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

[allochthon.livejournal.com]

Also here via vito-excalibur (thanks!)

I'm female, and work in computer security for a large public university. I've also worked for a small software group in a large company.

Many of the sexist experiences mentioned above have happened to me. I've had it implied to me that the only reason I had my job was that I sucked off the boss. I've had my sexuality openly questioned. The pressure to "be one of the guys" is extraordinary. Luckily, I'm fairly butch (in attitude, not orientation), so that's not such a problem for me.

Saying something, being ignored, only to have a man repeat it and get credit: happens every week. It's only recently that my calling a guy on a sexist remark gets him to shut up, as opposed to him turning around and calling me sexist for calling him out (wait, what?).

My group is actually pretty good, we're about 40% women, but I'm the only technical woman in the group. We had another, but she left. And my technical duties are being routinely taken away from me (however, it's unclear if that's because of me, my gender, or the fact that security is becoming an exercise in CYA, rather than actually, you know, securing things.)

But something which hasn't been mentioned so far in these comments (that I've seen) is the unrelenting presence of porn.

I've walked into a lab I supported (when a sysadmin) to find 1/2 of the screens full of mid-core porn. There are coding comments in security software like "oh, porn cache, save it!" Let's not even talk about looking at the DNS searches that I have to sort through to find infections.

I don't know of a single female technical person who hasn't had to deal with pornographic background images on a computer she's been called to support. I don't know of a single woman who hasn't 'stumbled' upon a porn stash on a computer she has to support (scare quotes because sometimes they're directed to the stash by the guy who owns the computer). I don't know a single female technical person who hasn't faced "you're on the rag, calm down."

And let me tell you how fun it is to inform a professor he's received a porn DMCA infringement notice.

Having said all that, it is slowly getting better. Hopefully by the time the current children are entering the workplace, things will have smoothed out a fair bit. I'm a firm believer in the idea that a lot of the sexism will die off as the old-school workers retire and/or die. But I *do* think that's what it will take - the hard-core sexists leaving the workforce.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I really hadn't considered that aspect of a support job, because as a programmer you don't generally, uh, share porn with the other programmers. I suppose it's conceivable that somebody could have porn on their machine when you come over to ask a question or for a code review but I've never, never had that happen.

So I suppose it's possible as a form of harassment, but if that happened to another programmer I don't think anybody would say, "oh, yeah, that just happens in this job." Like, ever.

And yet as a sysadmin, somebody absolutely could, making it much more effective as crypto-harassment than it would be in my job.

[allochthon.livejournal.com]

We pretty much have to deal with it with "oh, yeah, that just happens in this job," if we want to keep said job, and not make enemies all over the place. And sometimes it's true.

But I have had it used as cyber-harassment, and it's no more fun than any other kind of harassment. Hostile work environment, and all that.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

" I don't know a single female technical person who hasn't faced "you're on the rag, calm down."

Wow. No body has ever said that to me in the workplace. Argh, that's not good.

[agent_dani]

I'm a bit late to the discussion but wanted to comment here as you raised some great points.

My wife has had experiences such as the answers she gave not being accepted but if her male boss told the questioner the same answer it was accepted without any remark. Quite often she only knew about it because she and her boss compared, which helped illustrate a way sexism can be hidden as well.

She was doing desktop and server administration in a physical plant of a large public university and pornography was rampant there. That, along with what you state, has made me appreciate a policy of my current employer (another large, public university) where that's one of the easy get-fired offenses.