 Hello, this is Warwolf. I will start with an English introduction and follow it up with a German one. Welcome to the Kate Shepard must be turning in her grave talk here at the Hexen Stream. During the next 20 minutes, the mother, musician, and geek catalyst will talk about sexism and the professional and personal life in the 21st century. During the talk, she will mention violence and pornography, but without any expert images. After the talk, you can join us in the Q&A, which is hosted on the Hexen big blue button. Welcome to the next talk. Kate Shepard must be turning in her grave. In the next 20 minutes, the mother, musician, and geek catalyst will tell us about sexism in the private and professional environment of the 21st century. During the talk, she will mention violence and pornography, but without expert images. After the talk, you can join us in the Q&A in the Hexen big blue button. Have fun. Kate Shepard will be turning in her grave. This is a presentation by me. In October of this year, at the ripe age of 44, I started to study IT. I am going to become a Fachinformatikerin, specializing in system administration, or as the Germans call it, fizzy. It's a big deal for me because I haven't got any completed qualifications yet, except for my university entrance. I was nearly gonna become a baker, but I'm really glad that I took a leap and started learning IT instead. I was privileged enough to get a building, which looks good shine. I had to go to a mass number over the summer and do German and maths and logic tests, which were good enough to convince the Argon Tours to let me do the course. And because of corona, it's entirely online. I don't even have to leave the house to get an education. It's just perfect right now. I feel so privileged, first of all, to be able to retrain as an older student as it is. But secondly, I don't have to go out into the world every day in the middle of a pandemic. It's perfect. So I had zero strategy or even a proper strong will about learning when I was 18 and went to university. During my uncompleted music studies, I took a 101 introduction to computer science. But it was clear after the first two lectures that I should have taken the 102 instead, which was the basic course for the actual degree path. I was this close. But although we were showing the basic hardware, after that, I was just five months of Microsoft Office, sadly. And by the time I realized I was too behind in the material to be able to switch to the other course. But I always had an interest in computers. The first from figuring out how I could use my dad's old DOS work computer as a word processor, copying basic programs out of a book onto a C64 or nervously trying out the single Apple computer at the tiny two-classroom country school I went to. I come from New Zealand, which is famous for being actually paradise. I get asked about once a week, what are you doing here? These days I like to answer, I really like Corona. Yeah, there's not a lot going on in New Zealand though. It's a bit too finite for my personal taste. I did this weird maths when I left, which was based upon increasing the amount of possible things that could happen to me. I mean, how could I resist? With the challenges of concentrated, detailed learning in my middle age, I feel it's necessary and very helpful to call on some girl bosses and strong role models. I have a very daunting mission ahead of me and I don't have time for doubt or distraction, especially with the 12 year old kid to care for as well who would tell me that I look fat at the drop of a hat. There are some amazing women who have come out of New Zealand. For example, on the left we have Jean Batten, who made long distance solo aeroplane journeys. And on the right, this incredible woman is Nancy Wake, who is a New Zealander, a nurse and a journalist who joined the French foreign legion in World War II. She got the code name the White Mouse and she once killed an SS officer with her bare hands. She had a five million franc price on her head and was the most decorated allied woman of World War II. And this is Kate Shepards, who wasn't actually born in New Zealand. She was born on the UK, but her work is credited with being the catalyst for New Zealand being the first country on the entire planet to give women the vote in 1893. Her work also had a profound influence on other countries also making this improvement. Here she is, featured currently on New Zealand's $10 bill. And this is my great-great-grandmother, Jemima, born in New Zealand in 1860. And she was one of the first women in the world who was able to vote. There's another hero who appeared like a headmistressy kind of angel to me and my youth. Helen Clark delivered a fiery speech at my school final assembly. She was the second ever serving Prime Minister of New Zealand, but the first one who is actually less elected to the post and the first one who is actually nice. At the time she spoke at my school, she'd already been Deputy Prime Minister for a few years and would go on later, very soon to become New Zealand's first elected female Prime Minister. Helen recently only narrowly missed out on becoming Secretary General of the United Nations. Yeah, Jacinta gets a lot of credit, but yeah, Helen was there before her. She told us in the speech that most of us would end up going overseas and that when we did that, we should be the best possible ambassadors for our little country that we could possibly be. A friend of mine told me snarkily several years later that in fact, we should be telling the world that New Zealand is full of drug addicts and prostitutes so that people stop going there