answers concerning gender issues from Australia

No IMC activist Australia
Male individual

Firstly, one of the hidden problems is that the blokes (men) like porn And the women don't. The "blokey" workplace turns women off IT. Blokey is A softer local version of macho, where men have their hobbies and potter About doing things that only men do. looks are not important, whereas for women, the clothes and etc are just as important as the work produced. Ourmagazines and media trivialise womens achievements every day.

In this country there has been a huge reduction in the percentage of Women in IT over the years. Women's mags never promote IT as a career, it's For geeks and nerds, not our type of girl who are all thin model types, with Jennifer Aniston and Callista Flockart and that ex-spice girl gerri as role models.

A woman named Phillipa Yelland writes about this, in passing, in the Sydney Morning Herald quite often. She writes a regular column on computertraining and jobs every Tuesday morning. I think she is very aware ofgender issues.

Below is an interchange of e-mails with her. Nearly all the IT peoplearound me are men, but in one recent case where we tried to recruit a woman we came unstuck - see e-mail below. Aside from IT, my current usersworkplace is very much 50/50 (heritage, preservation of historical sites) and there not a lot of gender problems.

I have not tried to answer your questions (i am not in an indy media Work group) but when i worked in a programming shop in 1994, all the gurus Were men, and the women wrote the manuals and checked things. The women Were power dressers from an agency, too. The men were all techo types, looks were irrevelant. The suburb was extremely upmarket.

No IMC Activist Australia
Female individual

I'm just emailing because I have a different story to tell- in the activism i've been involved in (substantial, and over many years) I must say that the left men I have worked with have been nothing but generous, friendly and helpful. I have felt much encouragement from them to become more & more computer literate, which I confess has not actually led to me becoming a fully-fledged geek by any means. so, there you go. I think feminism has been extraordinarily successful in the Australian left for having nurtured a social realm in which friendshipbetween men and women (& i'm a lesbian, by the way) can and does flourish. I believe it has been embraced at least broadly across the gender divides in a way that's unique to this country- though I guess I'm talking an inner-city, activist version of australia, and possibly (ok, probably) this is a bubble insulated from the rest of a clearly patriarchal culture. For a specific example, I did a big collaborative public art project with photographer Tina Fiveash as part of the mardi gras festival this year, called Hey, hetero! (which you can check out on:abc.net.au/arts/news/hetero/heterocover.htm#photos) Two men (one straight, one gay, best friends) from SKATV in Melbourne approached me and asked if they could turn the project into broadcast TV ads- of course I was delighted. I have been working with them (Cam Manderson & Ntennis Davi) both online & face to face on this project for some months now, and they are both entirely ( & a bit embarrassingly) happy to work to my direction, and when my ignorance of the capabilities of the technology gets in the way, they are totally cool with explaining it to me, as if they're imparting wonders which still thrill them- rather than making me feel in any way dumb or inadequate. Also, I am touched by the fact that these men are so proud to be working with me, a woman, on a radical project I conceived. The boat-people posse that i asembled is another example of this creative respectful collaboration between activist men and women.