Barking up the wrong tree

I'm breaking my rule about not discussing job stuff, but this observation has been shoved in my face once too often.

There are many reasons that my choice of late-life career is a mistake—and this is no surprise to some of my friends. The chief one relates to my librarian spouse's observation early in her career.

In that field, some two-thirds of the professionals are women. However, two-thirds of the directors and librarians in senior or more technical fields are men. Not too surprisingly, the women notice this and resent it. There is less of that today, but the memory remains.

The same is true of my new occupation. The overwhelming majority of coders are women, but a majority of health information managers are men. This has not changed as much as in library science. The result is that men, and especially men with degrees outside of coding, must overcome the suspicion that they are only blowing through the coding office on their way to a management job. Notwithstanding all those "earn big money--become a coder" TV ads, gender is one of the major hurdles prospective coders must leap. If you have a penis, it will absolutely get hung up in the hurdle.

Men with coding education can sometimes--eventually--get sorta-kinda coding jobs, such as what I now do. These are jobs that require coding knowledge, but to the Elect, they don't make you a "real" coder. You could do these jobs for 30 years and in their eyes you would still not be a "real" coder. This strikes me as self-fulfilling prophecy. The Elect close ranks and don't admit men to the sorority, so the men take their knowledge and previous education, bypass coding altogether, and wind up in the management ranks. It's a lot like a phenomenon known to all Navy veterans. No matter where you are, you'll hear that "this isn't the real Navy. When you get to ABC, then you'll be in the real Navy."

But you never get to the real Navy. Likewise, I wonder if men ever get to be real coders.

There are other hurdles which cut across gender lines. One is that the Elect have a settled prejudice against hiring graduates of any coding programme. They want their coders to come up the good old-fashioned way, starting as file clerks and working their way into a coding desk. Trouble is, there are fewer and fewer openings for file clerks because there are fewer and fewer paper files. There are also fewer and fewer high school graduates interested in coming up that old-fashioned way: they want into the express lane.

All this is going on against the backdrop of forthcoming huge technical changes in medical records, which will make much to the Elect's hoarded knowledge obsolete. Those changes will increase the demand for new medical records people fourfold. The response of the Elect so far is to circle the waggons and cloak themselves in denial. So in two or three years, when you the consumer can't get even a semblance of a straight answer about your bill, remember the Elect and their stranglehold on medical information.

I think I should turn back to my original objective: to obtain medical knowledge and wed it to my technical communications background. Then I can contribute to the one logical outcome of this impasse: computer applications that make the closed circle of coders entirely obsolete. It's good to have a goal.