, et al....
This is a fascinating conversation. I can't resist coming in here.
I was in the second generation of computers, as a 23 year old Marketing
Director of Minivac, Digital Computer Simulators. We immediately had a
name
infringement law suit from Univac! We were an original garage culture in
Cambridge, MA , a decade before Bill. (1962) The oldest guy among us was
31 and he managed the production line. A Social Worker who converted to
more lucrative Advertising, I was needed to translate for the uninitiated
market the exotic techno-babble that has now become common language. The
MIT inventors needed a street savvy interpreter.
I was the only 'girl' in management and paid half of what the guy I
replaced
was paid because he "had a family to support." Interestingly, I was let go
when I started to grow a family! Archaic Boolean Herstory.
Cornelia, you and I have had similar activist, feminist backgrounds.
Some recent feminist herstory might be illuminating here.
We American feminists followed the model we were raised to,
democracy....and
so we went all out for equality with males in the early seventies.
Androgeny was a benchmark on that journey. European feminists proclaimed
"viva la difference" . That is why they have generous maternity leaves and
our needs for motherhood are generally ignored by public policy makers.
(We
somehow haven't seen that we are producing the next generation of taxpaying
labor force, free to society---at considerable cost to parents.)
I went on to become a professional change agent, first as an elected
official (politician), now as a reconceptualizer of organization
cultures.....a change implementer.
I am writing a book based on two decades of research of women's journey
trying to access leadership in the cultures of mainstream workplaces. It
talks about women's ways of organizing to do work, which I found to be
unique, complementary and very needed in today's male-defined organization
models, which, incidentally, aren't working all that well.
What I found out was that although females ARE different than males, we
are
not as The Bible says, flawed. (eg: Eve, Lot, etc) We are hormonally
different, we bleed and do not die, we are not "unclean" for that (eg:
Muslim, Judeo-Christian tradition) We have far more generous connections
between the hemispheres of the brain, enabling us to be multi-modal, whole
pattern thinkers and awesome multi-taskers by nature, and not "ditzy" or
"scatterbrained" as we have been labeled because of that. In fact, top
decision makers in organizations, the behavioral science profession of
Organization Development and HR people know all this.....and utilize us for
it. They just don't honor it in us, or reward us for it......as they do
the
dualistic, focused, logos-based,bottom-line, linear thinking patterns on
which our corporations, legal, academic, governance system models are
based.
We need to become way more informed about the differences so that we can:
1. Celebrate them in us . Denying or ignoring them is a challenge to our
nature and our bodies, not to mention our souls.
2. Capitalize on them to add value, creatively contribute where we join
with
men to do our work.
3. Create a climate that requires honoring of the female, to replace the
debasement we live when we read the ads, listen to rap music, get the
anonymous comments on the street, get passed over for the top jobs,
feel the alertness, perhaps the fear when we walk to our cars in a deserted
parking garage.
This is not all about technology, sisters. This is about changing the
world
with a medium that connects people in ways unimagined by my grandmother.
And we are all writing the book as we go along.
Carlotta Tyler
ctyler@odconsultants.org
Visit http://www.odnetwork.org for details
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