things that don't occur to guys
In IT - particularly in areas like mine: financial systems applications - there's this constant push for new technologies, new developments. And with these new tech comes a steep learning curve. Which a lot of guys love and push for and really want to get into.
(See my last work-tagged post about being 'overqualified' for the client we were trying to contract to - btw, turns out it was money that they stalled on. They didn't want to pay our daily rate for a programmer. Well, they'd been outsourcing it to a programmer in India, hadn't they? This is the thing which people don't seem to realise about "making [country] great again" or "immigrants taking our jobs" - when we're talking about the economics of jobs, then it costs more to have the work done in [country] than it does to outsource it to somewhere the standard of living is lower. You want to make your country great again? You're going to have to pay for it. Yes. Except you're not even paying it to a government that is at least supposed to have the country/region's best interest at heart, you're paying it to a private company whose sole interst in you is as a consumer. You got no moolah, you get no product. And when you're one of the 99%, increasingly you have NO MONEY. Them's the breaks. /rant)
But back to learning new things.
Most of the guys in the office treat new tech with an excitement that I do not share. And so far as I can tell, most of the women do not share this excitement either. It's something we have to do, but it's not something that we need to do - our mental penises are not entangled up in the "better, faster, newer, more" psychology of masculinity.
I suspect a lot of this comes back to the concept of emotional labour - or the unpaid lubricant that keeps society and households running and which men, by and large, do not contribute to. Women perform the vast majority of emotional labour in the household, so all that brainspace a man can use to look at new things? Is busy coping with the regularity of the every day. And my male work colleagues don't have to deal with that: they have wives and partners and mothers to do that.
I don't have a husband or male partner to manage, but I still have a household to run, and if my emotional labour gets shared with at least one of my sisters (B1, since B2 is getting better, but still apt to drop the ball), then all the little details of my friendships and keeping things running smoothly are still bouncing around in my head. And I don't get to drop them, because I'm female and I like having friends.
And this is a job, not a career - it pays good money, that's why I'm in this. It's not a holy calling, it's something that brings in the bacon, and you know, I'm going to dedicate exactly as much as I need to in order to get stuff working.
Plus, I do a lot of other things, like write fic, and quilt things, and garden, and cook. It's a busy life if I don't want to park myself in front of the TV, scratch my crotch, and watch sport/TV shows/eat takeaway/play games.
*sigh*
Frustrating.
(See my last work-tagged post about being 'overqualified' for the client we were trying to contract to - btw, turns out it was money that they stalled on. They didn't want to pay our daily rate for a programmer. Well, they'd been outsourcing it to a programmer in India, hadn't they? This is the thing which people don't seem to realise about "making [country] great again" or "immigrants taking our jobs" - when we're talking about the economics of jobs, then it costs more to have the work done in [country] than it does to outsource it to somewhere the standard of living is lower. You want to make your country great again? You're going to have to pay for it. Yes. Except you're not even paying it to a government that is at least supposed to have the country/region's best interest at heart, you're paying it to a private company whose sole interst in you is as a consumer. You got no moolah, you get no product. And when you're one of the 99%, increasingly you have NO MONEY. Them's the breaks. /rant)
But back to learning new things.
Most of the guys in the office treat new tech with an excitement that I do not share. And so far as I can tell, most of the women do not share this excitement either. It's something we have to do, but it's not something that we need to do - our mental penises are not entangled up in the "better, faster, newer, more" psychology of masculinity.
I suspect a lot of this comes back to the concept of emotional labour - or the unpaid lubricant that keeps society and households running and which men, by and large, do not contribute to. Women perform the vast majority of emotional labour in the household, so all that brainspace a man can use to look at new things? Is busy coping with the regularity of the every day. And my male work colleagues don't have to deal with that: they have wives and partners and mothers to do that.
I don't have a husband or male partner to manage, but I still have a household to run, and if my emotional labour gets shared with at least one of my sisters (B1, since B2 is getting better, but still apt to drop the ball), then all the little details of my friendships and keeping things running smoothly are still bouncing around in my head. And I don't get to drop them, because I'm female and I like having friends.
And this is a job, not a career - it pays good money, that's why I'm in this. It's not a holy calling, it's something that brings in the bacon, and you know, I'm going to dedicate exactly as much as I need to in order to get stuff working.
Plus, I do a lot of other things, like write fic, and quilt things, and garden, and cook. It's a busy life if I don't want to park myself in front of the TV, scratch my crotch, and watch sport/TV shows/eat takeaway/play games.
*sigh*
Frustrating.