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

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Here via vito_excalibur. I'm a tech person in a slightly different environment - I'm a systems librarian at a university. That means I'm part of a team whose job is to keep the catalog running (it's more than just the computers you look books up on, we do inventory, purchasing, and a number of other things with it), to maintain the website, to write apps that manage our course reserves, manage the computer lab and wrangle the printers, and basically to be the first line of defense for the computers in the library, before we have to kick things over to the Technology Resources department. (I'm the web developer, blog admin, and a baby sysadmin for our servers. ETA: And the new server I'm getting soon is going to be Linux! I think I earned a geek badge there!)

The library field has also traditionally been heavily female. Our library is about 75-80% women, with the usual tendency of the men to be in higher positions, except that of the three highest positions (dean, assistant dean, and the director of administrative services), the two highest of which are filled by women. I think it's a function of the library field being traditionally loaded with women that I've never experienced any sexism in this job (and also a function of working with surprisingly nice people). My department has the highest proportion of men - out of eight of us, there are two women - but that wasn't always the case: when I started, there were four of us, three of which were women. The third woman transferred to Technology Resources. The three most recent hires were men, but they're primarily lab managers who work overnight shifts, which again tends to skew male instead of female, and they don't do any of the programming or admin work. We also recently hosted a conference for the user group of our catalog, attended by a bit over 500 systems librarians from around the world, and judging by my quick look around the lunchroom, I think it was about 40-45% women.

Having not worked in a technical field outside of libraries, I can't say anything about experiences there, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend women go into systems librarianship. Naturally, as with most professions that are traditionally female and/or nonprofit, the salaries are lower than doing the equivalent in a private company (even though we're a private university), but the benefits tend to be greater - I get more vacation and sick leave than my programmer boyfriend does, and I know for a fact that my job is essential to the faculty and students (because we hear about it when things break!), so I feel that I'm a vital part of the organization, which helps a great deal with job satisfaction. Unlike my boyfriend who keeps getting pulled aside to work on his boss's personal projects instead of the code that the company was designed to create and support.

The only time I've experienced anything that I think might be related to sexism, and which might not be, was when I spoke to a professor in my department in library school. I explained that I was thinking of switching my concentration from digital imaging to systems, in part because I liked working with techs and programmers, and he said "oh, no, no, no! You won't be working with them!", and he never said anything like that to any of the male students.

I currently daydream about going back to him and saying "Eff you, Professor, I have root!!"

[noirem.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting point. My experience working in tech was in a library where I reported to a woman (Linux sys admin) and she was assertive enough for 10 men. There was one guy, hired to a position that was senior to me but junior to my supervisor who was patronizing in his dealings with me, but I figured (and still do) that it was because I was in a junior position not because I was a girl. Oh, and I had a trainee who was also a girl. Of the four senior-level positions when I left two were women and two were men and the junior positions were all filled by women.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I don't go over to the Technology resources department at my school much, but I think there's slightly more women than you'd usually see in equivalent tech departments at private companies. None at the highest positions, though, and I can't speak for how they're treated by their male colleagues. The men in TR that I've had cause to work with have never expressed anything to me that I think is sexist, but I also have 99% of my dealings with them via email, so I don't know if that changes anything. I like to think not).

(Even when I managed to corrupt a file badly enough that it brought down a server and refused to let any admin person delete it so we had to restore from backup, they were nice to me! I still have no idea how I managed to do that.)

[noirem.livejournal.com]

None of the things the guy said to me ever related to my gender. He was just generally patronizing in our interactions while everyone else treated me like I'd been there long enough to know what I was doing. The worst part was my going-away card in which he wrote something about watching me grow and develop blah blah blah and um, he'd only been there two months and had nothing to do with my projects so up yours bub.

Not that being patronized is one of my buttons or anything :o)