for the holidays all the time. So it's actually rife with homelessness, crime and meth. So maybe go check out Australia instead, but her speech instilled a curiosity in me and I thought, oh, I wanna be one of the ones that goes. So coming alone from this more experimental nation in 2000s, the birth of the 20th century, as far as my feet could take me to the airport, to the beast that is Europe, I was ready for my eyes and all of my senses to be open wide to this incredible continent that was a source of philosophy and ideas and science and development. But it seems to be a bit preoccupied with itself trying to decide if people with darker skin were actually humans as well. Let alone the fact that you can't get a decent coffee until about 10 a.m. in the morning, which is worth a 20 minute talk in itself. There's definitely some issues that come from being a cumbersome bird and dinosaur of a nation. 20 years later and somehow we have a universe where fax machines and toxic telegram groups exist at the same point in time. It's certainly a sharp contrast to this high and fast moving tricky isolated remote little island in the South Pacific that I herald from. So as I mentioned, New Zealand owes status as the first country to give women the vote and a great part to the work of the suffragette, Kate Shepherd. And I think that had a lot to do with the fact that it was a small country with a tiny population and it's just simply makes it easier to change things. It was also fueled heavily by the wishes of women to prohibit alcohol, which invariably comes with violence, which is rife in a colony of much less penetrant social pressures, much more isolation and dodgy homebrew than in their homelands. You didn't have to convince and convert so many people in New Zealand as you had to in Germany. And in addition to that, you also didn't have to change so many laws because there weren't that many laws. Germany always feels to me like this big friendly but cumbersome bureaucratic dinosaur, but in the late 1800s in New Zealand, white people had only been there for about 50 years. So I think this enabled the whole process to be streamlined. Opponents labeled the movement as a loop in the dark, but in reality, it was a giant leap into the light. Germany wasn't that far behind at this stage. Women had the vote here by 1919 and directly at the same time, women were also able to be elected to office, which is fantastic. And obviously some things happened after that, which slowed the whole thing down a bit. But something I keep hearing again since I've been living in this country is, oh yeah, but in the 70s, it was still the law here that women weren't allowed to have their own bank accounts without their husband signing off on it. So look how well we've done considering that. But this feels similar and it's an excuse. This is 50 years ago now and there's been plenty of time to accelerate this stuff, to kick up some kind of quantum feminism to make up for lost cars. If only Germany put as much energy into equality as it did into building car engines. So despite these excuses, despite hearing repeatedly from friends of mine who were living more mainstream lives than me, that this glass ceiling is there to be put by us from underneath so that mostly men can look down through it with a nice clear view. Regardless of knowing all of this in my brain, I was still pretty shocked when I started studying IT in 2021 to find out that I was on a course with only one other woman in it, with 25 guys. I expected that with an Omschulung in particular, that there would be a higher percentage of women, it would be really nice if Germany could speed it up just a little bit in the equality area because this is a field a lot more women should be in. It's so interesting, so broad. When you look on paper, there's no reason why it should be a male dominated industry. It's not a physically demanding job and the fact that you can work from home makes it perfect. For example, single parents, women with younger children who want to be home when they get back from school like I do. I just think there's so much more potential than it just being a digital sausage fest. I really think this country has got enough sausages. I do also realize that I can only see this from my particular perspective, from my particular experiences and my individual blundering romp through this world and probably the IT profession in New Zealand is just as behind. No shade everyone, but I'm just wondering how come it's not better than it is? I keep getting told how brave I am for doing this, which feels infuriating. It doesn't feel like it should be brave. It feels like it should be really normal to do what I'm doing, but instead it seems to take a big heaving pair of virtual balls to dive into an industry that women have been successful in since the beginning. I'm pretty much starting from scratch and it's overwhelming and it's so much. I've worked the office job before, but 40 hours a week learning from home on Zoom the entire time is something quite different. So we'll see how this progresses and I just relish the determination that I feel at the moment. I hope that I can sustain it for the next 19 months. And I mean, I'm late to the party no matter what happens, but hey, season three have lost. Some of the best characters hadn't even shown up yet. So for now I'm trying to study every day at least a little bit after class and in the weekends. And I'm so short, overwhelmed with so much information right now, but I hope that as long as I consistently keep putting more time than I'm required to, I'll be okay. Regardless of how much English there is in IT, it's