I work in new media. The general percentage of women in this field is approximately 5%.

I don't believe I'm treated any differently than my male counterparts. My company is really good on that point.

3 of the 8 employees in this branch are women; but only two of us are doing anything new-media-ish (I'm an instructor, one is courseware developer, the other is admissions officer). So it's not so prevalent around here.

But when our whole company gets together, it's a different story. Then, it's 6 women out of 21 employees (with no more women in that number doing new media than before).

I'm quite at home surrounded by men, but in a work situation it's quite disconcerting. I feel the disparity.

For one thing, men and women (in general!) communicate differently. So to find a woman with whom I can communicate knowledgably about what I/we do is a rarity and a delight.

In my own office, I'm not treated differently, but often outside there's a visibly startled reaction when I explain what I do.

I once had a female student grill me: "Are you the instructor? Are you sure you know what you're doing? How much do you know?" - although that may have had to do with my age more than my gender.

However, everything I've read about the field suggests that while librarians in the public services aren't exactly raking in the dough, they are extremely well organized as a workforce and well represented by their unions. It'll be interesting to see what it's like once I get into the workforce.

When I was an administrative assistant, I noticed all the same things Audra's talking about -- my co-workers were nearly all female, and not particularly into agitating for their rights. It was so frustrating to see the women who, in every important sense, kept our company running run into the ground by the shitty wages and suck-ass benefits package offered by our multi-million dollar corporation.

I'm a temp. I like being a temp. I choose to work as a temp. If I'm lucky I get work doing media relations or writing. If I'm less lucky I'm working as an admin assistant, doing mostly typing.

I'm almost always the only male in the office other than the higher-up manager types. I find I tend to get looked down upon from all sides.

The managers wonder why I have no ambition and my co-workers tend to avoid me because they don't like having a male in on their conversations. I tend to be stuck in the middle.

New media and the whole software industry, ultimately, is just automated persuasion and automated ethics, and you can guess exactly how heavily it all leans towards persuasion!

PowerPoint is a lot more popular than high end risk management software that honestly weighs a huge number of variables to the best ability of the requirements analysts to figure out what is important... 99% of the money is given to those better at persuading.

That "advertising-centric, bullshit-centric" view exists throughout the "knowledge industry" consisting of finance, insurance, software, advertising, politics/NGOs and entertainment. Except for the few NGOs that actually do something on the ground for real living things (like MSF/DWB, Sea Shepherd, Red Cross, Christian Children's Fund, World Vision - although this may be a CIA front it actually does the work if only as a cover!), the "knowledge industry" is the "belief industry" and is indistinguishable from the old function of religion: social control... keeping the professions all on one track and getting the ordinary person to trust them and not question the whole order of society.

So given that "new media" has this status-quo-maintaining function, only women with very popular values are going to succeed... they have to somehow make the status quo saleable to a particular client audience, and that's true no matter how technical a job you have...

The same is true for men, of course, but in a male-run society with men making most of the decisions, men have a head-start in understanding "when men mean what they say, and when they are just saying it to look good". Women have less direct training with this phenomena and have to rely on their own innate sense of when men are putting them on. In most women this sense is very well developed...

I am quite sure that men invented the first 1000 words of language. I am equally sure that the first word invented by women was "Really?" - one could say that men are about orders and answers, and women are about questions and actions, sociologically. But when men act, they act en masse - they're built to believe language.

Or, at least, the last few hundred generations of men who didn't believe what they were told by other men in language were simply killed. Meanwhile, women could often get out of this system simply by smiling sweetly and giving great head. Vicious and obedient men, pliant and obedient women, are favored in our germline. It's not fair, it's not equality, it's not anything except genetic, and it has no influence other than genetic. That may be a lot, or it may be very little. It's not clear that passivity and belief and obedience are sex-linked to the X or Y chromosome... therefore you may inherit *EITHER* vicious or passive traits (most likely in some passive-aggressive traits) but one thing is certain: you are built to obey.

To this day, the social culture of human beings emphasizes and requires obedience. In the media industry, women have to evoke that by behaving like mothers, not like the sisters or girlfriends or unreachable single females far beyond your station. Men don't reliably obey those women - they reliably obey their mothers.

Meanwhile, women reliably obey certain types of men, well understood in stereotype: alpha male big-jaw action-oriented brutes ideally with a sense of humour and big dick. Anyone else, they tend to control...

So, in the new media software and finance industry, *LIKE ALL OTHER EXPRESSIONS OF THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY*, those men and women who play up and pander to these traits will do extremely well... by definition this means "right wing" types who accept the status quo as such.

Everyone else, with more egalitarian ideals, is going to be subordinated. Women have the opportunity to advance *ONLY* by playing Mom. If they try to hold out for equality of anything, they are just gonna be crushed.

The fact is, in the new media industry, no one is paying to learn, they are paying to pander to existing beliefs. Accordingly the profitable aspects of the new media industry will always be the near-pornographic parts that shamelessly exploit sexual realities of the present, including male oriented power structures and female dominated home bases.

