A Request to Women Working in Tech

[noahgibbs]

A friend recently said something about which, as Shanna's father, I feel conflicted.

She said that as a woman working in technology, she wouldn't recommend that other women enter the field. She's a system administrator. So, while she's not a computer programmer like myself, she's in a very similar field with mostly similar interpersonal dynamics. That is to say, what she says almost certainly applies to my field if it applies to hers. And as an actual woman working in technology, her experience is going to be significantly more accurate than my from-the-outside impressions.

I'm not going to repeat her reasons here. Rather, I'd be very curious whether other women working in technical fields, especially system administration and/or programming, felt the same way. Anybody care to comment? When you comment, please let me know what you do/did in technology. For some of you, I'll know offhand. For many of you, I'll have forgotten. For anybody who comments, there may be other readers who don't know/remember.

Anonymous comments are turned on here. Technically I *do* log IPs and I don't see a quick way to turn it off just for this post, but you have my word that I won't attempt to match up anybody anonymous here with any specific person. If you're really worried for some reason, there are many fine technical measures to make that tracking ineffective at finding you.

Comments

[dangerpudding.livejournal.com]

I actually, upon reflection, think it's important to say something else here.

I've been speaking about how I would or would not encourage, and how I might explain things to, another adult.

What I might encourage or discourage in a child is a very different thing. Someone else mentioned ignoring their parents trying to discourage them from places they might not fit in. My parents generally didn't discourage me, quite the opposite. I think this was terribly important - and has little to do with what most of us are saying. As parents, your job is to give your child the confidence to fly, anywhere she wants to. I have that, and it's one of the things I wouldn't give up for the world. I have a lot of friends who didn't get that from their parents, and have struggled with making up for that lack.

Speaking to Shanna frankly about sexism when she's old enough - sure, of course. Explaining that some fields might be more struggle and heartache then they're worth, again, once she's older, yes, that's kind and reasonable and all of those things. But as a child, give her the confidence that she can do anything she wants to, because she's smart and strong and determined. Give her the resources to learn anything she's interested in. You know these things, you're already doing it. Don't let our bad experiences change that - just keep them in mind later, to be sure she has all the information when making real world decisions.

[warsop.livejournal.com]

During the last presidential election, the right-wing press kept on using "shrill" to describe Hillary Clinton, which pissed me off to no end.

[rehana.livejournal.com]

Oh, and it's not that I didn't encounter any sexist people. But they were rare and not in positions of power.

[judith-s.livejournal.com]

I don't think we disagree. We both agree that it's played against the woman in the workplace.

I was the first female partner of child bearing age in my firm. Then I had children and cut down my hours to effectively 3/4th time. I'm sure at least in part this is the origin of bias against women in general (e.g. the assumption that if you see one female who is a bad programmer, who takes off after having kids, who can't manage, you say "women can't" not "this person can't." In part that comes from having such a small percentage of women.)

I actually do disagree with you regarding child rearing. Whenever Charles is out with our boys (he is the primary caretaker) he always gets a ton of comments about what an amazing Dad he is, and how wonderful the kids are. All true. :) But I don't see similar appreciation for women who are primary caretakers, because it's assumed that it's their job.

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

I'm not a lawyer, but it might be worth talking to one if you're concerned. That sort of thing is often hard to prove, unless your boss is dumb enough to put it in writing.

[judith-s.livejournal.com]

Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 added discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions as unlawful sex discrimination into Title VII.

[judith-s.livejournal.com]

I second that, every industry, especially every well paying industry has its problems. (EE, software programmer, now a patent lawyer.) I certainly never heard any interview questions like that, but then I present pretty butch, so maybe they assumed I didn't swing that way.

[judith-s.livejournal.com]

Yes! This! Thank you for saying it.

Although I said elsewhere, I'm not sure what challenging and well paying jobs aren't a heartache.

[slinkr.livejournal.com]

I spent the first decade of my career as a software engineer, then moved into product management about 3 years ago - software engineering was a great career for my twenties, product management has given me some growth opportunities I wouldn't have gotten in my previous line of work.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend software development to American students (regardless of gender) as a long-term career option today. It could be a good short-term option for getting a foot in the door in a specific industry, and it might be fun for a few years, but a lot of software development is getting offshored/commoditized and it may be hard to find great software development jobs in the US in 10-15 years. For people who are really passionate about creating software, I'd encourage them to look for a growth industry (clean energy, healthcare, etc.) and develop some strong domain knowledge to go with their tech skills.

