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

[spiffikins]

there's an entire set of circumstances that you aren't aware of, so you can certainly have that opinion. However, suffice it to say, that during her pregnancy and afterward, she was unable to do the job she was hired to do - and her insistence on pretending that nothing had changed, and belief that she was still doing the same amount and quality of work - when it was clearly not the case - caused harm to those around her.

[(Anonymous)]

WOW. This really bothers me. I understand that there may be extenuating circumstances, but this kind of wording applied to any new mother is problematic.