Ever notice how women wind up in Product Management or testing or managerial positions? Not an accident.
I'm a woman working in technology. For a long time, I did very high-level support for enormous enterprise customers for a stuffy company you've heard of - the kind of support where for half a million dollars a year, you buy my time, and I have root on your servers and find your bugs and get them pushed through my engineering department and talk to your VP about our strategic plans and basically just make everything go.
I would not recommend it for the faint of heart, but it has been rewarding for me.
I have spent a lot of time being the only woman in any given room. I had to adopt a policy of not ever wearing interesting clothing. When I dress up to go see a client, I wear a suit and tie; it sets an unusual tone and they don't know what to expect from me, so I find that I don't get pigeonholed as quickly. For a while, I had blue hair, or pink, or orange, or cherry red, for exactly the same reason. If you don't throw them off, they will speak over your head, until you establish your position as the smartest person in the room.
It always helped that I had the backing of my entire team, and that people at my company looked up to me. That way, the customer would quickly see that I turned internal heads and commanded internal respect, making it easier for them to see that maybe I knew what I was talking about and they could listen to me without second-guessing.
I was a sysadmin for a while, and would actively discourage women from doing that. Holy fuck but there's a lot of dicksizing posturing crap.
Being the lone tech person on a crew, or one of a very small handful -- that's the way to go. Or QA, or even development in some places (but not others). Never system administration. You wouldn't believe how many people fall all over themselves when I mention in passing that my home laptop runs Ubuntu: either they want to goggle in amazement that a GIRL could run LINUX (dude, it's just ubuntu, calm down - I remember the excitement of compiling 2.2.0), or they want to prove that they know more than me. That shit gets old. Fast. Sometimes, I just want to run Ubuntu because it does a couple of things I like without having to immediately become a fantasy geek girl.
here from vito_excalibur
I'm a woman working in technology. For a long time, I did very high-level support for enormous enterprise customers for a stuffy company you've heard of - the kind of support where for half a million dollars a year, you buy my time, and I have root on your servers and find your bugs and get them pushed through my engineering department and talk to your VP about our strategic plans and basically just make everything go.
I would not recommend it for the faint of heart, but it has been rewarding for me.
I have spent a lot of time being the only woman in any given room. I had to adopt a policy of not ever wearing interesting clothing. When I dress up to go see a client, I wear a suit and tie; it sets an unusual tone and they don't know what to expect from me, so I find that I don't get pigeonholed as quickly. For a while, I had blue hair, or pink, or orange, or cherry red, for exactly the same reason. If you don't throw them off, they will speak over your head, until you establish your position as the smartest person in the room.
It always helped that I had the backing of my entire team, and that people at my company looked up to me. That way, the customer would quickly see that I turned internal heads and commanded internal respect, making it easier for them to see that maybe I knew what I was talking about and they could listen to me without second-guessing.
I was a sysadmin for a while, and would actively discourage women from doing that. Holy fuck but there's a lot of dicksizing posturing crap.
Being the lone tech person on a crew, or one of a very small handful -- that's the way to go. Or QA, or even development in some places (but not others). Never system administration. You wouldn't believe how many people fall all over themselves when I mention in passing that my home laptop runs Ubuntu: either they want to goggle in amazement that a GIRL could run LINUX (dude, it's just ubuntu, calm down - I remember the excitement of compiling 2.2.0), or they want to prove that they know more than me. That shit gets old. Fast. Sometimes, I just want to run Ubuntu because it does a couple of things I like without having to immediately become a fantasy geek girl.