The extremely unprofitable work will of course be fought over by the egalitarian leftists.

So if you want equal treatment and don't like the political status quo, you just have to find another industry. Something outside the "knowledge society" or at its very edge, in the pure sciences, where reputation is far less dependent on playing your sexuality.

If you are wearing a Pink social-feminist heart on your sleeve in that industry, you can expect to be in its Pink collar ghetto, and never included in management decisions.

The women I know who did well in new media were uniformly porn star types who were quite willing to use freedom, dignity and pride as trade goods. And to detect small penised males and milk them for economic favours as a test of productive power for the male. Mass media is totally sexist in its purpose, structure, and its hierarchy:

Alpha females are at the very top. They get beta females and alpha males to perform for them. Alpha males do the detailed direction of the beta females. Beta females lure beta males into doing massive favors for them in a type of operant conditioning. Beta males work their guts out and get their pride out of scoring better females than they would in any other industry, plus getting chances to show off their creativity, usually in some technical capacity.

If you ever see a media workplace that is not structured like this, let me know, so that I can immediately short their stock.

You're in a sexist industry. Learn to love it, or get the hell out of it. I can only stand so much of this stuff myself, so I've taken a breather from it to do the most opposite thing I could think of: left wing egalitarian politics.

Onto new media. What the hell is "new media"?

I feel like I'm on the outside looking in sometimes. I've been an industrial worker and later an office worker, but those involved jobs with, of necessity, lack of permanence. In the case of my first job, I was still in high school, and working weekend clean-up at a sawmill.

My education is in chemical engineering, but I have never had a chance to obtain employment that makes use of that skill set. The job market for people like me fell right out after the collapse of the Asian economies in late 1997. Half my graduating class got axed from an analytical lab just 6 months after that same half got hired at that lab. That's 20 people, gonzo.

So I've reapplied to university and I'll be going back. This time it's teaching in high school I'm aiming at. Government's been complaining about a shortage of teachers looming in the next few years. *chortles*

My professions go as such: Web Designer. Instructor: 3D Animation & Interactive Multimedia Authoring. Graphic Designer.

That's what new media is to me - creativity + technology. I think it's got other meanings to other people - I read craig's post several times and didn't recognize a single thing he's posed.

The company I used to work for, KnowledgeHouse, spoke like he did - knowledge-based economy, and all that. I'm glad McKenzie College bought us, because they're much more fun

Those of you who are deluded enough to think that digital media offer ground-breaking opportunities for innovation, well, you have to learn a lot about basic game design, game theory, and ergonomics, before that's true.

All the creativity in new media is in the game section at your local computer store.

You don't believe, come back in ten years when you've got the burnout factor going... then you'll recognize everything I've said especially about the sexism and the brutal hierarchy. The really fun shops are fun only because they are technically hardcore, and everyone knows the others will pull their weight.

Any egalitarian or fun situation in any non-technical shop will be strictly a short term situation... when the hardcores and high end artistic talent come to eat your lunch for a discount (the hardcores cut the time that the artists take to deliver so they can do a job 50% better for the same amount of cash), you will see the true face of "the new media" - exploitative bosses like Moses Znaimer, intense sexism that isn't like the natural playful hierarchy that I describe but more like a death march plus the WWF...

This shit is FUN times a thousand. If it wasn't for you, then fine - it's good you got out. But it IS fun for me. I love it.

I get to take my computer and create art out of nothing. Out of NOTHING, I tell you! No paper, no canvas, no paints, no pencils, nothing. Just open up Painter or Photoshop or Illustrator or 3DSMax, and a few hours later, I've got if not a masterpiece, at least something worth framing.

I get to create websites for people. I usually have a semi-deadline but not always. I can work whenever I want. I have full artistic license.

This business is going places. I teach dozens of talented people, young and old, how to make it so.

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Those of you who are deluded enough to think that digital media offer ground-breaking opportunities for innovation, well, you have to learn a lot about basic game design, game theory, and ergonomics, before that's true.

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New media doesn't involve just games or ergonomics. That's a bit silly.

...Ok, lunch break in the middle of a post, lost my train of thought...

Unfortunately, my talents lie elsewhere - my websites are always text-filled, not graphics-filled.

[irony]edited for typos[/irony]

Lots of men start out as editors, designers, production workers, but unless they're among the very few who rise in those crafts, most either head for management or marketing positions or they get out of the biz entirely -- well, that's probably least true of the male designers: more of them can make interesting livings these days.

Of course publishing is in such flux (chaos?) right now -- I think younger people probably have lots of reasons to be hopeful that it will become exciting again, if/when some of the predictions about magic new technologies pan out ... There are lots of exciting scenarios about, but it's still hard for me to be sure of any of them yet ...

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Decades of struggle for equality have yielded modest results for Canadian women. Women's incomes, however, still lag behind men's. And the gap is much wider than you might expect, according to a new study released jointly by the CSJ Foundation and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.

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