Sexism in IT Career

It has never come to my mind to write this blog entry until I saw a Python workshop advertisement which is "specially designed" for ladies. I don't know if it represents sexism, but the first thing that passed in my mind is: why would women need a specially design workshop in the first place?

Is it based on the assumption that women don't excel men in logic, that is why they need a separate workshop, so that they can learn programming with a slower pace to prevent slowing down the other members (which will happen in a unisex workshop) ?

You can say, "no, this is not it". Then why is it categorized based on gender and not based on the skill level of the candidates?

Catholic educates boys and girls separately, which I don't know why because I'm not a Catholic. But I believe that the reason behind it is not because of smartness differentiation between boys and girls.

In my humble opinion, women and men have the same opportunities to understand complex algorithm and how to work with programming language. There is no correlation between gender and ability when it comes to logic. This kind of gender specialized workshop has just proved that there has been some unprofessional gender prejudices happening in the community (which is sad), perhaps as a result of society belief.

What do you think? Do you see or experience any similar discrimination incident ongoing in your workplace?

---

Update per 03 August 2011

---

After asking for a number of trusted friends' opinions, it turns out that I had been acting too subjective upon posting this entry. Whatever the reason is, claiming something to be sexist is so judgmental and it's inappropriate. I apologize for that I've written this entry, I admit that it was subjective and personal.