I've been working in technology for the past 10 years.
My experience seems to be different from other women, in that I've never had anyone either directly say anything to me, or suggest that, as a woman, I am incapable of doing my job. I've only had one co-worker ever make a sexist joke - and he's a dear friend of my, so when I looked askance at him, he apologized immediately and that was the end of that.
I've worked for the same company for the past ten years, a small software development company that I joined when I completed my programming course after college.
I took a 9 month programming class run by a school that made piles of cash off of people who wanted to get in on the dot.com boom. The school had something like 8 or 9 campuses across Canada, and much was made of the fact that the class that I was in, was nearly 50% female - out of the 34 people in the class, there were something like 16 women.
Of those 16, probably 4 or 5 really "got it" - the rest struggled to really understand the course materials. That being said, probably of the other 18 men, I would say 10 or 12 of them really did well.
When I was hired, the owner of the company had already hired a handful of people that had graduated from this program, and he was impressed enough that he was advertisting on the school's job board.
He mentioned in my phone interview that he was "actively recruiting women" because his daughter had said something to him about "why don't you have any women working for you?". My friend Marianne and I were both hired from the same graduating class, and another woman was also hired at the same time from another campus.
About a year after I started, the company had 19 technical people - 6 women in technical positions.
I was hired as a java developer, but the dot.com bust left us scrambling to find any consulting work - I did pl/sql development, I built web pages, I did java development and when that dried up, I became a DBA and the Release Manager/Build Engineer for our application. I'm a project manager, and a consultant who architects and writes code. I'm also the IT department, keeping our development servers up and running, as well as our server farm used for our hosted ASP customers up and running 24/7. I also run our technical support department and I am the person they escalate to when they cannot figure out the answer.
As a small company, that makes software that needs other well-known software packages to run (apache, tomcat, java, oracle/mysql/mssql) - we don't get to say to a customer "go ask Microsoft for help getting mssql working" - we get to become experts in *all* of the combinations and permutations of these software packages - and I'm the one who gets to troubleshoot customer installations.
I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, and thought maybe it's because I've only ever worked for one company that I haven't been exposed to sexism - but realistically I talk to more IT people than anyone I know, because I talk to a dozen customers a week, troubleshooting their world.
And in ten years of doing this, I've never had anyone in any way show any reluctance to work with me, or any disbelief that I could solve their problem because of my gender.
On the flip side - I don't find very many occasions where the IT person on the other end of the call is a woman. When I do, I give a little cheer inside and *hope* very hard that she will be competent.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-06-02 03:31 am (UTC)My experience seems to be different from other women, in that I've never had anyone either directly say anything to me, or suggest that, as a woman, I am incapable of doing my job. I've only had one co-worker ever make a sexist joke - and he's a dear friend of my, so when I looked askance at him, he apologized immediately and that was the end of that.
I've worked for the same company for the past ten years, a small software development company that I joined when I completed my programming course after college.
I took a 9 month programming class run by a school that made piles of cash off of people who wanted to get in on the dot.com boom. The school had something like 8 or 9 campuses across Canada, and much was made of the fact that the class that I was in, was nearly 50% female - out of the 34 people in the class, there were something like 16 women.
Of those 16, probably 4 or 5 really "got it" - the rest struggled to really understand the course materials. That being said, probably of the other 18 men, I would say 10 or 12 of them really did well.
When I was hired, the owner of the company had already hired a handful of people that had graduated from this program, and he was impressed enough that he was advertisting on the school's job board.
He mentioned in my phone interview that he was "actively recruiting women" because his daughter had said something to him about "why don't you have any women working for you?". My friend Marianne and I were both hired from the same graduating class, and another woman was also hired at the same time from another campus.
About a year after I started, the company had 19 technical people - 6 women in technical positions.
I was hired as a java developer, but the dot.com bust left us scrambling to find any consulting work - I did pl/sql development, I built web pages, I did java development and when that dried up, I became a DBA and the Release Manager/Build Engineer for our application. I'm a project manager, and a consultant who architects and writes code. I'm also the IT department, keeping our development servers up and running, as well as our server farm used for our hosted ASP customers up and running 24/7. I also run our technical support department and I am the person they escalate to when they cannot figure out the answer.
As a small company, that makes software that needs other well-known software packages to run (apache, tomcat, java, oracle/mysql/mssql) - we don't get to say to a customer "go ask Microsoft for help getting mssql working" - we get to become experts in *all* of the combinations and permutations of these software packages - and I'm the one who gets to troubleshoot customer installations.
I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, and thought maybe it's because I've only ever worked for one company that I haven't been exposed to sexism - but realistically I talk to more IT people than anyone I know, because I talk to a dozen customers a week, troubleshooting their world.
And in ten years of doing this, I've never had anyone in any way show any reluctance to work with me, or any disbelief that I could solve their problem because of my gender.
On the flip side - I don't find very many occasions where the IT person on the other end of the call is a woman. When I do, I give a little cheer inside and *hope* very hard that she will be competent.