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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.
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.
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.
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.
Re: here from vito_excalibur
Oh, god, yes. I am so damn tired of defending my choice of home computing systems because it doesn't fit someone else's fantasy of who I need to be in order to be geeky enough for them.
Re: here from vito_excalibur
Re: here from vito_excalibur