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

[karenbynight.livejournal.com]

Female, unix sysadmin, senior.

I probably wouldn't encourage other women to enter the field, either. It's not the brutal experiences in sexism: the guys who were cabling the unix lab I managed who had extensive meetings with me about where I wanted the ports and then wished me a happy secretary's day; the interview where the guy told me that he hadn't wanted to interview girls today but it turns out that I was actually competent; the co-worker who harassed me for years after a bad divorce and the bosses who either did nothing or lied to the guy and told him they'd seen me crying over his treatment of me so couldn't he lay off it; the boss who tried to bring me to his viewpoint by saying "this is your dad speaking". Those brutal experiences invite brutal responses, and I know how to play political hardball.

It's not even the random experiences of gender disconnect: the new co-worker who had to take 30 seconds to process out loud about how I'm really technical for a woman as if I've never heard that before before he started to geek out with me like he would have a guy; the blog entries and speakers that went along about the common geek experience, lulling me into the sense that just maybe they understood that it transcends gender before they made a gendered joke, perhaps about how we're all the same in that the wife just doesn't understand about our need to packrat hardware, to remind me that they consider me an outsider; the constant use of "your mother" as the archetypical naive user as if some of their geek friends weren't *already* mothers. Those serve to remind me that a lot of people forget that it's OUR world now, too... but as an eternal optimist I have hope that with excellent work and a working sense of humor, we can remind them.

No, the thing that really gets me is that these all point to a fact that's immutable and beyond my control to change: as long as I am in this field, I have to constantly confront my belief that I get paid less and treated as a less valuable employee than my male co-workers of the same level. And that it's almost worse that that belief is likely to be untrue during some parts of my career... because the odds are, it's true much more often than it's false. And so I get to second-guess continually: would I have gotten that raise if I were born with a penis? Would my boss have rated me higher? Would my co-workers listen to me more? Would I be able to work a little less hard or a little less long of hours for the same result?

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Oh I can't even begin to get into the actual experiences of sexism I've had. It's not pretty and it just makes me angry. The fact is, I can turn people around relatively quickly because I'm Just That Good, but ... the number of times I've been mistaken for junior/admin staff is just embarassing.

[warsop.livejournal.com]

Your comment about "your mother" reminded me of something.

A few years ago, I hired an immensely competent woman. She's older -- I'm guessing early 60s, but I'm not sure. Suffice it to say that her kids are around my age (I'm in my mid-30s), and she is a grandmother. Her husband is a pilot. They met in college, she got her college degree, then they started having kids, and so she was a stay-at-home mom. When her kids got old enough, she went back to school, and got her PhD. She contracted for us for awhile, and I convinced her to take a permanent position.

In her new-hire training, the instructor kept on saying how our company has to do better so that even a grandmother can use our products. She said that she went to the instructor afterwards and told her that it's hard enough being a grandmother at our company without someone telling every new hire on their first day that grandmothers are too dumb to use software.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

what she said.

i am doing support at the moment, trying to get back into windows sysadmin. i am terrified that because i made a choice to take a job that i could do and would be good at when i was out of work, that i won't be able to get back into sysadmin, which is what i love.

i love computers, i love technology. and i am *good* at them.

but i am tired of explaining that i'm not a project manager, you know?