Having said that, I would never tell a woman to choose a career based on sexism avoidance. If you care about having a job that you find interesting and rewarding, and your interests lie in tech, you should go for it. The opportunities are there. You may have to work harder to get taken seriously, but you can do it. I worked on teams of 30 people where I was sometimes the only woman (and when there were multiple women, guys named Steve still outnumbered the women), and I was able to make it into a leadership role and get recognized as a top performer. I did feel like I had to be much better than my male peers to get recognized, but I used that as motivation.

It's not the right environment for everyone, and there's a risk of burnout (having female peers and mentors can really help with that). Having a competitive streak really helps, as does working in an environment where the culture emphasizes respect for technical skills. If you go in prepared to prove yourself, you can make it work. I really thrive on that challenge, but not everyone does. It goes against some pretty basic female socialization, and you'll hear some men say that you're arrogant or not nice, but it won't stick if the culture rewards you for knowing your stuff.

I'm probably making it sound kind of brutal, but in general I think that women should approach corporate America as if they're going to war. I haven't found it to be terribly different now that I'm over on the marketing side of things, except that now my skills are less important than results and relationships. But in most corporate environments, men and women have both been socialized to discriminate against you, often subconsciously, and you have to fight for recognition and compensation. It's tough, but if you pick a field that really interests you then you'll get to work on some fun stuff.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

Having met you and tenacious snail, you 'read' far far far more femme than she does. :)

[snippy]

her life choices again, simply made my life harder

No, your employer's decisions about how to handle her choices, choices they permitted her to make, made your life harder. Your employer could have managed the situation so that you didn't bear the brunt of the decision they made to allow her to work part time. Blaming her for taking advantage of their offer is sexist and unfair.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

well said

Re: here from vito_excalibur

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

to be fair, that one might not have anything to do with being female; we're disappointed by *anyone* who isn't running a FLOSS operating system :)

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

:) Good to hear that the other coast does it better. To be fair, the main reason I left theatre is because I am a somewhat extreme morning person. I just couldn't do the hours. The fact that I was at my crankiest during peak work hours meant I was completely unwilling to put up with the stupid sexist crap and I was more bothered than I would have been at a civilized hour of the day.

Amusingly, it wasn't being able to lift things where I got the most shit. It was one boss asking me nearly daily "Have you been trained on this" after I had been working there for three years. (He would ask me if I knew how to use a hand drill when I was one of two people in the place who had been trained on *all* of the equipment.) This would have been less annoying if he didn't assume that every guy who walked through the door was fine with a bandsaw. It was another boss who would continually ask if I was PMSing when I told him that what he wanted me to do was unreasonable. (Sorry dude I can't do 25 hours of work in two days. I really can't.)

But despite all that it was the hours that really drove me out. :) I liked the job overall.

Late to the party...

[miss-mimsy.livejournal.com]

I worked in tech for 10 years. I did low level IT, Database Admin, and lots of product support.

I have never earned as much money as my male peers. There have been numerous times that I was passed over for a promotion for a male colleague. I am good at my job, so why am I treated this way? I have children and I put them ahead of my career.

As has already been revealed in the comments, sexism is not limited to the computer field. According to the Harvard Business Review, only 2.6% of the Fortune 500 companies are led by women (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2009/12/women_ceo_why_so_few.html)

According to Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics "In 2010, 90 women serve in the U.S. Congress. Seventeen women serve in the Senate, and 73 women serve in the House. The number of women in statewide elective executive posts is 72, while the proportion of women in state legislatures is 24.4%." (http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/index.php)

What really frightens me is that this is progress. Women have only been allowed to vote for the past 90 years.

I feel that a woman going into any field that isn't traditionally a woman's job is going to face significant challenges. Heck, going into teaching, a "woman's field" I am facing challenges since men tend to dominate the administration jobs at the high school level since many female teachers don't get their doctorates, instead having families. In this job market, male teachers have an advantage. They are a longer term investment and are more likely to stay in education, even if they have families.

