Chinese Version
12-15-2017, Friday
Friday, my girlfriends, who were all once employees of eBay for many years, but were now employees of eBay, PayPal, Walmart or Visa, had a lunch gathering, a traditional Happy Friday routine for IT engineers in Silicon Valley.
I was late for today’s lunch gathering. As soon as I entered the restaurant, I saw four white-collar beauties with exquisite clothes and extraordinary temperament sitting leisurely and freely around the table near the window. Their presence added an unspeakable high-end atmosphere to the very small restaurant. I was secretly happy to be part of this group.
When these girlfriends got together, the talking around the table is usually more interesting than the food on the table. Watching TV shows, traveling abroad, raising children, making new friends, and caring about older parents were common topics that formed a relaxing atmosphere and let us be close to each other.
“The TV show which the British Princess was playing a role in was really very interesting.” Pei, who liked watching the show, recommended it to us.
“Running can make you ‘High’.” Su, who just finished the half marathon, shared the happiness brought by running.
“There seems to be a lot of people applying for college next year,” sighed Liping, the mother of a Millennium (a child born in 2000).
The news that one of us became a mother-in-law this summer suddenly excited all of us. After a burst of congratulations and inquiries, we praised her and blessed her newly wedded son and daughter-in-law! The wedding candy brought by the newly mother-in-law made our dining table unusually festive and filled with joyful spirits.
We talked about our children, ranging from newly married adults to elementary school pupil. We, five mothers, have eight children in total. Our children covered a wide life stages: newlyweds, newly employed, graduate students, college students, college applicants, elementary school pupil. During our conversation, I noticed some industry characteristics: six of the eight children are boys and only two children are girls. The gender proportion is seriously unbalanced. Then I thought about children’s gender among my familiar female colleagues, I realized that majority of us have sons instead of daughters.
After Friday’s lunch, while walking with my friend during the weekend, I mentioned my discovery of the gender imbalance of children of mothers I knew in IT industry. After listening to my discovery, my friend joked, “The IT industry is too tough, women working in IT field need to be more manly, so the probability of giving birth to boys is naturally higher.” I thought my friend’s explanation was incisive, which fully reflected the precision and humor of her technology major in college.
Thinking about “women working in IT field need to be more manly” and recalling my IT girlfriends I saw on Friday, I felt my friends were light, elegant and high-end, exuding a strong feminine flavor without a trace of manliness. Perhaps the long-standing charm of the intellectual feminine has already vaporized the manly spirit from their soul, a kind of cognizant and beauty brought about by experience.
“Information technology (IT) is the use of any computers, storage, networking and other physical devices, infrastructure and processes to create, process, store, secure and exchange all forms of electronic data.”