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

[kest]

I absolutely recommend other women enter the field. Since you didn't repeat her reasons, I can't speak to them directly, but the common complaints about such a thing tend to center around it being male dominated and chauvinistic, and to be completely honest, you can find misogynists in *any* field, and the best way to change it is to have enough kick ass women in it that they are eventually forced to admit that women have brains too. In some ways, technology is a *better* field for that, because geeks tend to be very happy to judge you on what you can do, so as long as you can step up and play ball, they will respect that. (And yes, this may require being better than them, not just equal, which sucks, but they may be less likely to have the 'you stepped on my ego' reaction when you are.)

In my opinion, the best thing you can do for your daughter is give her the confidence that she can do *anything*, and down with the haters. The sexism that women tend to run into these days is subtle and often takes the form of 'you can't do that: you're a girl' interspersed with 'do what I tell you, because I'm better than you'. Women tend to be taught (or naturally want, depending on your conception of where gender comes from) to please others and make them happy, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, except when it comes at the expense of themselves. It's like democrats vs republicans - sometimes, dear nurturers, you need to stand up and put your foot down.

(I'm a web developer.)

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Since you didn't repeat her reasons, I can't speak to them directly

She commented with several of her reasons on this post, actually. Her LJ ID is dangerpudding.