Time for a feminist rant. Hang on.When I was working for IT at Case, I trained a young man as a student who was a year later promoted to be my boss. He had no qualifications that I could see (I had a college degree, he was still working on his) and gave me the worst review of my life, one that was also self-contradictory. (It said I relied too much on others and didn't come to others for help soon enough. In hindsight, this was my lack of confidence in staff meetings.)His promotion still baffles me. There were many other people in the department and as far as I knew, no public announcement of the position was made. I didn't want to be a manager so I wouldn't have asked for it, but I thought a lot of my co-workers were more qualified than him. In fact, he was about the only one in the department I was sure was less qualified than me."I thought that didn't happen anymore," my friend Mary said. "Women training new hires that become their bosses. It used to happen all the time."I was passed up for an IT position in the library. I found out who they hired - it was a young guy I'd just taught how to install linux. I knew he didn't have the qualifications for the job so I went right up to the hiring guy and asked why they chose him. "He knows linux." was the answer I was given.I stared blankly at the boss, wondering if I'd neglected to put Linux on my resume. "But this is an IT position and he doesn't have computer skills.""Oh no, he knows a lot."This was an important moment for me. I realized I knew more than this guy - than both these guys - about computers. For years I'd been assuming every male around me knew more about computers than I did. I thought about the way the guy who beat me to the job talked about computers - he basically quoted all the latest ads for the latest equipment. He knew what was a good deal on RAM and what computer was more bad-ass than another, but he came to me if he needed to change his email settings. Just reading the ads was enough to appear knowledgeable to the uninitiated, and until now, when I had lots of hard-earned knowledge from working the help desk, I had accepted that surface knowledge, too.Scales fell from my eyes that day and I started to see more of this. A guy knows very little about something - he brags about the little he does know. A woman knows a lot about a subject - she hedges and apologizes and says "but you might know better". For years I had been deferring to people who almost certainly didn't know any better than I did!I'm not just blowing smoke here, there's data to back up my anecdotal experience.From The Confidence Gap - article in The Atlantic "A review of personnel records found that women working at HP applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements."Another study in the article had men and women rate who they did on a science quiz. The women guessed that they had gotten 5.8 questions out of ten right. The men estimated their performance at 7.1 - the men and women had actually both scored about the same.When I hired Mackyla, my student employee, she was the FIRST FEMALE STUDENT the IT department had ever hired, and my boss actually asked me, "Didn't any boys apply?" He almost certainly wouldn't consider himself sexist, but said, "I mean... once a year we ask the student employees to help move tables at graduation. Boys are better at moving tables. Are you sure she can do that?" Mackyla and I shared incredulous looks and I was proud of her flat sarcasm when she said, "Yeah, I think I can move a table."The next time I interviewed a female student, I got cracks about how I was trying to "take over the department" with an army of amazons.Mackyla is, and has been, the best student employee ever, and no one doubts her presence now, but I couldn't believe the near instinctual push-back against her.I talked her into applying. I saw her at the activities fair and I told her how I didn't know anything about computers when I got my first IT job and you learn by doing and it's valuable experience whatever your future career. I told her how I got turned down for every IT-related student job I applied for and ended up making campus minimum my entire college career, working much harder than an IT student would, on my feet in the cafeteria for 40 hours a week until I had bone bruises on my heels while the guys who beat me out of those good jobs sat on their asses doing homework.Maybe I didn't wax that long. The point is, I practically begged her to apply and she's so amazing at the position I sometimes fear they'll fire me and keep her. The point is - how long would it have been before this department hired its first female work-study student if I hadn't intervened?Why do I still have to explain to people that I'm not the department secretary?I digress. Part of this whole rant is this article - which pissed me off. Short story: Women's lack of confidence is hard-earned. We're beaten down every day and you wonder why we don't speak up for ourselves?Part of the reason I stopped playing board games is that every time, the men in the room would TELL ME how to move and I would end up just a puppet for their extra turn. That's not fun. And I didn't have the confidence to say "Screw you, you've never played this game before, either, I'm just going to move how I want to move."When I started fighting in the SCA, I was frustrated to see the unearned confidence in the boys learning at the same time I was. I seemed to have to talk myself into trying to win while they took it as a given that they would. I complained to a friend, who floored me when she said, "Their dads all told them they were the best little league player in the world." Because... yeah. I know my childhood was atypical, but my parents never implied I was GOOD at anything, much less the BEST, and I can't recall any of my female friends' parents saying anything positive to them, either. I was more likely to hear a friend's mother say "Don't get dirty" while playing softball than "you are the best!"I digress. Or I don't digress. The point of this is - yes, this is real. This needs to be fixed. I don't know if telling every little girl that she's the best ponytail softball league player ever will do the trick, but it couldn't hurt.