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

[kest]

This reminded me of something. At my current job, I don't feel like there's a lot of sexism going around, which is good. But it's a small office and we're all working on top of each other, and we get into usually good natured disagreements a fair amount. I'd been feeling for awhile that maybe I was too opinionated, maybe I was fomenting strife, was rocking boats that didn't need to be rocked. Then my boss gave us a sales workshop (because we're technology people, and we tend to hate talking to the clients, let alone trying to upsell them) and as part of that we got personality tests. And it was really interesting to me to see that the results on that basically said the opposite of what I expected - that instead of being a dominating outspoken leader who was trying to keep myself in control to avoid problems (which is how I saw myself), I was really a calm, careful listener who was trying to be more take-charge than came naturally. In other words, there was plenty of room for me to be *more* opinionated if I wanted to be, without it being a bad thing. And the only reason I thought otherwise was probably gender related.