I don't know if you were thinking about your daughter when you asked this question, but I know I thought of mine when I read it. I went to Mills because I wanted to get away from the boys and it really changed my perspective. I will encourage my daughter to consider a woman's college, because she will have a chance to earn her degree where her ideas will be respected and she will be allowed to speak. Further, she is more likely to find a job that will attempt to be equitable if she is starting from said college.

[kest]

This reminded me of something. At my current job, I don't feel like there's a lot of sexism going around, which is good. But it's a small office and we're all working on top of each other, and we get into usually good natured disagreements a fair amount. I'd been feeling for awhile that maybe I was too opinionated, maybe I was fomenting strife, was rocking boats that didn't need to be rocked. Then my boss gave us a sales workshop (because we're technology people, and we tend to hate talking to the clients, let alone trying to upsell them) and as part of that we got personality tests. And it was really interesting to me to see that the results on that basically said the opposite of what I expected - that instead of being a dominating outspoken leader who was trying to keep myself in control to avoid problems (which is how I saw myself), I was really a calm, careful listener who was trying to be more take-charge than came naturally. In other words, there was plenty of room for me to be *more* opinionated if I wanted to be, without it being a bad thing. And the only reason I thought otherwise was probably gender related.

[skamille.livejournal.com]

I don't have the energy for a long response, but my feelings can be summed up as thus: misogyny is everywhere in American culture, in every profession. Is it worse for women in IT? I would say that it has barely affected me at all, but I have spent my career at very large companies with serious commitments to diversity and decent HR departments.

The place where I feel it most is in the comments on tech-focused blogs and bulletin boards when topics related to women come up. Slashdot is so bad I had to quit the site. HN is pretty much only ok because the topic rarely comes up, but even pg has expressed the kind of juvenile "yuk yuk I prefer when entrepreneurs aren't 'PC'" sentiment that serves to encourage bad behavior and silence criticism of it. He has lost a significant amount of respect in my eyes, and left me very wary of the startup scene in general.

But in the end, It will never get better if women avoid the profession. I would like to believe that most of the men in the field actually do respect women even though, when presented with a totally male frat house working environment, one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. But tech is in my mind one of the areas women need to embrace if we really want to achieve economic equality. It is not a glamorous profession most of the time, it is hard, but it is a profession that you can raise a family on. I would absolutely encourage any young woman I knew to go into tech, although I think the "sys admin" job is a poor choice because that is a dying breed.

[skamille.livejournal.com]

The pedigree you have may have more to do with this than a boyish appearance. I dress extremely girly-girl these days (you might say almost as a dare for the people I work with to stereotype me), and I really don't ever get any problems. Of course, I do fear the changes having kids might cause, but that's a problem for every woman everywhere.

[loop.livejournal.com]

I've been a unix sysadmin for over a decade. I've experienced some well meaning but clueless "trying to be inclusive but highlighting that I'm different" type stuff, some annoying personal interactions when chatting over lunch. But nothing even remotely close to what other women here have experienced, and nothing that I felt affected my status at work, my potential for advancement, or pay raises. My managers have all been respectful (well, the one that wasn't also treated my male coworkers very badly too). I've always felt like I was perceived as a valuable member of the team.

I'd say that my socialization as a women/my personality has probably played a bigger role in slowing my career advancement, rather than external factors. I've avoided high profile jobs due to my perception of expected overtime and high stress, I've stayed in a technical role rather than advancing to management because I didn't want that responsibility. When I was more junior, I'm sure I doubted my abilities more than a man of similar experience would.

Working in IT can be demanding, thankless, high stress, disruptive to your personal life (long hours, being on call). So, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it on those grounds. But I wouldn't cite sexism as a reason for a woman not to go into IT, based on my own experience.

[vespid-interest.livejournal.com]

[Here via Vito]

My sister and I both work as programmers in a "Casual Game" company. I asked her this question and she says she *would* encourage women to get into tech fields, with full knowledge that they'll be a minority and some things may be harder. But she says it is worth it.
She says the key is to interview the company as much as they interview you. Look at the other women working there to gauge the environment. A single jerk in a position of power can make the place unbearable, but if that isn't the case then things will be fine.

A story I did not know: our floor has the tech people and the floor above us has finance/HR/customer-support/etc. people on it, and she can tell the difference by the hallways just inside the bathrooms. Our floor looks normal but the other floor has pock-marks all over it from women's high-heeled shoes. So in some ways she has more freedom as a woman programmer than if she was in a more traditional "woman's job."

