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

[charleshaynes.livejournal.com]

I have been active in trying to recruit more women into the tech companies I've worked for for the past 20 years. I've talked to a lot of women in tech during that time, I've taught classes in sexual harassment in the workplace, and I've tried to pay specific attention to this issue.

My impression is that things got better for a while during the 70s and 80s, but that they've been steadily declining since the mid 90s, and that right now things are worse than they've been in a while. I believe I'm relatively familiar with spaghettsquash's situation, and I recommended that she hire a lawyer, her situation was so bad.

I've known other women who left the company due to sexual harassment situations that I was sure didn't actually happen any more - a senior manager making direct and blatant sexual advances to women who worked for him.

Like spaghettisquash I encourage women who are in the industry, but these days my primary approach to getting more women in to tech is to try to improve working conditions in the companies I work for rather than trying to actually convince more women to work in tech - because until sexism in the workplace improves I can't in good conscience try to recruit more women into the field. (I do try to recruit women who are already in tech to companies I believe are good places to work.)

[ETA, an example. Yesterday in a meeting a woman presented a proposed hardware layout for a new system we're building. It includes a diagram of how the equipment should be installed in the hardware "rack." (it's called a rack diagram.) One of the (male) engineers said "Nice rack." I was shocked and said "You did NOT just say that!" The other males in the room all thought it was funny and presumably that I was a humorless git. (I'm in Australia, sexism is worse here.)]

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

I've had the "nice rack" comment made in front of me by a customer, when I worked for a VAR and did storage design. Given the "business consultant" with me is a sexist git himself, he laughed at it, too.

I've always felt like if I didn't act like "one of the boys" I was ostracized.