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

[warsop.livejournal.com]

I'm a researcher for a major technology company. I've been here for five years. Before this, I had a similar position with another major technology company. I've also done development, tech support, and system administration. My two undergraduate degrees are math and computer science; I've also got a MS in human-computer interaction.

Looking around my group of around 200 people, there's about 40 women. If I were to remove the non-engineering disciplines of marketing and user assistance, the number drops to under 20. One of my previous managers, who has been a manager at our company for nearly 15 years, told me that I was the first woman who reported to him. Someone else hypothesised up to 20% rates for female programmers, but that's much higher than my experience. In my current group, we're under 5% for female programmers and only slightly better for female testers. That's similar for my previous employers.

There's sexism. It's gotten steadily better than what I experienced when I was an undergrad (such as my first calc prof telling me that women couldn't understand differential equations), but it's still there. I've been told repeatedly that I'm more technical than expected. In a meeting a couple of weeks ago, one of my co-workers told me that I didn't know what I was talking about with respect to math (which, thankfully, resulted in another co-worker saying "ohnoyouDIDN'T" to him).

There's subtle things as well. If I raise a concern about something, I'm far more likely to be labelled "alarmist" than if it's one of my male counterparts doing so. If I have a disagreement within my team, I'm likely to be described as "shrill". If one of my male colleagues tells an off-colour joke and I just raise an eyebrow at him, then I'm "being defensive". If someone pisses me off, then I'm "on the rag". If I back up one of my female colleagues in a technical discussion, then I'm "representing the sisterhood". If I say that maybe using "rape" to describe a technical decision you don't like isn't really appropriate, then I'm "just being politically correct".

After getting married last year, I noticed that people started asking me when I might be taking maternity leave. Last year was a wedding year in my group, so I compared notes with my other co-workers who had also gotten married around the same time I did. The other woman reported the same experience as I did, but none of the men were asked when they'd be headed off on paternity leave.

All of this is why I mentor other women at my company. In each and every one of those mentoring relationships, sexism has come up at some point. The subtle forms of it are the ones that will drive you crazy because it's hard to identify whether it's actually happening or whether you're just being "sensitive" (another word often thrown at women).

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

in re: shrill-- yes. i get "why are you so angry?" a lot.

[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.

[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.