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Our floor looks normal but the other floor has pock-marks all over it from women's high-heeled shoes.

There's nothing not "normal" about women wearing high heels if that's what they choose and enjoy.

[spaghettisquash.livejournal.com]

I recently stopped working at a very large company with PR that suggests they care about diversity in the workplace. I was at "one sexual harassment incident per month" (not all of which I bothered reporting) for most of the 3 years I was there. People in other groups remarked that my experiences were extremely atypical. (I have had only mild sexual harassment at other employers - I think it was more that my colleagues were older and had families.)

I do not actually believe "it is stressful when I need to wonder if my salary adjustment will be affected by [false] rumors of my sexual exploits with management in my group" counts as respect. Slashdot reads like the colleagues I had at that group.

It is hurtful to suggest that someone should enter a toxic relationship. I would not suggest that person should enter a toxic work relationship any more than a toxic romantic relationship.

[vespid-interest.livejournal.com]

Absolutely! I'm not saying it is abnormal for women to wear high-heels.
I used "floor" two different ways without realizing it. I mean to say that the surface of the bathroom floor on level 1 is evenly flat and unmarked, which I'm calling normal for tiled flooring. But the norms for dressing on the second story are different enough from the first story that the surface of their bathroom floor bears different marks.

I talked to my sister more about this and she doesn't think she is freer in a tech job than an administrative one because she is a woman, but rather because the job itself is less structured. I think a lot of tech jobs are like that though: not customer-facing, and not even really management-facing.

[rehana.livejournal.com]

And that would explain why I don't see the other major complaint in this thread, the "you can't do math because you're a girl" stuff. Another reason I might be the wrong person to ask.

Still worth it, but "people skill" development is important

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

Hi. (Here through Vito, like several others). Female and I've worked in various kinds of tech for 18 years. In college I was a computer user consultant and started to do web design, studied physics, comp sci, history and tech theater, did summerstock theater as a tech, had an internship in QA for biomedical development & engineering. Post my BA I worked as a web designer, then went back to school and got a Master's in Systems Design Engineering focused on human-machine systems interface design and cognitive ergonomics, and eventually worked for the last 5 years as a human factors engineer, working with programmers, cognitive psychologists and visual designers, and more recently with engineers who make electromechanical systems. So a lot of different kinds of tech.

I have definitely dealt with sexism - most blatantly in tech theater, but blatant sexism is in some ways easier to deal with. If the question is whether or not you're strong enough to help load and unload a truck, you can prove yourself. Much more difficult to deal with is the more subtle situation of having a manager or supervisor who is male and is uncomfortable with women, especially if they are essentially unaware of their own attitudes and issues. Talking with the women around me, I've discovered things like profs who didn't know how to answer questions posed as being about our own understanding, the way women tended to ask them, but could help us if we focused on questions like what is the next step in doing a problem. I've had managers who assumed that women seeking mentorship in the workplace should logically get it from other women (even though women higher than us in the organization were few), and I've faced more than one case where assumptions about what I had and had not been trained in caused programmers or other technicians to bridle when I've made suggestions. One manager (who was eventually fired) only worsened a situation like that when he shared a complaint I'd made to him with "the guys" without telling me.

That wouldn't prevent me from encouraging women to enter the field. In point of fact, I think we fail to teach all of our children how to deal with being mismanaged and how to establish our place in a complex team; in general our educational system does not prepare people for how to operate within a business environment. We teach that the path to promotion is good performance when often it requires recognizing and negotiating your way out of a situation in which the person evaluating or guiding your performance shouldn't be in charge of you at all.

Above all, I recommend any woman pursuing education in a technical field seek out mentors and professors who excel, and who are rewarding to work with. There are many of them in technical fields.

My experience, btw, is that electromechanical engineers age 30-50 are *less* likely to react to me in a sexist way than computer programmers. The culture is different. Also of note is that I've been working as a military subcontractor for five years, often interviewing soldiers and diplomats to gather systems requirements. Though a couple of times my managers expressed concern about how well I'd be accepted as a woman in that context, I never had any problems from military personnel. Of course, I studied hard on terminology and documentation and can "talk the talk", which no doubt helps, but the service men and women I've interacted with have always been respectful and forthcoming regardless of my gender.