still a massive challenge to study in foreign language. I try and Uber drive it just a little bit all the time and read another few pages, look at a few YouTube videos or listen to a podcast. It is complicated somewhat by the fact that the proofing system has just been dramatically overhauled by the AI car. Instead of a multi-choice exam for the tuition proofing, apparently it's now more similar to how the end exams used to be. And nobody has even set a final exam in this new structure yet. It's pretty terrifying. Our tests in between seems to be creepily easy considering what is coming. But all I do, I just figure in my situation, my job is to identify what I need to know. And if I can do that, I'm halfway there. I feel like I'm collecting knowledge on a big scale and I know there is more to come. So I'm trying to get the basics down as firmly as I can. Which includes figuring out a way to be clear in this English universe that I mean Thelan or Faulan. Am I talking English or am I talking German? Faul, I just confuses me constantly because I don't even know what I'm supposed to be saying. But a classmate of mine made a good call of just saying it in an unabbreviated form every time to avoid confusion. So I'm just gonna go with that. So I've dropped a few of my habits to make space for study. I don't play drums as much as I was before I've stopped writing songs for now. But I've started jogging in the mornings and I still play bass guitar and a punk band and netball on the weekends. But corona is just the best time to be studying because I'm missing out on nothing. I can stay home most of the weekend and just alternate cleaning and cooking and learning all the time. My mental health is also a huge priority for me, especially with COVID, staying positive. And when these little nagging thoughts come up just be like, I don't have time for this now, maybe another time. But it's the little things that make the difference in the end. And my body is just as important as my mind. I need to stay prime for exponential knowledge and take and to not take the teenager's bad moods personally. I wanna say a little something about social media because it has been on my mind. I don't like being confronted with any sexual contact when I'm trying to learn. I don't wanna see a jiggling bottom when I'm trying to digest my arm and board. It's jarring just because of its appropriateness, let alone the context itself. There was some really dodgy stuff in our WhatsApp group. I wanted to say something, but it's really not easy to do. I thought and thought about it and almost decided to just leave the group rather than mention it. I was really grateful when somebody said something about it. Shout out to Catfan 2021, EuroGM. And since then it's been noticeably a lot better. But still here and there, some on the border stuff gets shared. I mean, my social media contact with the people in my class is to further my knowledge, to understood my learning process, not to look at bumps. I do not wanna be confronted with reproductive biology when I'm just checking the time. Maybe I should start posting a recipe every time somebody posted a dumb thing. Maybe I should say something about it every single time. I should write, but it's so hard. I don't wanna be the one coming in and saying, blah, blah, blah, I don't like it. I'm not only a woman, I'm also old, so I'm really trying to not send off these grandma vibes. I don't wanna be the camp mother. I wanna be right there in the thick of the scrum. I've got a thick skin and I realize that not every woman is confident enough to travel the world with no money to make bands and found clubs and make zines and survive a divorce without getting a single tattoo. Some major achievement, by the way. So I see it as a moral responsibility to see this through, to get this qualification, even if it doesn't inspire a single other person, possibly my 12 year old. But that kind of just depends on the way that the wind is blowing and the irony of doing all of this out of my kitchen has not escaped me. Maybe I can change a few perspectives in the process. I am here, I am very loud, I'm going to ask all the questions and I'm going to stay to the end. I need to achieve this because of the woman before me who sacrificed so much. It's ridiculous that I wasn't born onto an even playing field in the 1970s, but I'm jumping every day as high as I possibly can. These trailblazers who busted their arses to get us the right to be able to vote democratically will be shaking their heads. I think about Kate Shepard and try and leap into the light on every possible occasion. I wanna show my kid that you can do anything when you really want it. But first I need to get this network stuffed down. I woke up half dreaming about protocol abbreviations last weekend so I think I'm on the right track. If you want to follow me on Twitter, my name is Debe Stimmerin. I can't believe that it wasn't taken, but it wasn't taken a few years ago when I grabbed it, when Twitter wasn't as popular as it is now. So I post a lot of sarcastic remarks about learning IT, staying at home during corona, and as you can see some of the mind-bending dinglish atrocities that I happen to come across. That's it from me today. I wanna give a shout out to my wonderful classmates who are watching. Thank you for your support. You're great. And thanks everybody for sticking around. Let me know if you have any questions. Cheers, bye. Thank you, kind of list for the great talk. Let's discuss some further points and join us for the Q&A. We'll be held in the awesome AIDA room at https.double.slash-events.hexen.org slash awesome underscore AIDA.hdml.