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

[noirem.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting point. My experience working in tech was in a library where I reported to a woman (Linux sys admin) and she was assertive enough for 10 men. There was one guy, hired to a position that was senior to me but junior to my supervisor who was patronizing in his dealings with me, but I figured (and still do) that it was because I was in a junior position not because I was a girl. Oh, and I had a trainee who was also a girl. Of the four senior-level positions when I left two were women and two were men and the junior positions were all filled by women.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I don't go over to the Technology resources department at my school much, but I think there's slightly more women than you'd usually see in equivalent tech departments at private companies. None at the highest positions, though, and I can't speak for how they're treated by their male colleagues. The men in TR that I've had cause to work with have never expressed anything to me that I think is sexist, but I also have 99% of my dealings with them via email, so I don't know if that changes anything. I like to think not).

(Even when I managed to corrupt a file badly enough that it brought down a server and refused to let any admin person delete it so we had to restore from backup, they were nice to me! I still have no idea how I managed to do that.)

[noirem.livejournal.com]

None of the things the guy said to me ever related to my gender. He was just generally patronizing in our interactions while everyone else treated me like I'd been there long enough to know what I was doing. The worst part was my going-away card in which he wrote something about watching me grow and develop blah blah blah and um, he'd only been there two months and had nothing to do with my projects so up yours bub.

Not that being patronized is one of my buttons or anything :o)