I'm still a feminist!

I've been a feminist since I was a small child. I've always felt that being a girl shouldn't prevent me from doing whatever I wanted in my life.  Asked at age 6 what I was going to be when I grew up I would answer "Medical doctor" or even "Prime Minister". Little did I know how much I would hate politics, politicians and  how full of lies public life is, but it never occured to me as a 6 year old girl that I could not do this as a girl in 1962.

I find it appalling the things women still cannot do in 2014.  Simple things like same pay for same work. As a competent computer technician I feel I should earn the same amount of money as another competent technician who does similar job. I am recognized as a competent tech in my field mostly because I use to work 3 times as hard as the boys. I had to be better then them all the time to be noticed as even competent in the field.

When I started in 1992, I used to get razzed about my gender all the time. It only stopped when I started to razz the guys the same way they razzed me.  I've actually told co-worker who couldn't figure out a hardware problem that I quickly resolved that the reason I managed to resolve it that quickly is that I didn't have a penis between my legs to confuse me.

A few weeks ago I had to do reviews for my employees and I know my boss checks our bug database to see how many problems each employee documents.  I realized I had 3 times the number of issues as my best guy, who is my 2nd. Everyone else has put less issues. To be honest I seem to have found as many issues as the rest of my team put together. This has been a constant for many years. Some of it is that I go on projects before the guys so I find the blaring issues. The other thing is I test the more complex configs and that finds the weirder issues.Some of it is that I'm that good at finding issues.

All of this to say that I'm over 50 and I still strongly feel that gender is not relevant in how good you are at something or another.  Yet in 2014 there were still plenty of things women were told they could not do.