One thing that is dismaying to me as a manager, though, is that the women staff tend to be the most needy for various special attention (and am not referring to things like maternity leave – in a way, a lengthy absence that is expected is rather straightforward to plan for).

I admit I’m of the old school. My wife has been a home maker and concentrated on being in the home for the kids. Now that they’re older, she’s started to do her own vocational pursuits.

The sadness for me is to see some of the stress that women have in the workplace when they get conflicted over the requirements of a full time job vs raising their children, or relations with their spouse.

Part of me certainly says we should indeed have a world where every individual is free to pursue their path in life as they see fit. But it’s been clear to see that there is a cost (human toll) involved as we’ve moved away from traditional family structure.

My mom wrote me an email after seeing this post, and wondered – what drew you to the computer science and technical writing field? I guess I’m just irrationally confident in my abilities.

Two of the best people on my tech writing/localization team are very young women (19 and 23) who didn’t think they were good at computers.

Coincidentally, both have at least one brother who was deemed “technical genius” by family and others.

Living in a brothers’ shadow, one was a model, the other majored in English with no real plans after college.

But both turned out to be technically brilliant . And both were convinced they weren’t that good and never would have considered computer or science fields. (I found them when I was looking for someone to come do some mindless temp work.)