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A Request to Women Working in Tech
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.
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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.
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My perception is that female programmers (perhaps excluding operating systems programmers) have had a substantially more pleasant time of it than I have. The numbers mean that make more sense; my general sense is that there are a lot more female programmers (10-20% vs 1-5%?), so the dominant culture shifts from "expects some in a reasonably large group" to "expects none, even in a pretty large group (and there are no large groups)".
It is reasonable to believe that in 15 years, my field will be completely different than it is now - both the nature (or existence) of work and team dynamics.
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This. There are lots of "traditionally" male industries that women had a hard time breaking into. Things get better. Shanna wants to do everything her daddy does, so teach her as much as she wants to learn.
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There is the possibility that in 15 years things will magically be 100% welcoming to women, I'm not holding my breath. I will encourage my daughter to go into tech if she wants to but I want her to do so knowing she is fighting an uphill battle if it exists.
As for traditionally male industries: I worked as a theatre tech for a few years. I got a lot of sexist, nasty treatment. It really wasn't worthwhile for me. Yes, it is better than it used to be. It still isn't good enough.
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It clear that some of these commenters do not actually experience sexism (or do not notice the sexism that surrounds them), and that is awesome! I am happy for them. Honestly, if I knew what I was getting into I would have found a different field to work in. Some days, I do not want to be an example of a woman that can man up.
Some people think that IT is not better than it used to be (ie, it improved in the 80s and declined in the late 90s, so we are not at 60s level of hostility). It varies a lot; dangerpudding's new job sounds amazingly awesome. Most of my jobs have been on par with the rest of her career.
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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.
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You guys are very conscientiously raising her to be her own person and I have faith in your ability to communicate that some people are assholes and assholes congregate with other assholes so you tend to find a lot of them together and to pick her assholes.
That said, I think it's good that Noah is now conciously looking for this particular form of misogyny in the world around him as being aware of it -> noticing when it happens -> being able to say "that's not okay" -> less misogyny in 15-20 years when Shanna may be looking for a career in programming or sys-admin or any field where similarly conscientious men have been telling other men to be people and not assholes. But I figured that was a given so I didn't mention it in my first resposne :o)
Also, don't discount the power of Barbie with her name spelt in binary across her bright pink shirt to change the hearts and minds of an industry.*
*yes, that was tongue-in-cheek.
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This may be unusual. I've worked programming operating systems, graphics drivers, hardware drivers and other low-level crunchy systems programming stuff, where women may be less common. Ditto for startups. Here at On-Site the proportion is around 10% female, but the team is so small that that translates to "yes, there's a female programmer here." So I have no clue if web programming is different, or if it's just that, yes, Becky works here.
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I may be lucky though; I have never worked at a company where I have noticed any male coworkers displaying sexism. Either that, or I have conveniently blocked it out of my memory.
FWIW, in a couple areas I have some really talented female coworkers, and I suspect this helps dispel any possibility of sexist talk, even besides all the harassment training we receive. But it may well be that these women all feel more pressure to perform, and conform, than their male counterparts.
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The problem I've heard discussed lately is that the guys they worked with tended to make them uncomfortable (example: telling a lot of dirty jokes) and when confronted, tend to intensify that behavior rather than toning it down.
On the one hand, I don't remember seeing that in my workplaces. On the other hand, I'm much less sure that I'd notice that than that I'd notice discrimination based on ability.
But yeah, the complaints I'm hearing currently aren't directly based on ability. Maybe that's progress? I don't feel qualified to say one way or the other.
So yeah. I'm not seeing much sexism either, but it's been pointed out to me that I'm looking in the wrong place.
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My last experience working with a female programmer came down to the the fact that she wasn't a good programmer. It wasn't her being female, it was she couldn't code worth a damn. I did use what she wrote, but I did a lot of editing of it myself.
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I'm no longer in tech, but my industry is largely male as well (although 15% female partners at my firm now). Sexism is real, but unfortunately it's real in every industry. I actually think that tech on the whole is less sexist than a lot of other fields.
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I'm not convinced that people are as capable as they think at noticing discrimination based on ability. Sure, the really blatant one-on-one discrimination. But, in my experience, when you have 10% women in a technical group, that 10% is rarely in the bottom half of the group in ability. And they're never the least-able person on the team. (Sometimes the least experienced. Never the least capable.) That is the visible effect of invisible ability-based discrimination: the men that are on the lowest 20% of the curve shamble along, still able to find jobs. The women that are on the lowest 20% of the curve get pushed out of the field entirely.
Look for non-normal distribution of ability, and look for places where the ability curves for men and women don't match, and you're seeing the tracks discrimination leaves behind.
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