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]

I've been working in technology for the past 10 years.

My experience seems to be different from other women, in that I've never had anyone either directly say anything to me, or suggest that, as a woman, I am incapable of doing my job. I've only had one co-worker ever make a sexist joke - and he's a dear friend of my, so when I looked askance at him, he apologized immediately and that was the end of that.

I've worked for the same company for the past ten years, a small software development company that I joined when I completed my programming course after college.

I took a 9 month programming class run by a school that made piles of cash off of people who wanted to get in on the dot.com boom. The school had something like 8 or 9 campuses across Canada, and much was made of the fact that the class that I was in, was nearly 50% female - out of the 34 people in the class, there were something like 16 women.

Of those 16, probably 4 or 5 really "got it" - the rest struggled to really understand the course materials. That being said, probably of the other 18 men, I would say 10 or 12 of them really did well.

When I was hired, the owner of the company had already hired a handful of people that had graduated from this program, and he was impressed enough that he was advertisting on the school's job board.

He mentioned in my phone interview that he was "actively recruiting women" because his daughter had said something to him about "why don't you have any women working for you?". My friend Marianne and I were both hired from the same graduating class, and another woman was also hired at the same time from another campus.

About a year after I started, the company had 19 technical people - 6 women in technical positions.

I was hired as a java developer, but the dot.com bust left us scrambling to find any consulting work - I did pl/sql development, I built web pages, I did java development and when that dried up, I became a DBA and the Release Manager/Build Engineer for our application. I'm a project manager, and a consultant who architects and writes code. I'm also the IT department, keeping our development servers up and running, as well as our server farm used for our hosted ASP customers up and running 24/7. I also run our technical support department and I am the person they escalate to when they cannot figure out the answer.

As a small company, that makes software that needs other well-known software packages to run (apache, tomcat, java, oracle/mysql/mssql) - we don't get to say to a customer "go ask Microsoft for help getting mssql working" - we get to become experts in *all* of the combinations and permutations of these software packages - and I'm the one who gets to troubleshoot customer installations.

I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, and thought maybe it's because I've only ever worked for one company that I haven't been exposed to sexism - but realistically I talk to more IT people than anyone I know, because I talk to a dozen customers a week, troubleshooting their world.

And in ten years of doing this, I've never had anyone in any way show any reluctance to work with me, or any disbelief that I could solve their problem because of my gender.

On the flip side - I don't find very many occasions where the IT person on the other end of the call is a woman. When I do, I give a little cheer inside and *hope* very hard that she will be competent.

[spiffikins]

Ran out of room!


Unfortunately, I talk to a *lot* of incompetent sysadmins. And because there are so few women out there, every one of them that is incompetent - makes me cry a little inside, because if you talk to 10 men and 5 are incompetent - that sucks...but if in the same period of time you only talk to 3 women, and 2 of them are incompetent...that's just painful.

We had one woman who worked with me, who ended up taking maternity leave twice in 3 years, plus scaled back her work to only work part-time, and from home.

The company wasn't able to replace her while she was out - so her job got dumped on me, in addition to my own work. When she came back part time - her job was not suited to part time work from home - but the company wanted to be "flexible" - and so her life choices again, simply made my life harder. I was resentful of the situation, and although I see it from all sides - *my* life was made more difficult for several years - which sucked.

This was an epic - but I guess overall, my experience has been that it's not so much if you're male or female as whether or not you excel at your job and are seen as competent.

That being said - I'm sure others have completely different experiences and perhaps I'm simply not seeing it in my case?

[snippy]

her life choices again, simply made my life harder

No, your employer's decisions about how to handle her choices, choices they permitted her to make, made your life harder. Your employer could have managed the situation so that you didn't bear the brunt of the decision they made to allow her to work part time. Blaming her for taking advantage of their offer is sexist and unfair.

[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.