Why I'm a Feminist

Shaker Deana forwarded this Newsweek item this morning (emphasis mine):

No Glass Ceiling Here

For 25 years, Lory Manning lived in a universe foreign to many women she knew. She participated in international negotiations and oversaw $3 million budgets. Her path to power: the Navy. Manning, who now works for a nonprofit, says she "never would have gotten these opportunities elsewhere."

Women and minorities often express dissatisfaction with barriers in the civil work force, but, according to a new University of Massachusetts study of 30,000 active-duty personnel, they are the most satisfied military employees. (White men are the least.) The service's racial diversity and rank-based hierarchy "level the playing field," says the study's author, sociologist Jennifer Hickes Lundquist. If the satisfaction among enlisted women seems surprising—especially given that a third reported experiencing sexual harassment in a recent Pentagon survey—there is a possible explanation: "They figure it's part of being a woman in the military," says University of Maryland sociologist Mady Wechsler Segal, who is unaffiliated with the survey. It may not sound like progress, but for a level playing field, it's a risk that some military women seem willing to take.

No glass ceiling. Just a requirement that you suffer sexual harassment in order to get the same opportunities as the men who are sexually harassing you.

Then, this afternoon, Phil passed on the link to "a rather sobering Computerworld article on women and tech careers," which contains the following passage:

We found that 63% of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment. That's a really high figure.

They talk about demeaning and condescending attitudes, lots of off-color jokes, sexual innuendo, arrogance; colleagues, particularly in the tech culture, who genuinely think women don't have what it takes -- who see them as genetically inferior. It's hard to take as a steady stream. It's predatory and demeaning. It's distressing to find this kind of data in 2008.

This was cited as "the most important antigen" driving women out of technology. Per the article, over half of the women who enter the fields of science, engineering, and IT leave mid-career.

Point to this post the next time someone accuses feminists of having to search for things to get angry about.