My late father was an old school chauvinist – I sadly (as far as he would be concerned if he were still alive) haven’t inherited his traits.

I’d kind of thought the rah rah girls are dumb thing had died a death (outside of pre 8 year old school yard games of course. And then I read with amusement Sandy’s tale. Most of the Wellington blogging crew have already posted about it but I couldn’t resist doing so also. So here follows the tale of Sandy and a 17 year old graduate IT geek with zero understanding of the Dale Carnegie concept;

…Slightly annoyed I asked a more technical question: I was interested in what database they were running as he had just told me (i.e. Eduard) he was doing a data migration. Answer to this: “I’m moving data from one database to another using scripts. Oh, is that too technical for you? Do you understand this?”

So I patted his shoulder and told him in the most patronizing way I could muster (I did kind of enjoy calling him little boy) that he had just made a very career limiting move and that it was always a huge mistake to assume women wouldn’t understand IT.

I also told him I held an Oracle certification and could code 10 times better than him and if he ever talked down to a woman in IT again I’d kill his career before it had even started (not that I have to power to do that but little Flintstone boy wouldn’t know